In an Associated Press article, nearly two dozen illegal immigrants were arrested on Wednesday at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, with fake airside security passes. On the face of it, one would think it is just another story of illegals being used to cut corners. Digging a little deeper, the story actually illustrates just how messed up the whole Homeland Security system is.
The reason Homeland Security was put forward by President Jo Jo the Idiot Boy was to combine all the forces available into one manageable organization to protect the US from terrorists. Post 9-11, this seemed like a sensible idea: A super-agency designed to protect everyone by protecting, vetting and investigating all the things that come into the country or exist in the country that are very important, like water supplies, the power grid and items of National Importance.
To help the Department of Homeland Paranoia, very powerful laws were passed, not the least of which was the Patriot Act, which violates most of the US Constitution. Several billion dollars in budget were set aside to help Homeland Paranoia ramp up the technology to protect the US.
Tom Ridge, the original head of Homeland Paranoia, was the one who helped create the Terror Threat scale. Remember that colour-coded Paranoia Pez dispenser? CNN used to run it on the bottom of the screen, almost always pinned on Yellow, occasionally bubbling into Orange, but never into Green. Tom was also the guy who said you should and could defend yourself against terrorist bioweapons with duct tape and plastic sheeting. He meant well.
There were all kinds of stories about fabulous technology that would sniff bombs in baggage and imaging technology that would show the screeners if the person in the booth waxed their Secret Garden, or let it grow wild. Naturally, taking off your shoes became the norm to get on a plane, especially post- Richard Reid, the loon (and lone) shoe bomber.
Never mind that freight and passenger trains were never protected. Intercity busses were never screened and drivers in private cars were never stopped, unless at the border and then only to make sure they didn’t have sausages, citrus fruit, or too many people in the trunk.
As for shipping? Homeland Paranoia and the Transportation Security Agency will only admit that a percentage of containers are checked. Needless to say illegal immigrants kept coming to the US, usually in containers, or over the fence, neither of which are protected, checked or patrolled.
With Hurricane Katrina, we got proof that Homeland Paranoia couldn’t organize a bowel movement, let alone respond to a legitimate emergency: They were too busy matching pants to shirts, making us take off our belts at the airport, X-raying Aunt Hazel’s walker and forcing women to chug breast milk to prove it wasn’t explosive.
The O’Hare story merely underlines how broken things have become. People were walking around airside with secure passes that had nothing to do with the actual person carrying it. Nobody checked. Nobody held the pass up next to the face of the burly, bearded, bearer and said: "You’re not a 22 year old woman named Marlene. Who are you and why are you near an airplane?"
The fix is so simple that it barely bears repeating: Technology will not and cannot replace vigilant human beings.
For all the expensive UAV’s flying circles over a reservoir or wiretapped emails, linking someone to someone else, nothing stops security breaches like a human. Face recognition doesn’t work, nor do fingerprint scanners, implanted RFID chips, or the laughable "Trusted Shipper" program.
All it takes is one grumpy, suspicious, security guard to stop random workers and match up the faces to pictures on the passes.
Or one grumpy, suspicious border guard to say "Bullshit. Open the truck up."
Or one grumpy, suspicious cop guarding a nuclear reactor saying "You’ve been parked here for four hours, staring at the building and the building hasn’t moved. Let’s see some ID, now."
That’s all it takes. Nothing more than humans.
RoadDave 