Tag homeland security

Terrorist Arrested in NYC – Bomb Plot Foiled

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

A 21 year old Bangladeshi national in the US, here on a student visa, was arrested two days ago for attempting to detonate a 1,000 pound bomb outside the Federal Reserve bank in Manhattan.  This was the result of a three month long sting operation by the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).  Congratulations to the agents and officers of the FBI and coordinating agencies who foiled this plot, and thank you for keeping our nation safe!

Homeland Security Today provides some initial details of the plot in what is, surprisingly, not a top national news story.  I’m honestly shocked by this –   Folks, this is big news!  Based on the information provided, the detonation of a bomb this size (had it been real) would have done just as much damage as that caused by Timothy McVeigh at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.  That bomb killed 168 and injured almost 700 people.

While there have been a lot of criticisms of our nation’s intelligence functions lately (see my earlier post on Fusion Centers), this is one of the true success stories.  Let’s congratulate all of the officials involved in finding and catching this radical.  I’m sure the employees of the Manhattan Federal Reserve bank and their loved ones are truly thankful.

FirstNet and Molasses

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

I’ve found something slower than molasses – and that’s the implementation of FirstNet: The result of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations from 2004 (again, that’s 2004 – which was eight years ago.  Eight.) part of which outlines the necessity for a more substantial radio spectrum for public safety purposes.  Before I rant any further, I do want to mention that this particular post was brought on by an article in this month’s Emergency Management Magazine called FirstNet’s Challenges, in the print edition or First Net: Answers to Key Questions in the online version.

Eight years… the span of time it takes to obtain a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a doctoral degree.

An eight year old child demonstrates the ability to solve problems independently and can count to 1,000.

I’m severely doubting that most of our elected officials have a great deal of education or an ability to solve problems independently, much less as a group.

The difficulties that public safety has with communication networks are as old as the communication devices themselves.  First off, it shouldn’t have required the 9/11 Commission to raise this issue – it should have been addressed well before.  A committed, secure, interoperable, and durable information network for first responders is an absolute necessity.  The hopes of first responders everywhere was that, along with most of the Commission’s recommendations, this matter would be addressed with all haste.  We couldn’t be more wrong.  It took them eight years to pass legislation just to allow the creation of the entity to work on ideas on how to address this!  That legislation, by the way, was included in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Action of 2012 – which largely deals with taxes, unemployment, and Medicare.  The creation of FirstNet is in no way directly related to any of these topics.

But wait – there’s more!  The Emergency Management Magazine article goes on to outline what needs to be accomplished next, including the formation of a board (done), development of policy, procedures, bylaws, and a charter.  Further, they must name a public safety advisory committee (isn’t public safety the primary purpose of this group to being with?  If so, why do we need an advisory committee?  Shouldn’t that be the primary focus of the board?), hire staff, and establish a budget (the enacting legislation provided $7 billion dollars as ‘seed money’… estimates for creating a nationwide network are as high as $40 billion – which does not include maintenance of the network and recurring costs.

I will grant that there are certainly challenges with this – financial, technological, and political.  There have been attempts at this (ref: a miserable failure of an attempt in New York State several years back which cost the tax payers millions of dollars).  But, gosh… perhaps we would be a bit further ahead had we not waited EIGHT YEARS to pass this enabling legislation in the first place!

Is my frustration apparent?

Fusion Centers & The Art of Intel

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

In reference to an MSNBC article titled “Homeland Security Fusion Centers Called Useless“… This was a pretty critical article on the utility and outputs of fusion centers.  Fusion centers have been highly funded by the federal government over the past decade as a means of pulling together local, state, and federal law enforcement officials into one regional facility with the purpose of collecting, sharing, and analyzing intelligence information pertinent to domestic crimes and terrorism.

While the article was critical of the outputs of fusion centers, such as failed leads and off-base reports, there have been successes.  The article eludes to them, but some of those successes are still classified/sensitive information.  Given that, this article may not be fairly representing the progress of fusion centers.  That said, there are still some obvious improvements to be made.

This is not CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds, or Law and Order.  The collection and analysis of information (law enforcement intelligence, or otherwise) is not often times a straight forward or simple process.  It can not be accomplished within the confines of an hour-long prime time show.  While I’m not an intel analyst, I’ve performed similar work many times over as a Planning Section Chief and Situation Unit Leader working in incident command posts and emergency operations centers for various types of incidents.  Add in a multi-agency response (which nearly every incident of any measure of complexity surely entails), and you’ve got your hands full just figuring what has happened, much less what’s going on right now, and trying to forecast what will likely happen.  One needs to determine exactly what information is needed, where to get it, how to get it, validate it once it’s received, consider how the information should be shared, cross-reference it with other data, and still make sure that it’s all timely, relevant, and accurate.  Intel gets even more complicated, particularly in the ‘cross referencing’ activity I just listed.  The best way I’ve seen this explained is by ‘collecting the dots and connecting the dots’.  A great book for your intel types is “Intelligence Analysis – A Target Centric Approach“.  It should be required reading for all fusion center staff.

Fusion centers are still a fairly new concept – perhaps could even still be considered a fad.  They are a concept that has likely not reached maturity.  They have certainly been tested in real life and by way of prevention exercises.  On a daily basis they must weed through tons of boring and seemingly irrelevant information, identifying one bit here and one bit there that might be relevant.  These folks are further challenged by a multi-agency environment (certainly a strength in the long run, but still presenting challenges of its own) and the necessity to identify patterns within the intel.  No easy task.  They have policies, processes, and procedures.  They have training and exercises.  Clearly, though, we are doing something wrong.  But what?