mohs

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Reviews The Myth of Homeland Security by Sten Grynir In his book, "The Myth of Homeland Security", Marcus J. Ranum exposes the bulk of our homeland security expenditures as a feelgood waste of money. His thesis is that the Department of Homeland Security is badly designed and ineffective, and that most of money being spent by this department and its subsidiary agencies supports the need to seem to be doing something, anything, rather than being expended on real efforts with tangible positive results. In a dozen useful chapters, Mr. Ranum, a computer security expert with decades of experience, explores the structure of the Department of Homeland Security, management of our borders, airline security, cyberthreats, and several other important topics. By turns depressing and encouraging, his book lays out the challenges to be faced, the challenges to be ignored, and the areas where successes can be expected.

To start with, the author describes the politics that ruled out any sensible structure for the DHS. Bringing the FBI and CIA under the same roof to eliminate the communication failures between them was never in the cards. More chilling is the fact that, even if these departments (and the other security agencies subsumed under the Department of Defense, Immigration, the Drug Enforcement Agency and various segments of the Treasury department, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and others) were minded to share information, not only are their internal systems not structured to make this possible, but in fact neither the FBI nor the CIA knows exactly how many useful databases it itself owns; furthermore, these multiple internal databases are mostly ad-hoc structure, maintained on different schedules, and not designed to communicate with any other database. In discussing this, Ranum says, for the first time, the mantra that he repeats over and over in the book: if we spent this much money for these kinds of results in a private company, the people responsible would be looking for new jobs.

The Homeland Security Act itself is described as riddled with pork. A vast new bureaucracy has now been put in place to manage agencies that should have been disbanded for poor performance, and budgets have been expanded to fund non-essential activities while money for critical services is provided grudgingly. $100 million dollars has been earmarked for smallpox defense, but the likelihood of a smallpox attack is very much lower than many other biological risks.

DHS has been given responsibility for border security, science and technology infrastructure protection, FEMA, and many other functions previously housed in each of the other Cabinet departments, but it has been given almost no enforcement mechanisms. It cannot compel other government departments to give it information, much less force them to adopt regulations, standards and infrastructure that DHS may deem necessary. To quote Ranum, "The new DHS consists of an impressive group of organizations that are both blind and paralyzed (emphasis in the original).

In chapter after chapter, the author tells the tale of organizational misdesign, systems inefficiency, appearance substituting for substance, and log-rolling and boon-doggling. He feels we are not made much safer by what has been put in place, and despairs of having it done right. One of the few bright spots he finds is the success foreign and domestic intelligence services have been having in disrupting terrorist cells and financing. Ranum is not a whiner and complainer, however. He offers some limited but practical ways in which our security could be enhanced without the changes being subverted by special interests. He also worries, appropriately, that becoming too good at Homeland Security could turn us into a state "that would terrify our founding fathers and impress George Orwell."

Published just last October, "The Myth Of Homeland Security" is remarkably current (or is it prescient) for a book whose subject matter might have changed quickly. While a bit trusting on the existence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction", its arguments retain their full force in all other regards. Buy this book.

"The Myth of Homeland Security" by Marcus J. Ranum, Wiley 2003, ISBN: 0-471-45879-1