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Secret Service Critics Pounce After White House Breach
HughPickens.com writes On Friday evening, a man jumped the White House fence, sprinted across the North Lawn toward the residence, and was eventually tackled by agents, but not before he managed to actually enter the building. Now CBS reports that the security breach at the White House is prompting a new round of criticism for the Secret Service, with lawmakers and outside voices saying the incident highlights glaring deficiencies in the agency's protection of the president and the first family. "Because of corner-cutting and an ingrained cultural attitude by management of 'we make do with less,' the Secret Service is not protecting the White House with adequate agents and uniformed officers and is not keeping up to date with the latest devices for detecting intruders and weapons of mass destruction," says Ronald Kessler. "The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance." But the Secret Service must also consider the consequences of overreaction says White House correspondent Major Garrett. "If you have a jumper and he is unarmed and has no bags or backpacks or briefcase, do you unleash a dog and risk having cell phone video shot from Pennsylvania Avenue of an unarmed, mentally ill person being bitten or menaced by an attack dog?" But Kessler says Julia Pierson, the first woman to head the Secret Service, has some explaining to do. "If the intruder were carrying chemical, biological or radiological weapons and President Obama and his family had been in, we would have had a dead president as well as a dead first family."
Guy walks on White House lawn, agents take him down. Nobody was hurt, never was the president or his family in danger. The Secret Service did his job. End of story. The rest is just the usual sensational media hysteria.
id say things went well. he was stopped fairly quickly, no one was hurt. not sure why all the hate on it? its a fine line between protection and being a fortress, i dont think we want the white house on military lock down do we?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So in the worst case scenario all you had to do really is to bring in the vice president or hold a new election. Yeah that sounds like the end of the world.
So, they don't guard it as strictly when the POTUS and family aren't home? I'm pretty OK with that.
If you want to defend the president 24x7 against absolutely any threat that includes non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, then you'll need to forget about putting the white house in the middle of a city, and never have the president step outside of an armored and sealed environment. If you want to protect against a threat that includes nuclear weapons, now you need maybe a 10 mile buffer zone between anywhere the president goes and the rest of civilization.
On the other hand, half of the other national leaders can bike to work if they want to. Granted, terrorists aren't gunning for the leader of Norway the way they would be for the US president.
In the end, security is a balance. Sure, we could have sentries that shoot anything that moves and a minefield in the white house lawn, but as was pointed out that results in lots of dead crazy people on the news. There is no question that the style of secret service the US has is going to lead to a few dead presidents each century, which is basically what the trend has been. I just don't see a way to fix things without making other things much worse. The problem is that there are a lot of nutjobs who think that killing one person will somehow solve the world's problems, and that the last election was just a one-time delusion that could never happen again.
This is just puffery because it is trendy to beat up on every government agency now, and the SS in particular after the Columbia prostitute scandal.
They have everything they need to protect the president but they are smart and respond to each threat based on the *actual* threat it poses. The snipers that hang out on the White House roof could have dropped the man before he made it ten feet, but had they done so everyone would be screaming about how they killed an unarmed man when the president and his family weren't even on the grounds.
I am sick of this. Every. Fucking. Thing. that happens is an excuse to pump money into the militarization of the US of A with the accompanying security theater. I've been in Europe for about 15 years. I am not going to talk about whether Europe is better or not, I've been around enough to know that it's apples to oranges. But I can compare between the America I grew up in and love and what I see today.
When Obama came to visit Brussels last year, myself and several thousand other people were locked in our offices for three hours because the only exit was on the street that his motorcade was scheduled to come down, only he was two hours late. When he passed, he rolled by in his motorcade with military escort; the last vehicle was an SUV with the back hatch open and a couple of dudes with machine guns in it. While I was having a smoke afterwords, one of the older ladies in the building told me about Clinton's visit in the 90's... she saw him out jogging in the foret de soignes park.
Every time I go home to visit my family, it makes me cry a little bit. Crime rates are their lowest since well before I was born, yet all I hear is about how important it is to take measures to keep myself safe. Last year I was jet lagged and went out for a walk at 2am for some air... a cop actually stopped me to ask me what I was doing! A middle aged man, clean-shaven and wearing light-colored clothes while walking on the sidewalk is now a cause for suspicion in suburbia. When I was growing up, I used to go out at that time on a weekly basis and actually do bad stuff. Never even saw a cop then.
It is time for us to wake up as a country. It is popular to say that 9/11 changed everything, but in fact it only changed us. We need to stop being so pussy-shit and do a little cost-benefit ratio analysis on the stupid security stuff we do. What is more likely to extend the average lifespan of your community's inhabitants, putting a dozen patrolmen on the streets or building a gym? I bet I know the answer to that one.
Oh, and the president is just a man. His family is just a family. He is an important man serving the country and deserves to be protected by said country, but if he bites the dust he'll be replaced and it ain't worth many millions of dollars on technical gadgetry when we could use that money to pay down the deficit.
From the summary: "risk having cell phone video"
Sounds like the decision making is largely driven by 1) Will we get caught doing X on video? and 2) What will the press say?
I'd just recommend that when you compare, it's done intelligently and fairly. I mean, there's a huge difference between the insanely distorted America depicted in clever headlines and media soundbites and the many and varied communities across the United States. The US is not CNN, it is not the E Channel, it is not Hollywood. Really. I've lived and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia across the decades. I've found there to be at least as much variation in good and bad neighborhoods, rich and poor, genteel and tough, both Europe and Asia. There are streets, stradas, rues, calles, etc., on either continent that I avoid at night or alone.
Presidents are politicians. They must keep in contact with the voters to get re-elected, and the accessibility of the current president has been welcome. It helps defuse concerns about his level of education separating him from ordinary citizens, or forgetting what it's like to be black.
Assessing the strange "what if he'd been carrying a weapon of mass destruction" concerns:
1) The simplest pony yield atom bombs have to weigh at least 40 pounds for the nuclear material alone, based on rough guidelines for U-235 critical mass published in various magazines during my career. Jumping the fence and sprinting across the White House lawn, carrying something that heavy is difficult and _will_ give the Secret Service personnel more time. Such a device would be more effective _outside_ the White House during a semi-public event where the President is outdoors, such as an inauguration.
2) Chemical attacks have similar problems. An aerosol or chemical poison would have to basically flood the air of the White House, which has quite good climate control inside. That means getting past the ventilation system, which would be a _very_ good place to put the sensors and stop the air flow if there were such an attack.
3) Bacteriological weapons would, again, have to get from the attacker's entry to the President. Such a biological agent would be more effectively spread by leaking it during a White House tour, not by a run across the White House lawn.
The Secret Service reacted well, with measured restraint. Better staffed guard posts might be useful, but they are _expensive_. If you estimate the presence of 20 more patrolling guards, 24x7, at roughly $100,000/guard/shift covered, that's roughly $6,000,000/year. Which federal budget shall we strip for that funding?
"If you have a jumper and he is unarmed and has no bags or backpacks or briefcase, do you unleash a dog and risk having cell phone video shot from Pennsylvania Avenue of an unarmed, mentally ill person being bitten or menaced by an attack dog?"
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance.
On what is arguably the most heavily guarded building on the planet some idiot thinks a little lock on the front door is going to keep the bad guys out? Exactly what would be the point of this little door lock? What would it protect against?
Talk about someone with no clue when it comes to security.
How many snipers had this guy in their sights thinking "please don't make me shoot you." The Secret Service agent at the door did their job as did the rest of the unit.
Yup, if the the President or family had been at the White House instead of on vacation (again) the snipers would probably have taken him out, and the door would have been locked anyway, and there would have been more agents around.
There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the white house.
Back when rather few people actually traveled any significant distance. Also back in those days the federal government mattered rather less than it does today. It's only since the Civil War that the federal government has started to play more of a role than state government in the every day lives of people.
What has changed with our society that our president needs to live in a castle with a moat and defense force?
A lot has changed. Maybe the fact that every president since Johnson has been the target of known assassination attempts or plots. Four presidents have been assassinated (Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and Garfield) and two were wounded by would-be assassins (Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt). When you are the leader of a nation there are some crazy people out there who will kill you if they have the chance.
Losing your nation's leader is a BIG deal. It causes very serious problems no matter what country you are talking about.
In a steely cool professional manner.
It's one of them fancy sentence spicer-uppers!
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GP here, although I've got no proof of that. You clearly did not read what I wrote. I am saying that it is perfectly safe pretty much everywhere in the US, but we've managed to convince ourselves that it is getting worse every year.
For what it's worth, I am from Centennial, Colorado and my neighborhood was solid middle class 40 years ago and remains so today.
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Absolutely there's no such thing as perfect security. I say that as a security professional. My wife, a childcare professional, will tell you that locking the front door is a good idea, if the house is a target. They spend a billion and half dollars every year on the secret service, who doesn't bother to lock the door. That's how government does things.
I guess those electric-type attacks weren't as effective against Secret Service as he'd hoped.
#DeleteChrome
It was a Friday evening. The President had left for Camp David earlier, and his main protective detail went with him. Most staffers had gone home. The guy got just inside the outer doors, where there is a security checkpoint, before he was tackled.
The Secret Service made the right choice not shooting the intruder dead on the lawn. They certainly had the capability to kill him. They would have been heavily criticized, with pictures of the dead body on national TV.
On September 12, a man wearing a Pokemon hat and carrying a stuffed animal jumped the White House fence. He was tackled and arrested. Should he have been killed?
However, using state-of-the-art Channel 5 computer technology, we'll show you how disastrous it could have been. Here's how it would have looked if the plane had crashed into a school. Now here's how it would've looked if the plane had crashed into a school for bunnies. Now here's how it would've looked if the plane had crashed into a school for bunnies but one passenger had survived, gone home, and mercilessly beat his wife. -- Family Guy
The crux of the problem is very simple: Americans whine ... not do. There has not been a significant political movement since the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther and others.
Americans whine about security and get it. At the end of George Orwell 1984 Winston says: "I love Big Brother" and Americans do as it is a figure to whom they can whine too and cheer simultaneously.\
If Americans stopped whining about places they never go, like their own inner cities, foreign countries, and the overflowing Psych wards triaged by imminent self-harm, these problems and dangers would not exist in the first place.
A real solution is education and health care, but oddly their children is the one thing they never whine about, until they are in a foreign country coming back with PTSD from picking up body parts from the shots they fired.
Mental health and poverty are completely managable, and they are the source of almost all the actual events that occur inside this country they fear to walk in. Stop buying guns and volunteer at a hospital stressed beyond it's maximum.
In seattle there is a large homeless population. Almost all are mentally ill. They get a bottle and a refill, and a at-a-glance diagnosis with cash-strapped on-going care. Maybe that is something to whine about when you smear them across the hood when they wander the streets at random, shootup schools, and sprint the white-house front lawn.
Terrorism ? you must be joking. Flight 97: stop whining on your phone and tackle some underfed psycho with nothing more than a F**ing box cutter. 200+ people can't handle a few guys ? that's what ace bandages are for retards.
Less guns more meds. Maybe the rest of the world would breath a sigh of releif too for once.
Here in the US, there is really very little relevance to whether or not anything DOES happen to the president. We have a rather robust chain of command going down how many elected positions? I'd personally rather lose 20 presidents than spend a dollar more on presidential security. It's not like loss of a president would lose us that much face with the global community, except perhaps in those regimes where their 'elected leader' is slightly less elected and slightly more concerned with staying in power and not being dead.
I mean hell we are replacing the guy every 4-8 years, likely with another corporate shill, so does it really matter that much to us if something happens to our figurehead? I mean hell, most Dems/Reps wouldn't mind it as long as it was the OTHER party's guy, right? All those bad decisions allegedly made by him can be stopped! Well, until the next automaton replaces him as part of the emergency chain of command, and you finally come to the realization it is puppets all the way down.
I apologize for having carelessly left an impression that I disagreed. I actually identified with your points, and I was going off on a tangental rant. This being /., I'm so used to reading America haters on both sides of the Atlantic painting uninformed pictures of violent crime ridden America; and for the same reasons, the distortions inherent of ubiquitous press and entertainment media only capable of creating highly cartoonish caricatures of reality. The serious shame is what it's doing to our children, and thus future generations. When I was a kid, we could leave the house in the summer every morning, and not return until dinner, or even by dark, unless we got hungry and diverted home, or to a friend's home, for chow, sometime noonish. Now kids are prisoners of "play-dates" and hovering parents who are scared shitless by the sick perception that if they divert theirs eyes for a second, Johnny's going to be butt raped and murdered, no question. Why? Because in the statistically few tragic occasions when something, anything, sensational does happen anywhere in any small corner of the country or the world, it's splashed all over CNN, MSNBC or Fox every 15 minutes all day. Did shit happen in the 50's and 60's when I was growing up? Sure. But when it happened in Tallahassee, we didn't get to hear about it all day long in San Diego on 24 hour news networks for 5 freaking days running, with constant streams of "experts" reminding us constantly how we need to imprison our little darlings for their own protection. Life will suck for our grandkids.
They also missed that it was from the "Get of my lawn" department.
You are required to identify yourself to a police officer who asks (per Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada). You are not required to show them identification documents. There is no good reason to do so. Do not do this. Tell them your (real) name. Certain states (not California, mind you) may have state laws requiring you to give the police such information as your address and date of birth; the Supreme Court has not ruled on the legality of these laws. I would probably not comply, but that one is up to you. Do not talk to the police. Do not assist them with any investigation -- you are not required to, and providing false information is an easy crime to get booked for. Do not answer their questions. Do not allow them to search you. There are nice cops who are just doing their job, but the potential downsides are not worth it. "Am I being charged with a crime? Am I free to go?" Those are the only things you should say to the police.
And if you get arrested, remember that, per the reprehensible miscarriage of justice in Berghuis v. Thompkins, you must explicitly invoke your right to silence in order for the police to stop questioning you. Police interrogations are so effective that perfectly innocent people have been known to sign confessions after extended interrogation sessions. Tell them you are using your right to silence, and that you will not answer questions without an attorney present, and do not say anything more until that attorney shows up.
Know your rights, and insist upon them. Do not cooperate with the police beyond strict necessity.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
On slashdot, GP usually means "Grand-Parent (post)", as in:
Grand-Parent post
.. Parent post
.. .. This post.
Who the fvck cares, it's not like he actually has any power anyway, just "vote" another puppet in.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
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