This
is
another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and
my
time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts." (If you want to
read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the
right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug
in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in
reverse-chronological order.) Comments and factual quibbles
are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:
fact.check.baker@gmail.com. If you're dying to order the book, send
mail to the same address. I'm still looking for an agent and a
publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too.
--Stewart Baker
The rain is growing heavier. The low
clouds are darker. The lights in the pools have begun to glow. I’m ready to
leave.
Passing a bench, I see something. A tiny
dot of color in the vast, sterile park.
It’s a bit of glass, like a clear blue
marble left in the kiln too long and melted into an oblong. It’s easy to miss.
I’ve already walked past it once. But it wasn’t dropped at random.
It sits centered at the end of one bench.
In this scrubbed, cerebral monument, it looks almost defiant, an act of
personal rebellion against the clean lines and uniformity.
The name on the bench is Ronald Hemenway,
electronics technician first class. He
died at work in the Pentagon. He was 37 – the right age to have a wife and
young children still feeling the pain of his loss eight years later.
I imagine mother and child sitting
together on the bench. They glance
carefully around and slip the blue stone from a pocket. A child’s hand centers
it at the end of the bench, just so.
A gift of memory. For a father.
For a family.
For all of us.
***
It
is memory that will save the changes DHS has made at the border. We remember what weak defenses cost us.
But
the memory of 9/11 may not save us from the new threats. When catastrophic
terrorism returns, the terrorists will use weapons that have already been
deployed -- by governments, by business, by all of us. Like jet travel, the
weapons will be technologies we love. If
we do nothing, these technologies and the new powers they confer will
eventually be used against us in shocking new ways.
I
tried my best to manage those new risks as aggressively as we were moving on
border security. But that was a lot harder; privacy groups, business, and the
international community resisted change with fervor. And too often they won,
blocking our efforts to bend the trajectory of change away from the greatest
risks.
Those
are the failures I most regret. The lesson I learned from the wall and 9/11 was
simple: The civil liberties advocates of
the time did not know where to stop.
They only stopped campaigning for the wall after it had killed three
thousand Americans (and some didn’t stop even then). They couldn’t see the line
between reasonable protections and measures that crippled our effort to fight
terrorism. And they still can’t. They and their allies in business and
international organizations are natural conservatives, opposed to any change
that might help government fight terrorism in new ways.
I’d
chosen not to fight these entrenched interests in the 1990s. When I left the National Security Agency, I’d
written a long article that endorsed a wall between spies and cops. I’ve spent
years undoing that mistake.
Now
I am leaving government again, and writing again – and hoping to keep others
from making the same mistake.
Call
it a gift of memory.
The mistake is listening to Stewart Baker, apologist extraordinaire for totalitarianism.
Posted by: Chicken Potpie | Dec 11, 2009 at 09:22 PM