We have many good families in Baltimore fighting for justice from loved ones killed by unjustifiable police homicide. These cases are real cases of police abuse---no question. When the Department of Justice is called in by a Mayor of Baltimore rather than having that Department of Justice come at the call of those citizens feeling civil rights abuses----that occurs because of a PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE ORDER called 'Federalism Act'. Republicans were determined to get state's rights with Clinton writing this EXECUTIVE ORDER. All this did was end all existing Federal structures and US Constitutional laws that make WE THE PEOPLE WITH RIGHTS UNDER RULE OF LAW disappear. It is what makes our state and local sovereignty disappear as well---ergo, we have global corporations controlling all of our government. CLINTON/BUSH used the Federalism Act to dismantle all those 3 branches of government----privatize all that was public ---and used this as the reason to sit back and watch Wall Street and corporate fraud fleece our government coffers and people's pockets. We now have state's attorneys who are BFF TO WALL STREET AND THE FED.
Republican voters supported this to circumvent the Constitutional Amendments of EQUAL PROTECTION AND LEFT-LEANING CIVIL RIGHTS. Obama campaigned as being that candidate who was going to reverse that ---and instead one of his first acts was to embrace the CLINTON/BUSH FEDERALISM ACT by EXECUTIVE ORDER.
Obama embraced an Executive Order that keeps the US Justice Department from coming in to help citizens harmed by fraud, government corruption, and yes, police brutality and wrongful death. Meanwhile, he invites victims of police brutality to talk at the White House----OBAMA IS POSING SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE.
For those not caring about our families struggling for justice from very real crimes----that same Obama EXECUTIVE ORDER is behind this expansion of global corporate surveillance and authoritarian military structures in our communities. Yes, it was Obama who used EXECUTIVE ORDER to expand Bush's Homeland Security and he fought to fund all those militarized equipment and training being brought to our cities. The Congressional Black Caucus followed the Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals in pushing for these laws at state and local level.
IF WE BREAK DOWN CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES FOR ONE GROUP---THEN THOSE RIGHTS DISAPPEAR FOR OTHER GROUPS---THEN OTHER GROUPS---UNTIL ALL RIGHTS DISAPPEAR---THIS IS FAR-RIGHT WALL STREET 1% NEO-LIBERAL/NEO-CONSERVATIVE.
When my friends the WEST FAMILY and other victims of Baltimore's police brutality petition the Department of Justice----they are missing the problem----the problem for them is this PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE ORDER---THE FEDERALISM ACT. This executive order as the one below is illegal---unconstitutional ---executive order cannot be used broadly to negate every aspect of our US Constitution and Federal law. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA did this because no one in Congress challenged it as illegal. No one took these EXECUTIVE ORDERS to court as illegal reach by executive branch and unconstitutional regarding rights of WE THE PEOPLE.
THIS IS THE ISSUE FOR OUR FAMILIES FIGHTING POLICE BRUTALITY----AND CITIZENS FIGHTING THIS AUTOCRATIC HOMELAND SECURITY STRUCTURE THREATENING FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY, PRIVACY.
Obama Executive Order Expands Homeland Security Into State & Local Areas
Tim Brown -- October 31, 2012
Barack Obama signed a new Executive Order on October 26 which will expand the role and power of the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Janet Napolitano. The order establishes a new Security Partnership Council that will have tremendous effects for state and local areas that interact with DHS.
The Executive Order's purpose is stated as:
The purpose of this order is to maximize the Federal Government's ability to develop local partnerships in the United States to support homeland security priorities. Partnerships are collaborative working relationships in which the goals, structure, and roles and responsibilities of the relationships are mutually determined. Collaboration enables the Federal Government and its partners to use resources more efficiently, build on one another's expertise, drive innovation, engage in collective action, broaden investments to achieve shared goals, and improve performance. Partnerships enhance our ability to address homeland security priorities, from responding to natural disasters to preventing terrorism, by utilizing diverse perspectives, skills, tools, and resources.
The National Security Strategy emphasizes the importance of partnerships, underscoring that to keep our Nation safe "we must tap the ingenuity outside government through strategic partnerships with the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and community-based organizations. Such partnerships are critical to U.S. success at home and abroad, and we will support them through enhanced opportunities for engagement, coordination, transparency, and information sharing." This approach recognizes that, given the complexities and range of challenges, we must institutionalize an all-of-Nation effort to address the evolving threats to the United States.
PARTNERSHIPS MEANS----GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND GLOBAL NGOs.
Kenneth Schortgen, Jr. at the Examiner writes,
Since it's creation in 2001 from the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has expanded its authority over states, communities, and law enforcement each year. From expanding TSA responsibilities over airport transportation to now include trains, subways, and even highway checkpoints, to new regulations in how border control agents function in immigration conflicts, Homeland Security is one of the fastest growing government agencies in the past decade.
Through creating a new Steering Committee in partnership with how Homeland Security missions, directives, and programs are implemented in state and local levels, the fine line between state sovereignty and the need protect the country from disaster and terror attacks is becoming smaller every day. Over the past few years Homeland Security grants to local law enforcement have led to a militarization of police and public safety, and new drone technology is being used in criminal investigations outside the scope of national security.
In a little more than a decade, the Department of Homeland Security, in conjunction with its underlying and partnering Federal agencies, have infiltrated nearly every community in America. This new Executive Order, which expands the scope of the agency and gives it greater power in state and local partnerships, will mean greater loss of freedoms and liberties to both the states and citizens as the Federal government imposes greater authority over what should remain state sovereignty scope and missions.
A new Council and Steering Committee is created in this executive order. According to the EO, the Council membership will be:
(i) Pursuant to the nomination process established in subsection (b)(ii) of this section, the Council shall be composed of Federal officials who are from field offices of the executive departments, agencies, and bureaus (agencies) that are members of the Steering Committee established in subsection (c) of this section, and who have demonstrated an ability to develop, sustain, and institutionalize local partnerships to address policy priorities.
(ii) The nomination process and selection criteria for members of the Council shall be established by the Steering Committee. Based on those criteria, agency heads may select and present to the Steering Committee their nominee or nominees to represent them on the Council. The Steering Committee shall consider all of the nominees and decide by consensus which of the nominees shall participate on the Council. Each member agency on the Steering Committee, with the exception of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, may have at least one representative on the Council.
Then the Steering committee will be chaired by the Chair of the Council and this steering committee will include a representative at the Deputy agency head level, or that representative's designee from the following agencies:
(i) Department of State;
(ii) Department of the Treasury;
(iii) Department of Defense;
(iv) Department of Justice;
(v) Department of the Interior;
(vi) Department of Agriculture;
(vii) Department of Commerce;
(viii) Department of Labor;
(ix) Department of Health and Human Services;
(x) Department of Housing and Urban Development;
(xi) Department of Transportation;
(xii) Department of Energy;
(xiii) Department of Education;
(xiv) Department of Veterans Affairs;
(xv) Department of Homeland Security;
(xvi) Office of the Director of National Intelligence;
(xvii) Environmental Protection Agency;
(xviii) Small Business Administration; and
(xix) Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Does anyone think this will either give the people more of their freedoms back or actually catch "terrorists?" If you do, then there is some ocean front property beside my house I would like to sell you.
Over and over the federal government, whose main job is to protect, fails to do so, and to cover their obvious failure in this, they continue to promote more government to do what they are currently failing to do. It goes on and on and on and now it's coming into local and state government. It will be only a matter of time before the federal government becomes the only governing power in this nation, if their power is not reined in via the Constitution.
So again, we so more expansion of the federal government and a bigger power grab, even into the local and state areas of government by the feds.
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This EXECUTIVE ORDER is from where all the funding designated for building these NSA and Homeland Security structures originates----and it is from where all the funding for building US cities deemed International Economic Zones----building all that militarized security structure including militarized police. Remember, US cities as FEZ operate under no US Rule of Law---they operate under global corporate tribunal law and this is why citizens cannot get justice. NONE OF THIS FEZ DESIGNATION IS LEGAL OR CONSTITUTIONAL AS WELL----WALL STREET POLS ARE SIMPLY 'MOVING FORWARD' with these MASTER PLANS. This one issue creates much of the BLACK LIVES MATTER problems. It will be causing all problems for all lives matter very soon.
This is what moved city police departments to become more openly violent against citizens these several years----whether street crime or protest movements. This created a militarized stance in our US city police departments especially in US cities deemed FEZ.
We discussed the building of those massive solar panel plants in these same states harboring the NSA BIG DATA CENTER. Much of that funding for this NSA surveillance came from GREEN ENERGY FUNDING. When the far-right Wall Street Clinton/Obama neo-liberals say they support environmental or green issues-----this is where the funding goes.
The article below is great in showing the movement of revenue to these 1% Wall Street fascist authoritarian structures.
DID YOU HEAR ANY CANDIDATE RUNNING FOR OFFICE IN YOUR STATE SAYING THEY HAVE A PLAN TO DISMANTLE THIS? THEY SAY THEY ARE AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY BUT NEVER EDUCATE FROM WHERE THESE POLICIES COME.
The graphs cannot be copied---take a look at this article.
$52.6 billion
The Black Budget
Covert action. Surveillance. Counterintelligence. The U.S. “black budget” spans over a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program.
Explore the top secret funding
Funding the intelligence program
The CIA, NSA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) receive more than 68 percent of the black budget. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Program’s (NGP) budget has grown over 100 percent since 2004.
Central Intelligence Agency$14.7 billion
National Security Agency$10.8 billion
National Reconnaissance Office$10.3 billion
National Geospatial-Intelligence Program
General Defense Intelligence Program
Justice Department
Office of the Director of National IntelligenceSpecialized Reconnaissance Programs
Department of Defense Foreign Counter-Intelligence Program
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Energy
State Department
Department of the Treasury
The top five agencies,
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The far-right admire J EDGAR HOOVER----most everyone else hated the overreach of the then FBI. All of this was child's play to what NSA with the CIA and FBI have become today and none of it is directed at securing our RIGHTS AS CITIZENS or protecting our national sovereignty----it is all geared to work for the global corporate tribunal.
This article ties to the fact California public university system has HOMELAND SECURITY NAPOLITANO at its head because this is where citizen activism grows ----Berkeley used to be a REAL socially progressive public university but has been made an IVY LEAGUE university with STANFORD.
KNOW WHAT? This overzealous security and spying system is what drove the 1960s -70s revolution. So many people protested and created economic disruption---citizens voted for good people to fill political offices and all of this security structure built by Hoover was dismantled and called illegal overreach of citizens PRIVACY. We allowed a bunch of far-right pols take our government and brought back these repressive structures----LET'S GET RID OF 1% WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
'The governor coughed and looked around the room at his aides. "Well, you heard him, boys," he said. "We'll follow the FBI's rules." Once they were gone, Lynum swore Reagan to secrecy and briefed him about the trouble at Berkeley.
Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio were especially detailed. Hoover had ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin the brilliant philosophy student's reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts'.
The FBI's Vendetta Against Berkeley
Nat Farbman, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images
Mario Savio, a leader of the student protests at Berkeley, is dragged away by campus police in 1964.
By Seth Rosenfeld August 13, 2012
Curtis O. Lynum, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco field office, rang the bell by the front door of the governor's mansion in Sacramento. By his side stood Glenn A. Harter, his top domestic-security agent. They had been summoned by the new governor, Ronald Reagan.
Waiting on the portico of the century-old grand Victorian that gray Monday morning in January 1967, Lynum felt some trepidation. He admired Reagan, but secrecy was crucial. He was carrying confidential information about the student protests that were disrupting the University of California's Berkeley campus and making headlines across the country. He had intelligence about Mario Savio, who had been a leader of the Free Speech Movement and was Berkeley's most notorious campus agitator, and Clark Kerr, the president of the university.
Reagan had been sworn into office just two weeks earlier, and within days contacted the FBI and requested help with "the Berkeley situation." Lynum got the call at his San Francisco office. He immediately notified J. Edgar Hoover at headquarters and recommended against meeting with Reagan—the controversy at the university was just too politically sensitive—but the director ordered him to go ahead.
During a fiercely contested gubernatorial campaign, Reagan had seized on the problem of campus unrest, and it became his hottest issue. Back at Eureka College, in Illinois, he had joined in a student strike as a freshman in 1928, and even helped lead it, but these Berkeley protests were different. He was disgusted with the sit-ins, strikes, and pickets lines of the Free Speech Movement, with the drugs and sex at the dance held by the Vietnam Day Committee in a campus gym to promote anti-war protests. He declared that "beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates" were proof of a "morality and decency gap" at the center of the state's Democratic Party.
His message resonated with voters who saw the turbulence at Berkeley as a symbol of all that was ailing their country, an America facing threats from enemies abroad and rising taxes, racial strife, and generational conflict at home. Reagan defeated the incumbent, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, in a landslide that left the state's Democratic Party a wreck and instantly made the new Republican governor a national political figure.
Hoover welcomed Reagan's victory. For years, he had been frustrated by what classified FBI reports called "subversive" activities at the University of California's flagship campus. Berkeley had been the kind of institution that exemplified the best of American values: Here was a public university that offered a tuition-free education rivaling those offered by Harvard, Princeton, or Yale; employed a constellation of Nobel laureates; and held millions of dollars in government research contracts.
But even as the university was helping the nation win World War II by overseeing the development of the atomic bomb, Hoover's agents were investigating Berkeley students and professors suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. In the cold-war atmosphere of the late 40s and early 50s, the director's concern had grown when scores of faculty members refused to sign a special loyalty oath for university employees.
So far, the 60s were posing an even greater challenge to authority, with the university generating one provocation after another--that "vicious" essay question about the dangers of an organization like the FBI that was optional for applicants in 1959, student participation in the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall, the Free Speech Movement, attempts to stop trains carrying troops bound for Vietnam. The old Communist Party had been bad enough, but now there was the New Left, the hippies, the Black Panthers, Allen Ginsberg. Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his second in command at the bureau and his most intimate companion, saw Berkeley as the vortex of a youth movement fed by "free love," drugs, and a general disrespect for authority spreading all too quickly to other colleges. Stepping up its efforts at Berkeley, the bureau mounted the most extensive covert operations the FBI is known to have undertaken on any campus.
The FBI has long denied investigating the university as an organization, and that much is true. But a legal challenge I brought under the Freedom of Information Act, entailing five lawsuits over the course of 27 years, forced the bureau to release more than 300,000 pages of its confidential records concerning individuals, organizations, and events on and around the campus during the cold war, from the 1940s through the 1970s. This is the most complete record of FBI activities at any college ever released. The documents reveal that FBI agents amassed dossiers on hundreds of students and professors and on members of the Board of Regents; established informers within student groups, the faculty, and the highest levels of the university's administration; and gathered intelligence from wiretaps, mail openings, and searches of Berkeley homes and offices in the dead of night.
Although the bulk of the documents were released in the mid-90s, continuing litigation has compelled the FBI to release more than 50,000 additional pages, some as recently as this year, that provide a clearer picture of the agency's relationship with Reagan and suggest that it profoundly influenced his political development. These records—including material from the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO operation to discredit domestic political organizations—also provide a more complete account of Hoover's activities concerning the university, and the bureau's covert efforts to stifle dissent and circumscribe academic freedom.
In court papers asserting its right to withhold documents, the FBI maintained that its activities were lawful and intended to protect civil order and national security. But the records show bureau officials used intelligence gleaned from these clandestine operations not only to enforce the law, or to prevent violence, or to protect national security.
As U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled in 1991, the FBI's own records show that its initial investigation to determine whether the Free Speech Movement protest violated federal laws soon evolved into political spying, and that it likewise investigated Kerr unlawfully. As she found, "The records in this case go [to] the very essence of what the government was up to during a turbulent, historic period of time." The FBI appealed, but the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed virtually all of Patel's ruling.
THIS WAS WHEN WE HAD A FUNCTIONING SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE JUDICIARY.
Having reviewed the uncensored FBI records in chambers, the court concluded that the documents "strongly suggest" the bureau's investigation of the Free Speech Movement became an effort to "harass political opponents of the FBI's allies among the Regents, not to investigate subversion and civil disorder." The court also found that the records "strongly support the suspicion that the FBI was investigating Kerr to have him removed from the UC administration, because FBI officials disagreed with his politics or his handling of administrative matters. Conspicuously absent from these documents is any connection to any possible criminal liability by Kerr."
In response to my reporting on some of these records, the FBI's current director, Robert S. Mueller III, acknowledged in 2002 that the bureau's surveillance and harassment at Berkeley during the cold war was inappropriate. "Such investigations are wrong and anti-democratic, and past examples are a stain on the FBI's greater tradition of observing and protecting the freedom of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights," Mueller declared.
FBI documents also show that in the 1950s Hoover ran a secret operation called the "Responsibilities Program" to get professors whose political views were deemed unacceptable fired by surreptitiously giving anonymous and unproven charges of disloyalty to Gov. Earl Warren, who then ordered investigations of the faculty. In fighting suspected radicals, Hoover also made common cause with State Sen. Hugh Burns, the head of the state senate's un-American-activities committee, instead of investigating allegations from organized crime sources in Burns's home district of Fresno that he had taken payoffs and secretly owned a brothel.
In 1960, FBI officials mounted a covert campaign to turn public opinion against the university and embarrass university officials by planting negative news stories and arranging for conservative allies to complain to the regents. Hoover was furious about the essay question for applicants, which had asked, "What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?" In 1965, Hoover collaborated with CIA Director John A. McCone to harass students involved in the Free Speech Movement by leaking unproved allegations that they were disloyal to Edwin W. Pauley, who then urged his fellow regents to crack down on them. The FBI chief also misled President Lyndon B. Johnson by sending the White House allegations impugning the loyalty of Kerr and two of his staff members, even though the FBI had investigated the claims and knew they were false.
Hoover had been trying to stifle dissent at Berkeley for years. But Governor Brown, the liberal Democrat elected in 1958 and again in 1962, had been unresponsive to Hoover's concerns about the university. Worse yet, he had betrayed Hoover's trust when the bureau sought to work with him covertly against the Free Speech Movement. In Reagan, however, the FBI director finally had an ally. Like Hoover, Reagan saw the Berkeley campus as a breeding ground for radicalism, where ungrateful students and insubordinate faculty used state resources to engage in anti-American protests. In their eyes, Savio was a "ringleader," and Kerr was, at the least, unwilling or unable to take control, and maybe a dangerous subversive himself.
Agents Lynum and Harter were surprised when the official who greeted them at the door of the governor's mansion told them Reagan would receive them upstairs in his bedroom. As they climbed the winding stairway to the master suite, Lynum hoped Reagan had picked the unusual meeting place for the sake of discretion. Lynum had warned Hoover that if reporters discovered the FBI was secretly helping Reagan, it would embarrass the bureau—something Hoover hated more than anything else.
Discretion was not the only reason Reagan had chosen the unusual meeting place. As the two FBI men were admitted to the governor's bedchamber, they found him propped up with pillows in a four-poster bed, suffering from a bad case of the flu. Reagan wore red pajamas, a muffler around his throat, and a robe. The covers were piled with stacks of official documents, and all around the bed stood aides in suits and ties.
Lynum introduced himself and Harter, congratulated Reagan on his election, and held out his business card. The governor took the white rectangle, thanked the agents for coming, and got to the point: He was "damned mad" that campus officials had allowed the demonstrations to continue. At one recent protest, students had even burned him in effigy. Pulling his robe closer, he said he intended to "straighten out" the university and was hoping the FBI could tell him what he was up against.
Lynum hesitated. Then, apologetically, he reminded Reagan that Hoover had agreed to the meeting on the condition that it would include only Reagan and Lt. Gov. Robert H. Finch. Lynum did not say so, but the director was concerned other witnesses might expose the FBI's involvement.
The governor coughed and looked around the room at his aides. "Well, you heard him, boys," he said. "We'll follow the FBI's rules." Once they were gone, Lynum swore Reagan to secrecy and briefed him about the trouble at Berkeley.
Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio were especially detailed. Hoover had ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin the brilliant philosophy student's reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts.
They also had compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine Kerr in myriad ways. He wanted him removed as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good."
Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more—much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of statewide dissent. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his effort to establish fiscal responsibility. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might
make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government."
Lynum said he understood Reagan's concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office to send an urgent report to the director.
The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved useful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information to help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry.
Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. And after Reagan emerged as a leading conservative spokesman in the 50s, Hoover secretly gave him personal and political help that, a federal court ruled in my FOIA challenge, served "no legitimate law enforcement purpose." He even lent Reagan a hand in keeping track of his own wayward children, Maureen and Michael. Now the long courtship between the FBI director and the former movie star would pay off for them both.
The FBI would become deeply involved in the clash over free speech at Berkeley among the powerful social forces represented by Reagan, Kerr, and Savio. Each of those men had a transforming vision of America and has exerted extraordinary and lasting influence on the nation. Tracing the bureau's involvement with these iconic figures reveals a secret history of America in the 60s. It shows how the FBI's dirty tricks helped energize the student movement, damage the Democratic Party, launch Reagan's political career, and exacerbate the nation's continuing culture wars. Above all, the story that emerges from the once-secret files illustrates the dangers that the combination of secrecy and power poses to democracy, especially during turbulent times.
In his corner office at the FBI's headquarters in Washington, D.C., the director finished reviewing Lynum's report. He saw Reagan's request as a chance to finally quell demonstrations at Berkeley before they ignited even more protests at other campuses.
Hoover's hand moved quickly across the report, scrawling jagged marks in blue ink.
"This," he underscored, "presents the bureau with an opportunity."
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This was the campaign Obama ran in 2008 as Democratic voters were tired of the BUSH-era overreach on national security. We know what needs to be done----we allow our elections to be rigged----Maryland is ground zero for all these policies and Mikulski, Sarbanes, Cummings, and Cardin are 100% ONE WORLD ONE SUPER-SECURITY SERVICE.
Here is where policy posing comes as Clinton and Bush neo-liberals and neo-cons try to appear conservative or social progressive. The expansion and funding of Homeland Security becomes tied to immigrant and border issues. Now, no state in the nation has allowed immigrant populations to grow then Texas, Florida, and neo-conservative states. So, they are not against immigrant labor coming---Republicans built the policies around International Economic Zones in the US. Both parties captured by CLINTON/BUSH pretend to be fighting but they are not. Then we see Obama looking tough on deporting immigrants when he is pushing Trans Pacific Trade Pact and helping Clinton Initiative build its global labor distribution system bringing immigrants to the US as global labor pool. Obama did that to scare Latino immigrants just as these several years of allowing police to be violent scared black citizens so these issues became the major issues for two major population groups. Obama went from deporting immigrants to the DREAM ACT---while ICE----the national security branch of this NSA structure was growing.
The goal of Foreign Economic Zones is to have controlled movement of immigrants----those identified by global corporate campuses and re-educated to be part of this global system. The 1% Wall Street does not want border-crossers mostly trying to escape what US cities deemed International Economic Zones are building. Latinos knowing what happened in Latin America would fight against it happening in the US. This is why Obama and Clinton neo-liberals all look crazy on issues of immigration.
THIS BIG DATA ENFOLDS IMMIGRANTS REGISTERED IN AN WORKPLACE SYSTEM AND FOLLOWS THEIR VOICES AS WITH ALL AMERICANS.
When Americans allow immigrants to lose civil rights and liberties---we are breaking an alliance of the 99% vs the 1%. It matters that immigrants fall into these surveillance structures to great harm because it then becomes OK to do the same to WE THE PEOPLE.
Don't Defund, Just Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security
Tom Barry
February 26, 2015
Photo: Steve Rhodes
The Republican majority has refused to approve new funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Following the lead of the party’s most conservative members, congressional Republicans will reject a new DHS budget unless President Obama reverses his November 2014 executive order to protect more than 4 million immigrants from deportation. Republicans are right to obstruct the routine annual funding of DHS—but they are doing it for the wrong reasons.
DHS would be an easy target of standard conservative critiques of big government. The third largest federal department is hugely wasteful, unaccountable, unmanageable, and emblematic of governmental mission creep. Yet President Obama has kept increasing the budget and expanding the reach of DHS—his most recent initiative is to increase the department’s role in cybersecurity through $6 billion in contracts with major military and intelligence contractors including Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton.
The DHS funding debate lays bare the disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations; the political standard has largely ignored the DHS counterterrorism mission. Instead, the dispute over DHS has revolved around the traditional divides over immigration policy.
This is unfortunate. It is time to reconsider the notion of a having a homeland security department. Rather then routinely submitting and approving the budgets of the bureaucratic monstrosity that DHS has become, the executive branch and Congress should consider dismantling DHS. Separating immigration policy from the post-9/11 security framework is fundamental to ending the waste and creating any sustainable and sensible immigration policy reform.
• • •
A product of post-9/11 fear-driven politics, DHS is a conglomeration of twenty-two different agencies created by the Bush administration under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with little consideration of the difficulties of merging such diverse agencies as FEMA, Secret Service, Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard. Prior to the creation of DHS, immigration and border control came under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice and were regarded primarily as issues of regulation and law. Under DHS, counterterrorism and national security became the dominant framework for immigration and border policy. President George W. Bush promised that the new federal department would “improve efficiency without growing government.” Furthermore, according to President Bush, the new federal department would eliminate “duplicative and redundant activities that drain critical homeland security resources.” Yet, with more than 240,000 employees, DHS is the third largest federal department—surpassing the Department of Justice and State Department, and with a larger budget than the latter. Democrats and Republicans alike have continually increased the DHS annual budgets.
One of the primary indications of the Department’s dysfunction and lack of direction is the continuing DHS inability to formulate a concise and consistent definition of “homeland security.” There was no consensus on the meaning of the term at the time of its creation. And there was absolutely no consideration of the implications of having governmental functions such as border control, emergency management, and immigration enforcement framed as security operations. Nonetheless, the budget for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes the Border Patrol, has more than doubled since 2003– rising from $27 billion to $59 billion in 2014—and now accounts for 21 percent of the DHS budget, making it the largest DHS agency. The CBP is also the nation’s largest law enforcement agency.
The DHS funding debate lays bare the disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations.
With each new director and changes in political issues, DHS tweaks the definition of the term and its mission statement. Defining Homeland Security, a January 2013 report by the Congressional Research Service, underscored the existential crisis facing DHS as its counterterrorism mission has lost focus. CRS observed: “Ten years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government does not have a single definition for ‘homeland security.’ [Instead,] different strategic documents and mission statements offer varying missions that are derived from different homeland security definitions.”
For instance, DHS programs now provide grants to local and state police for purchasing license plate readers, military-grade vehicles, surveillance equipment, and drones. And DHS continues to fund dozens of “fusion centers,” which were established as decentralized counterterrorism intelligence centers but have tracked lawful citizen organizing, including the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Another sign of DHS dysfunction is the low morale of department employees and officials. No other federal department suffers such high rates of job dissatisfaction. Not only does DHS rank as the department with lowest morale, the level of contentedness within DHS has also been dropping at a faster rate than any other department—decreasing 7 percent in the last four years, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
DHS employees and officials cite the department’s stifling bureaucracy and lack of performance measures among the many reasons for plummeting morale. The agency has spent at least $2 million on four studies seeking strategies to improve morale. But no study questioned the viability of a department with so many clashing cultures and one whose operations are so diffuse.
No other federal department is subject to greater congressional oversight. Some ninety congressional committees and subcommittees monitor DHS operations. But this extensive oversight hasn’t produced a more effective and cost-efficient department. To the contrary. Doing the rounds before these congressional committees, DHS officials shape their statements according to the political agendas of committee chairmen, thereby further contributing to the mission drift of DHS.
Rather than providing effective oversight, congressional committees—notably the House Homeland Security Committee and its Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee—function more as boosters and cheerleaders. Eager to display their hardline positions on border security or immigration enforcement, congressional members keep pushing DHS to ramp up its border security operations, resulting in a trail of monumental boondoggles such as the virtual border fence, intelligence fusion centers, deployment of military-grade drones to the border, and a border wall that costs $1–7 billion each mile (depending on the terrain) to construct. Without effective congressional oversight and with constant congressional pressure to expand DHS operations, the department relies heavily on private contractors—many of whom also generously contribute to the election campaigns of committee members—for the management and implementation of core DHS functions, such as cybersecurity.
Over the past dozen years, governmental research and monitoring agencies have published an ever-expanding library of reports that the agency’s waste and failure. Hundreds of reports by the Congressional Research Service, GAO, and the DHS Office of Inspector General have painted a picture of an agency badly divided and highly dysfunctional.
Since its creation, the GAO has identified DHS as a “high risk” government agency, pointing to the continuing challenge of integrating twenty-two agencies into one department. The GAO states that DHS has made progress but that the challenges of managing the mix of diverse agencies continue to impact “the department’s ability to satisfy its missions.” According to the GAO, “DHS’s management and mission risks could have serious consequences for U.S. national and economic security.”
• • •
After more than a dozen years, DHS is still floundering in its efforts to construct its own headquarters. Originally projected to cost $3.9 billion, DHS headquarters is $1.5 billion over budget and twelve years behind schedule. Completion was projected for this year, but according to the GAO it will not likely be finished until 2026. Meanwhile, the twenty-two DHS agencies remain scattered in fifty offices in the Washington, DC area. The GAO says that DHS should consider alternatives.
Dismantling DHS would be likely easier than consolidating it and refocusing its mission. Indeed, if Obama wants to decouple immigration and border policies from counterterrorism and security policies, dismantling DHS may be the only way. Otherwise, the recent immigration order—paired with a call for increased funding for border security, the hiring of 20,000 more Border Patrol agents, and a commitment to “crack down on illegal immigration at the border—just looks like playing politics.
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If you want to follow where global surveillance is going BOOZ ALLEN is tops----it is the source of policy for building global International Economic Zone security for several decades---that is where it got its money. So, BOOZ has the answer for WE THE PEOPLE of a free democratic developed nation with Rule of Law and citizens with a Bill of Rights---how they will install what they did overseas---here in the US. Working with authoritarian dictators globally---
This is why it is critical to act NOW as a 99% protesting and getting crony pols and political structures out of our elections. Baltimore had several establishment candidates for Mayor of Baltimore and it had several establishment farm team all trained with this language of 1% Wall Street global corporate neo-liberalism. It matters who is training our citizens and immigrants on what REAL ISSUES are in America and what REAL solutions are. GET RID OF ALL 5% TO THE 1%.
It is executives at these global corporations who act as that 5% to the 1% bringing campaign donations and pushing candidates for these corporations----
THEY NEED TO WAKE UP----THEY WILL SOON BE THROWN UNDER THE BUS.
Reimagining Homeland Security
Booz Allen is HELPING to ESTABLISH A FRAMEWORK TO DRIVE AMERICA’S HOMELAND SECURITY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT INTO THE FUTURE
The nation’s continued safety and security is dependent upon the continued maturation and institutionalization of a homeland security enterprise comprised of partners at all levels of government and the private sector. It is by strengthening this homeland security enterprise and adopting a whole community approach that we can, as a nation, prevent, prepare, respond to and recover more quickly from large-scale disasters.
Booz Allen is leading the way in shaping this next phase of homeland security. Through our new vision for homeland security and law enforcement, we’re bringing stakeholders together to build the kind of leadership, vision, and knowledge needed to make a strong, resilient homeland a reality.
THE CHALLENGE
As the nation reflects on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, we face a continued challenge in keeping the homeland safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) along with law enforcement agencies across the Federal Government struggle to clearly link the mission needs with capabilities, demonstrate measurable outcomes, maximize resources, and eliminate redundancies. The mission of protecting the homeland only increases in scale and intensity as the threat to the homeland continues to evolve, trade flowing across our borders continues to increase, cybersecurity threats continue to grow, and natural disasters continue to impact us.
Given the on-going challenges, the Federal Government must refresh and refine its approach to homeland security and law enforcement. Specifically, Booz Allen has identified five key challenge areas that the Federal Government will face in the next ten years:
A New Vision for Homeland Security and Law Enforcement
In the next 10 years, we as a nation must adopt a strong, future-facing strategy to transform an aggregated homeland security and law enforcement enterprise and drive the focus toward achieving national resiliency, establishing a networked approach to countering terrorism , defending our cyberspace through collaboration, and managing a functional border in the global commons.
Our Viewpoints
Most Common Natural Disasters in the U.S.
This infographic shares statistics around the most common natural disasters in the U.S. …Read More
Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Transforming the U.S. Immigration System. Federal agencies faced with implementing immigration reform will not simply do more of the same, but rather overhaul the way the immigration systems operates. Reform provides an opportunity for agencies to re-imagine their mission, deploy the latest technologies, and execute an enterprise approach that engages the whole immigration community. …Read More
Reimagining the Next Generation of Homeland Security
An introductory message from Senior Vice President Thad Allen marking the 10th anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) creation.…Read More
Reimagining the Border: Functional Border Management
Reimagining the Border as a Balanced Suite of Interrelated Mission Functions. Modern border management requires a vision that transcends physical locations and often stove-piped authorities to achieve a broader, more integrated approach to managing trade and travel. By viewing the border through the lens of the key functions of border management, we can make better use of advanced analytics to improve border management and strengthen the individual missions of each component authority, as well as the overall security of the nation.…Read More
Marshaling Data for Enterprise Insights
Marshaling Enterprise-wide Data for Mission Insights. Department of Homeland Security agencies can leverage cloud analytics to generate a more comprehensive picture of all kinds of data—such as cell-phone chatter, video, satellite images, biometric data, and a wide variety incoming field reports—to gain superior intelligence and predictive insight into terrorist threats. Taking full advantage of advanced data analytics will require DHS entities to think of themselves as collective sources of information rather than separate parts of a larger bureaucracy.…Read More
The Path Toward Resiliency
Booz Allen Hamilton can help reinforce “whole community” and “resilience” concepts by promoting mutually agreed upon definitions and developing mechanisms to measure progress toward helping the nation achieve greater resiliency.…Read More
Reimagining the Border
Reimagining the Border as a Suite of Interrelated Mission Functions. Modern border management requires a vision that transcends physical locations and often stove-piped authorities to achieve a broader, more integrated approach to managing trade and travel. By viewing the border through the lens of the key functions of border management, we can make better use of advanced analytics to improve border management and strengthen the individual missions of each component authority, as well as the overall security of the nation. …Read More
Enabling Agility in Law Enforcement
It is difficult to imagine an agency that will be not be affected by immigration reform, so all agencies need to consider the possible effects of proposed reform provisions and prepare for the transformational change to the nation’s immigration system. …Read More
Achieving "Unity of Effort" in Cybersecurity
Building Effective Government-Industry Cybersecurity Collaboration. There is no higher priority than protecting the networks and systems that are critical to our government and the private sector that requires a greater understanding of the respective roles each should play—and the benefits that will result—in establishing responsible collaboration.…Read More
Republican voters supported this to circumvent the Constitutional Amendments of EQUAL PROTECTION AND LEFT-LEANING CIVIL RIGHTS. Obama campaigned as being that candidate who was going to reverse that ---and instead one of his first acts was to embrace the CLINTON/BUSH FEDERALISM ACT by EXECUTIVE ORDER.
Obama embraced an Executive Order that keeps the US Justice Department from coming in to help citizens harmed by fraud, government corruption, and yes, police brutality and wrongful death. Meanwhile, he invites victims of police brutality to talk at the White House----OBAMA IS POSING SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE.
For those not caring about our families struggling for justice from very real crimes----that same Obama EXECUTIVE ORDER is behind this expansion of global corporate surveillance and authoritarian military structures in our communities. Yes, it was Obama who used EXECUTIVE ORDER to expand Bush's Homeland Security and he fought to fund all those militarized equipment and training being brought to our cities. The Congressional Black Caucus followed the Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals in pushing for these laws at state and local level.
IF WE BREAK DOWN CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES FOR ONE GROUP---THEN THOSE RIGHTS DISAPPEAR FOR OTHER GROUPS---THEN OTHER GROUPS---UNTIL ALL RIGHTS DISAPPEAR---THIS IS FAR-RIGHT WALL STREET 1% NEO-LIBERAL/NEO-CONSERVATIVE.
When my friends the WEST FAMILY and other victims of Baltimore's police brutality petition the Department of Justice----they are missing the problem----the problem for them is this PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE ORDER---THE FEDERALISM ACT. This executive order as the one below is illegal---unconstitutional ---executive order cannot be used broadly to negate every aspect of our US Constitution and Federal law. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA did this because no one in Congress challenged it as illegal. No one took these EXECUTIVE ORDERS to court as illegal reach by executive branch and unconstitutional regarding rights of WE THE PEOPLE.
THIS IS THE ISSUE FOR OUR FAMILIES FIGHTING POLICE BRUTALITY----AND CITIZENS FIGHTING THIS AUTOCRATIC HOMELAND SECURITY STRUCTURE THREATENING FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY, PRIVACY.
Obama Executive Order Expands Homeland Security Into State & Local Areas
Tim Brown -- October 31, 2012
Barack Obama signed a new Executive Order on October 26 which will expand the role and power of the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Janet Napolitano. The order establishes a new Security Partnership Council that will have tremendous effects for state and local areas that interact with DHS.
The Executive Order's purpose is stated as:
The purpose of this order is to maximize the Federal Government's ability to develop local partnerships in the United States to support homeland security priorities. Partnerships are collaborative working relationships in which the goals, structure, and roles and responsibilities of the relationships are mutually determined. Collaboration enables the Federal Government and its partners to use resources more efficiently, build on one another's expertise, drive innovation, engage in collective action, broaden investments to achieve shared goals, and improve performance. Partnerships enhance our ability to address homeland security priorities, from responding to natural disasters to preventing terrorism, by utilizing diverse perspectives, skills, tools, and resources.
The National Security Strategy emphasizes the importance of partnerships, underscoring that to keep our Nation safe "we must tap the ingenuity outside government through strategic partnerships with the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and community-based organizations. Such partnerships are critical to U.S. success at home and abroad, and we will support them through enhanced opportunities for engagement, coordination, transparency, and information sharing." This approach recognizes that, given the complexities and range of challenges, we must institutionalize an all-of-Nation effort to address the evolving threats to the United States.
PARTNERSHIPS MEANS----GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND GLOBAL NGOs.
Kenneth Schortgen, Jr. at the Examiner writes,
Since it's creation in 2001 from the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has expanded its authority over states, communities, and law enforcement each year. From expanding TSA responsibilities over airport transportation to now include trains, subways, and even highway checkpoints, to new regulations in how border control agents function in immigration conflicts, Homeland Security is one of the fastest growing government agencies in the past decade.
Through creating a new Steering Committee in partnership with how Homeland Security missions, directives, and programs are implemented in state and local levels, the fine line between state sovereignty and the need protect the country from disaster and terror attacks is becoming smaller every day. Over the past few years Homeland Security grants to local law enforcement have led to a militarization of police and public safety, and new drone technology is being used in criminal investigations outside the scope of national security.
In a little more than a decade, the Department of Homeland Security, in conjunction with its underlying and partnering Federal agencies, have infiltrated nearly every community in America. This new Executive Order, which expands the scope of the agency and gives it greater power in state and local partnerships, will mean greater loss of freedoms and liberties to both the states and citizens as the Federal government imposes greater authority over what should remain state sovereignty scope and missions.
A new Council and Steering Committee is created in this executive order. According to the EO, the Council membership will be:
(i) Pursuant to the nomination process established in subsection (b)(ii) of this section, the Council shall be composed of Federal officials who are from field offices of the executive departments, agencies, and bureaus (agencies) that are members of the Steering Committee established in subsection (c) of this section, and who have demonstrated an ability to develop, sustain, and institutionalize local partnerships to address policy priorities.
(ii) The nomination process and selection criteria for members of the Council shall be established by the Steering Committee. Based on those criteria, agency heads may select and present to the Steering Committee their nominee or nominees to represent them on the Council. The Steering Committee shall consider all of the nominees and decide by consensus which of the nominees shall participate on the Council. Each member agency on the Steering Committee, with the exception of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, may have at least one representative on the Council.
Then the Steering committee will be chaired by the Chair of the Council and this steering committee will include a representative at the Deputy agency head level, or that representative's designee from the following agencies:
(i) Department of State;
(ii) Department of the Treasury;
(iii) Department of Defense;
(iv) Department of Justice;
(v) Department of the Interior;
(vi) Department of Agriculture;
(vii) Department of Commerce;
(viii) Department of Labor;
(ix) Department of Health and Human Services;
(x) Department of Housing and Urban Development;
(xi) Department of Transportation;
(xii) Department of Energy;
(xiii) Department of Education;
(xiv) Department of Veterans Affairs;
(xv) Department of Homeland Security;
(xvi) Office of the Director of National Intelligence;
(xvii) Environmental Protection Agency;
(xviii) Small Business Administration; and
(xix) Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Does anyone think this will either give the people more of their freedoms back or actually catch "terrorists?" If you do, then there is some ocean front property beside my house I would like to sell you.
Over and over the federal government, whose main job is to protect, fails to do so, and to cover their obvious failure in this, they continue to promote more government to do what they are currently failing to do. It goes on and on and on and now it's coming into local and state government. It will be only a matter of time before the federal government becomes the only governing power in this nation, if their power is not reined in via the Constitution.
So again, we so more expansion of the federal government and a bigger power grab, even into the local and state areas of government by the feds.
________________________________________________
This EXECUTIVE ORDER is from where all the funding designated for building these NSA and Homeland Security structures originates----and it is from where all the funding for building US cities deemed International Economic Zones----building all that militarized security structure including militarized police. Remember, US cities as FEZ operate under no US Rule of Law---they operate under global corporate tribunal law and this is why citizens cannot get justice. NONE OF THIS FEZ DESIGNATION IS LEGAL OR CONSTITUTIONAL AS WELL----WALL STREET POLS ARE SIMPLY 'MOVING FORWARD' with these MASTER PLANS. This one issue creates much of the BLACK LIVES MATTER problems. It will be causing all problems for all lives matter very soon.
This is what moved city police departments to become more openly violent against citizens these several years----whether street crime or protest movements. This created a militarized stance in our US city police departments especially in US cities deemed FEZ.
We discussed the building of those massive solar panel plants in these same states harboring the NSA BIG DATA CENTER. Much of that funding for this NSA surveillance came from GREEN ENERGY FUNDING. When the far-right Wall Street Clinton/Obama neo-liberals say they support environmental or green issues-----this is where the funding goes.
The article below is great in showing the movement of revenue to these 1% Wall Street fascist authoritarian structures.
DID YOU HEAR ANY CANDIDATE RUNNING FOR OFFICE IN YOUR STATE SAYING THEY HAVE A PLAN TO DISMANTLE THIS? THEY SAY THEY ARE AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY BUT NEVER EDUCATE FROM WHERE THESE POLICIES COME.
The graphs cannot be copied---take a look at this article.
$52.6 billion
The Black Budget
Covert action. Surveillance. Counterintelligence. The U.S. “black budget” spans over a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program.
Explore the top secret funding
Funding the intelligence program
The CIA, NSA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) receive more than 68 percent of the black budget. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Program’s (NGP) budget has grown over 100 percent since 2004.
Central Intelligence Agency$14.7 billion
National Security Agency$10.8 billion
National Reconnaissance Office$10.3 billion
National Geospatial-Intelligence Program
General Defense Intelligence Program
Justice Department
Office of the Director of National IntelligenceSpecialized Reconnaissance Programs
Department of Defense Foreign Counter-Intelligence Program
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Energy
State Department
Department of the Treasury
The top five agencies,
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The far-right admire J EDGAR HOOVER----most everyone else hated the overreach of the then FBI. All of this was child's play to what NSA with the CIA and FBI have become today and none of it is directed at securing our RIGHTS AS CITIZENS or protecting our national sovereignty----it is all geared to work for the global corporate tribunal.
This article ties to the fact California public university system has HOMELAND SECURITY NAPOLITANO at its head because this is where citizen activism grows ----Berkeley used to be a REAL socially progressive public university but has been made an IVY LEAGUE university with STANFORD.
KNOW WHAT? This overzealous security and spying system is what drove the 1960s -70s revolution. So many people protested and created economic disruption---citizens voted for good people to fill political offices and all of this security structure built by Hoover was dismantled and called illegal overreach of citizens PRIVACY. We allowed a bunch of far-right pols take our government and brought back these repressive structures----LET'S GET RID OF 1% WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
'The governor coughed and looked around the room at his aides. "Well, you heard him, boys," he said. "We'll follow the FBI's rules." Once they were gone, Lynum swore Reagan to secrecy and briefed him about the trouble at Berkeley.
Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio were especially detailed. Hoover had ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin the brilliant philosophy student's reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts'.
The FBI's Vendetta Against Berkeley
Nat Farbman, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images
Mario Savio, a leader of the student protests at Berkeley, is dragged away by campus police in 1964.
By Seth Rosenfeld August 13, 2012
Curtis O. Lynum, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco field office, rang the bell by the front door of the governor's mansion in Sacramento. By his side stood Glenn A. Harter, his top domestic-security agent. They had been summoned by the new governor, Ronald Reagan.
Waiting on the portico of the century-old grand Victorian that gray Monday morning in January 1967, Lynum felt some trepidation. He admired Reagan, but secrecy was crucial. He was carrying confidential information about the student protests that were disrupting the University of California's Berkeley campus and making headlines across the country. He had intelligence about Mario Savio, who had been a leader of the Free Speech Movement and was Berkeley's most notorious campus agitator, and Clark Kerr, the president of the university.
Reagan had been sworn into office just two weeks earlier, and within days contacted the FBI and requested help with "the Berkeley situation." Lynum got the call at his San Francisco office. He immediately notified J. Edgar Hoover at headquarters and recommended against meeting with Reagan—the controversy at the university was just too politically sensitive—but the director ordered him to go ahead.
During a fiercely contested gubernatorial campaign, Reagan had seized on the problem of campus unrest, and it became his hottest issue. Back at Eureka College, in Illinois, he had joined in a student strike as a freshman in 1928, and even helped lead it, but these Berkeley protests were different. He was disgusted with the sit-ins, strikes, and pickets lines of the Free Speech Movement, with the drugs and sex at the dance held by the Vietnam Day Committee in a campus gym to promote anti-war protests. He declared that "beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates" were proof of a "morality and decency gap" at the center of the state's Democratic Party.
His message resonated with voters who saw the turbulence at Berkeley as a symbol of all that was ailing their country, an America facing threats from enemies abroad and rising taxes, racial strife, and generational conflict at home. Reagan defeated the incumbent, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, in a landslide that left the state's Democratic Party a wreck and instantly made the new Republican governor a national political figure.
Hoover welcomed Reagan's victory. For years, he had been frustrated by what classified FBI reports called "subversive" activities at the University of California's flagship campus. Berkeley had been the kind of institution that exemplified the best of American values: Here was a public university that offered a tuition-free education rivaling those offered by Harvard, Princeton, or Yale; employed a constellation of Nobel laureates; and held millions of dollars in government research contracts.
But even as the university was helping the nation win World War II by overseeing the development of the atomic bomb, Hoover's agents were investigating Berkeley students and professors suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. In the cold-war atmosphere of the late 40s and early 50s, the director's concern had grown when scores of faculty members refused to sign a special loyalty oath for university employees.
So far, the 60s were posing an even greater challenge to authority, with the university generating one provocation after another--that "vicious" essay question about the dangers of an organization like the FBI that was optional for applicants in 1959, student participation in the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall, the Free Speech Movement, attempts to stop trains carrying troops bound for Vietnam. The old Communist Party had been bad enough, but now there was the New Left, the hippies, the Black Panthers, Allen Ginsberg. Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his second in command at the bureau and his most intimate companion, saw Berkeley as the vortex of a youth movement fed by "free love," drugs, and a general disrespect for authority spreading all too quickly to other colleges. Stepping up its efforts at Berkeley, the bureau mounted the most extensive covert operations the FBI is known to have undertaken on any campus.
The FBI has long denied investigating the university as an organization, and that much is true. But a legal challenge I brought under the Freedom of Information Act, entailing five lawsuits over the course of 27 years, forced the bureau to release more than 300,000 pages of its confidential records concerning individuals, organizations, and events on and around the campus during the cold war, from the 1940s through the 1970s. This is the most complete record of FBI activities at any college ever released. The documents reveal that FBI agents amassed dossiers on hundreds of students and professors and on members of the Board of Regents; established informers within student groups, the faculty, and the highest levels of the university's administration; and gathered intelligence from wiretaps, mail openings, and searches of Berkeley homes and offices in the dead of night.
Although the bulk of the documents were released in the mid-90s, continuing litigation has compelled the FBI to release more than 50,000 additional pages, some as recently as this year, that provide a clearer picture of the agency's relationship with Reagan and suggest that it profoundly influenced his political development. These records—including material from the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO operation to discredit domestic political organizations—also provide a more complete account of Hoover's activities concerning the university, and the bureau's covert efforts to stifle dissent and circumscribe academic freedom.
In court papers asserting its right to withhold documents, the FBI maintained that its activities were lawful and intended to protect civil order and national security. But the records show bureau officials used intelligence gleaned from these clandestine operations not only to enforce the law, or to prevent violence, or to protect national security.
As U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled in 1991, the FBI's own records show that its initial investigation to determine whether the Free Speech Movement protest violated federal laws soon evolved into political spying, and that it likewise investigated Kerr unlawfully. As she found, "The records in this case go [to] the very essence of what the government was up to during a turbulent, historic period of time." The FBI appealed, but the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed virtually all of Patel's ruling.
THIS WAS WHEN WE HAD A FUNCTIONING SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE JUDICIARY.
Having reviewed the uncensored FBI records in chambers, the court concluded that the documents "strongly suggest" the bureau's investigation of the Free Speech Movement became an effort to "harass political opponents of the FBI's allies among the Regents, not to investigate subversion and civil disorder." The court also found that the records "strongly support the suspicion that the FBI was investigating Kerr to have him removed from the UC administration, because FBI officials disagreed with his politics or his handling of administrative matters. Conspicuously absent from these documents is any connection to any possible criminal liability by Kerr."
In response to my reporting on some of these records, the FBI's current director, Robert S. Mueller III, acknowledged in 2002 that the bureau's surveillance and harassment at Berkeley during the cold war was inappropriate. "Such investigations are wrong and anti-democratic, and past examples are a stain on the FBI's greater tradition of observing and protecting the freedom of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights," Mueller declared.
FBI documents also show that in the 1950s Hoover ran a secret operation called the "Responsibilities Program" to get professors whose political views were deemed unacceptable fired by surreptitiously giving anonymous and unproven charges of disloyalty to Gov. Earl Warren, who then ordered investigations of the faculty. In fighting suspected radicals, Hoover also made common cause with State Sen. Hugh Burns, the head of the state senate's un-American-activities committee, instead of investigating allegations from organized crime sources in Burns's home district of Fresno that he had taken payoffs and secretly owned a brothel.
In 1960, FBI officials mounted a covert campaign to turn public opinion against the university and embarrass university officials by planting negative news stories and arranging for conservative allies to complain to the regents. Hoover was furious about the essay question for applicants, which had asked, "What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?" In 1965, Hoover collaborated with CIA Director John A. McCone to harass students involved in the Free Speech Movement by leaking unproved allegations that they were disloyal to Edwin W. Pauley, who then urged his fellow regents to crack down on them. The FBI chief also misled President Lyndon B. Johnson by sending the White House allegations impugning the loyalty of Kerr and two of his staff members, even though the FBI had investigated the claims and knew they were false.
Hoover had been trying to stifle dissent at Berkeley for years. But Governor Brown, the liberal Democrat elected in 1958 and again in 1962, had been unresponsive to Hoover's concerns about the university. Worse yet, he had betrayed Hoover's trust when the bureau sought to work with him covertly against the Free Speech Movement. In Reagan, however, the FBI director finally had an ally. Like Hoover, Reagan saw the Berkeley campus as a breeding ground for radicalism, where ungrateful students and insubordinate faculty used state resources to engage in anti-American protests. In their eyes, Savio was a "ringleader," and Kerr was, at the least, unwilling or unable to take control, and maybe a dangerous subversive himself.
Agents Lynum and Harter were surprised when the official who greeted them at the door of the governor's mansion told them Reagan would receive them upstairs in his bedroom. As they climbed the winding stairway to the master suite, Lynum hoped Reagan had picked the unusual meeting place for the sake of discretion. Lynum had warned Hoover that if reporters discovered the FBI was secretly helping Reagan, it would embarrass the bureau—something Hoover hated more than anything else.
Discretion was not the only reason Reagan had chosen the unusual meeting place. As the two FBI men were admitted to the governor's bedchamber, they found him propped up with pillows in a four-poster bed, suffering from a bad case of the flu. Reagan wore red pajamas, a muffler around his throat, and a robe. The covers were piled with stacks of official documents, and all around the bed stood aides in suits and ties.
Lynum introduced himself and Harter, congratulated Reagan on his election, and held out his business card. The governor took the white rectangle, thanked the agents for coming, and got to the point: He was "damned mad" that campus officials had allowed the demonstrations to continue. At one recent protest, students had even burned him in effigy. Pulling his robe closer, he said he intended to "straighten out" the university and was hoping the FBI could tell him what he was up against.
Lynum hesitated. Then, apologetically, he reminded Reagan that Hoover had agreed to the meeting on the condition that it would include only Reagan and Lt. Gov. Robert H. Finch. Lynum did not say so, but the director was concerned other witnesses might expose the FBI's involvement.
The governor coughed and looked around the room at his aides. "Well, you heard him, boys," he said. "We'll follow the FBI's rules." Once they were gone, Lynum swore Reagan to secrecy and briefed him about the trouble at Berkeley.
Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio were especially detailed. Hoover had ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin the brilliant philosophy student's reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts.
They also had compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine Kerr in myriad ways. He wanted him removed as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good."
Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more—much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of statewide dissent. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his effort to establish fiscal responsibility. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might
make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government."
Lynum said he understood Reagan's concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office to send an urgent report to the director.
The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved useful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information to help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry.
Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. And after Reagan emerged as a leading conservative spokesman in the 50s, Hoover secretly gave him personal and political help that, a federal court ruled in my FOIA challenge, served "no legitimate law enforcement purpose." He even lent Reagan a hand in keeping track of his own wayward children, Maureen and Michael. Now the long courtship between the FBI director and the former movie star would pay off for them both.
The FBI would become deeply involved in the clash over free speech at Berkeley among the powerful social forces represented by Reagan, Kerr, and Savio. Each of those men had a transforming vision of America and has exerted extraordinary and lasting influence on the nation. Tracing the bureau's involvement with these iconic figures reveals a secret history of America in the 60s. It shows how the FBI's dirty tricks helped energize the student movement, damage the Democratic Party, launch Reagan's political career, and exacerbate the nation's continuing culture wars. Above all, the story that emerges from the once-secret files illustrates the dangers that the combination of secrecy and power poses to democracy, especially during turbulent times.
In his corner office at the FBI's headquarters in Washington, D.C., the director finished reviewing Lynum's report. He saw Reagan's request as a chance to finally quell demonstrations at Berkeley before they ignited even more protests at other campuses.
Hoover's hand moved quickly across the report, scrawling jagged marks in blue ink.
"This," he underscored, "presents the bureau with an opportunity."
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This was the campaign Obama ran in 2008 as Democratic voters were tired of the BUSH-era overreach on national security. We know what needs to be done----we allow our elections to be rigged----Maryland is ground zero for all these policies and Mikulski, Sarbanes, Cummings, and Cardin are 100% ONE WORLD ONE SUPER-SECURITY SERVICE.
Here is where policy posing comes as Clinton and Bush neo-liberals and neo-cons try to appear conservative or social progressive. The expansion and funding of Homeland Security becomes tied to immigrant and border issues. Now, no state in the nation has allowed immigrant populations to grow then Texas, Florida, and neo-conservative states. So, they are not against immigrant labor coming---Republicans built the policies around International Economic Zones in the US. Both parties captured by CLINTON/BUSH pretend to be fighting but they are not. Then we see Obama looking tough on deporting immigrants when he is pushing Trans Pacific Trade Pact and helping Clinton Initiative build its global labor distribution system bringing immigrants to the US as global labor pool. Obama did that to scare Latino immigrants just as these several years of allowing police to be violent scared black citizens so these issues became the major issues for two major population groups. Obama went from deporting immigrants to the DREAM ACT---while ICE----the national security branch of this NSA structure was growing.
The goal of Foreign Economic Zones is to have controlled movement of immigrants----those identified by global corporate campuses and re-educated to be part of this global system. The 1% Wall Street does not want border-crossers mostly trying to escape what US cities deemed International Economic Zones are building. Latinos knowing what happened in Latin America would fight against it happening in the US. This is why Obama and Clinton neo-liberals all look crazy on issues of immigration.
THIS BIG DATA ENFOLDS IMMIGRANTS REGISTERED IN AN WORKPLACE SYSTEM AND FOLLOWS THEIR VOICES AS WITH ALL AMERICANS.
When Americans allow immigrants to lose civil rights and liberties---we are breaking an alliance of the 99% vs the 1%. It matters that immigrants fall into these surveillance structures to great harm because it then becomes OK to do the same to WE THE PEOPLE.
Don't Defund, Just Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security
Tom Barry
February 26, 2015
Photo: Steve Rhodes
The Republican majority has refused to approve new funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Following the lead of the party’s most conservative members, congressional Republicans will reject a new DHS budget unless President Obama reverses his November 2014 executive order to protect more than 4 million immigrants from deportation. Republicans are right to obstruct the routine annual funding of DHS—but they are doing it for the wrong reasons.
DHS would be an easy target of standard conservative critiques of big government. The third largest federal department is hugely wasteful, unaccountable, unmanageable, and emblematic of governmental mission creep. Yet President Obama has kept increasing the budget and expanding the reach of DHS—his most recent initiative is to increase the department’s role in cybersecurity through $6 billion in contracts with major military and intelligence contractors including Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton.
The DHS funding debate lays bare the disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations; the political standard has largely ignored the DHS counterterrorism mission. Instead, the dispute over DHS has revolved around the traditional divides over immigration policy.
This is unfortunate. It is time to reconsider the notion of a having a homeland security department. Rather then routinely submitting and approving the budgets of the bureaucratic monstrosity that DHS has become, the executive branch and Congress should consider dismantling DHS. Separating immigration policy from the post-9/11 security framework is fundamental to ending the waste and creating any sustainable and sensible immigration policy reform.
• • •
A product of post-9/11 fear-driven politics, DHS is a conglomeration of twenty-two different agencies created by the Bush administration under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with little consideration of the difficulties of merging such diverse agencies as FEMA, Secret Service, Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard. Prior to the creation of DHS, immigration and border control came under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice and were regarded primarily as issues of regulation and law. Under DHS, counterterrorism and national security became the dominant framework for immigration and border policy. President George W. Bush promised that the new federal department would “improve efficiency without growing government.” Furthermore, according to President Bush, the new federal department would eliminate “duplicative and redundant activities that drain critical homeland security resources.” Yet, with more than 240,000 employees, DHS is the third largest federal department—surpassing the Department of Justice and State Department, and with a larger budget than the latter. Democrats and Republicans alike have continually increased the DHS annual budgets.
One of the primary indications of the Department’s dysfunction and lack of direction is the continuing DHS inability to formulate a concise and consistent definition of “homeland security.” There was no consensus on the meaning of the term at the time of its creation. And there was absolutely no consideration of the implications of having governmental functions such as border control, emergency management, and immigration enforcement framed as security operations. Nonetheless, the budget for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes the Border Patrol, has more than doubled since 2003– rising from $27 billion to $59 billion in 2014—and now accounts for 21 percent of the DHS budget, making it the largest DHS agency. The CBP is also the nation’s largest law enforcement agency.
The DHS funding debate lays bare the disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations.
With each new director and changes in political issues, DHS tweaks the definition of the term and its mission statement. Defining Homeland Security, a January 2013 report by the Congressional Research Service, underscored the existential crisis facing DHS as its counterterrorism mission has lost focus. CRS observed: “Ten years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government does not have a single definition for ‘homeland security.’ [Instead,] different strategic documents and mission statements offer varying missions that are derived from different homeland security definitions.”
For instance, DHS programs now provide grants to local and state police for purchasing license plate readers, military-grade vehicles, surveillance equipment, and drones. And DHS continues to fund dozens of “fusion centers,” which were established as decentralized counterterrorism intelligence centers but have tracked lawful citizen organizing, including the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Another sign of DHS dysfunction is the low morale of department employees and officials. No other federal department suffers such high rates of job dissatisfaction. Not only does DHS rank as the department with lowest morale, the level of contentedness within DHS has also been dropping at a faster rate than any other department—decreasing 7 percent in the last four years, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
DHS employees and officials cite the department’s stifling bureaucracy and lack of performance measures among the many reasons for plummeting morale. The agency has spent at least $2 million on four studies seeking strategies to improve morale. But no study questioned the viability of a department with so many clashing cultures and one whose operations are so diffuse.
No other federal department is subject to greater congressional oversight. Some ninety congressional committees and subcommittees monitor DHS operations. But this extensive oversight hasn’t produced a more effective and cost-efficient department. To the contrary. Doing the rounds before these congressional committees, DHS officials shape their statements according to the political agendas of committee chairmen, thereby further contributing to the mission drift of DHS.
Rather than providing effective oversight, congressional committees—notably the House Homeland Security Committee and its Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee—function more as boosters and cheerleaders. Eager to display their hardline positions on border security or immigration enforcement, congressional members keep pushing DHS to ramp up its border security operations, resulting in a trail of monumental boondoggles such as the virtual border fence, intelligence fusion centers, deployment of military-grade drones to the border, and a border wall that costs $1–7 billion each mile (depending on the terrain) to construct. Without effective congressional oversight and with constant congressional pressure to expand DHS operations, the department relies heavily on private contractors—many of whom also generously contribute to the election campaigns of committee members—for the management and implementation of core DHS functions, such as cybersecurity.
Over the past dozen years, governmental research and monitoring agencies have published an ever-expanding library of reports that the agency’s waste and failure. Hundreds of reports by the Congressional Research Service, GAO, and the DHS Office of Inspector General have painted a picture of an agency badly divided and highly dysfunctional.
Since its creation, the GAO has identified DHS as a “high risk” government agency, pointing to the continuing challenge of integrating twenty-two agencies into one department. The GAO states that DHS has made progress but that the challenges of managing the mix of diverse agencies continue to impact “the department’s ability to satisfy its missions.” According to the GAO, “DHS’s management and mission risks could have serious consequences for U.S. national and economic security.”
• • •
After more than a dozen years, DHS is still floundering in its efforts to construct its own headquarters. Originally projected to cost $3.9 billion, DHS headquarters is $1.5 billion over budget and twelve years behind schedule. Completion was projected for this year, but according to the GAO it will not likely be finished until 2026. Meanwhile, the twenty-two DHS agencies remain scattered in fifty offices in the Washington, DC area. The GAO says that DHS should consider alternatives.
Dismantling DHS would be likely easier than consolidating it and refocusing its mission. Indeed, if Obama wants to decouple immigration and border policies from counterterrorism and security policies, dismantling DHS may be the only way. Otherwise, the recent immigration order—paired with a call for increased funding for border security, the hiring of 20,000 more Border Patrol agents, and a commitment to “crack down on illegal immigration at the border—just looks like playing politics.
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If you want to follow where global surveillance is going BOOZ ALLEN is tops----it is the source of policy for building global International Economic Zone security for several decades---that is where it got its money. So, BOOZ has the answer for WE THE PEOPLE of a free democratic developed nation with Rule of Law and citizens with a Bill of Rights---how they will install what they did overseas---here in the US. Working with authoritarian dictators globally---
This is why it is critical to act NOW as a 99% protesting and getting crony pols and political structures out of our elections. Baltimore had several establishment candidates for Mayor of Baltimore and it had several establishment farm team all trained with this language of 1% Wall Street global corporate neo-liberalism. It matters who is training our citizens and immigrants on what REAL ISSUES are in America and what REAL solutions are. GET RID OF ALL 5% TO THE 1%.
It is executives at these global corporations who act as that 5% to the 1% bringing campaign donations and pushing candidates for these corporations----
THEY NEED TO WAKE UP----THEY WILL SOON BE THROWN UNDER THE BUS.
Reimagining Homeland Security
Booz Allen is HELPING to ESTABLISH A FRAMEWORK TO DRIVE AMERICA’S HOMELAND SECURITY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT INTO THE FUTURE
The nation’s continued safety and security is dependent upon the continued maturation and institutionalization of a homeland security enterprise comprised of partners at all levels of government and the private sector. It is by strengthening this homeland security enterprise and adopting a whole community approach that we can, as a nation, prevent, prepare, respond to and recover more quickly from large-scale disasters.
Booz Allen is leading the way in shaping this next phase of homeland security. Through our new vision for homeland security and law enforcement, we’re bringing stakeholders together to build the kind of leadership, vision, and knowledge needed to make a strong, resilient homeland a reality.
THE CHALLENGE
As the nation reflects on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, we face a continued challenge in keeping the homeland safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) along with law enforcement agencies across the Federal Government struggle to clearly link the mission needs with capabilities, demonstrate measurable outcomes, maximize resources, and eliminate redundancies. The mission of protecting the homeland only increases in scale and intensity as the threat to the homeland continues to evolve, trade flowing across our borders continues to increase, cybersecurity threats continue to grow, and natural disasters continue to impact us.
Given the on-going challenges, the Federal Government must refresh and refine its approach to homeland security and law enforcement. Specifically, Booz Allen has identified five key challenge areas that the Federal Government will face in the next ten years:
- Resiliency: Strengthen the nation’s ability to respond to and develop from incidents by developing a scalable model across the federal, state, local, private sector, and international communities that serves as a holistic approach to understanding and rewarding resiliency (e.g., resiliency index)
- Enterprise Insight: Address the challenges of the Department’s vast information holdings by leveraging enterprise data to enhance mission operations and business support functions through the establishment of a Chief Data Officer
- Borders: Move beyond the ability to manage a physical border in order to establish and enhance capabilities that support the development of a “functional border” across multiple domains (e.g., air, land, maritime and cyber)
- Counterterrorism: Address the evolving homeland security threat by enabling agile adaptation across the law enforcement and counterterrorism communities through collaborative networks and analytical tools for identifying, tracking, and dismantling of people, money, and travel
- Cybersecurity: Key tipping points and new technologies will define the future of the Internet and cybersecurity. These changes will require a functional definition of cybersecurity focused on protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data from both a logical and physical perspective
A New Vision for Homeland Security and Law Enforcement
In the next 10 years, we as a nation must adopt a strong, future-facing strategy to transform an aggregated homeland security and law enforcement enterprise and drive the focus toward achieving national resiliency, establishing a networked approach to countering terrorism , defending our cyberspace through collaboration, and managing a functional border in the global commons.
Our Viewpoints
Most Common Natural Disasters in the U.S.
This infographic shares statistics around the most common natural disasters in the U.S. …Read More
Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Transforming the U.S. Immigration System. Federal agencies faced with implementing immigration reform will not simply do more of the same, but rather overhaul the way the immigration systems operates. Reform provides an opportunity for agencies to re-imagine their mission, deploy the latest technologies, and execute an enterprise approach that engages the whole immigration community. …Read More
Reimagining the Next Generation of Homeland Security
An introductory message from Senior Vice President Thad Allen marking the 10th anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) creation.…Read More
Reimagining the Border: Functional Border Management
Reimagining the Border as a Balanced Suite of Interrelated Mission Functions. Modern border management requires a vision that transcends physical locations and often stove-piped authorities to achieve a broader, more integrated approach to managing trade and travel. By viewing the border through the lens of the key functions of border management, we can make better use of advanced analytics to improve border management and strengthen the individual missions of each component authority, as well as the overall security of the nation.…Read More
Marshaling Data for Enterprise Insights
Marshaling Enterprise-wide Data for Mission Insights. Department of Homeland Security agencies can leverage cloud analytics to generate a more comprehensive picture of all kinds of data—such as cell-phone chatter, video, satellite images, biometric data, and a wide variety incoming field reports—to gain superior intelligence and predictive insight into terrorist threats. Taking full advantage of advanced data analytics will require DHS entities to think of themselves as collective sources of information rather than separate parts of a larger bureaucracy.…Read More
The Path Toward Resiliency
Booz Allen Hamilton can help reinforce “whole community” and “resilience” concepts by promoting mutually agreed upon definitions and developing mechanisms to measure progress toward helping the nation achieve greater resiliency.…Read More
Reimagining the Border
Reimagining the Border as a Suite of Interrelated Mission Functions. Modern border management requires a vision that transcends physical locations and often stove-piped authorities to achieve a broader, more integrated approach to managing trade and travel. By viewing the border through the lens of the key functions of border management, we can make better use of advanced analytics to improve border management and strengthen the individual missions of each component authority, as well as the overall security of the nation. …Read More
Enabling Agility in Law Enforcement
It is difficult to imagine an agency that will be not be affected by immigration reform, so all agencies need to consider the possible effects of proposed reform provisions and prepare for the transformational change to the nation’s immigration system. …Read More
Achieving "Unity of Effort" in Cybersecurity
Building Effective Government-Industry Cybersecurity Collaboration. There is no higher priority than protecting the networks and systems that are critical to our government and the private sector that requires a greater understanding of the respective roles each should play—and the benefits that will result—in establishing responsible collaboration.…Read More
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