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Edited on Thu Oct-26-06 09:52 PM by Temporary1
The Day I Outsmarted Homeland Security
About a year and a half ago or so my sister joined the US Department of Homeland Security (in Atlanta). She was a lowly intern and she did mostly lowly intern stuff. Soon enough she dragged me into her stuff.
At first I resisted. I really didn’t want to be involved with DHS or their operations; I don’t really care much for the “war on terror” -- not then and not now. But eventually about a summer ago I was cast as a roleplayer in a terrorism simulation at the Georgia capitol. My job was to go around and do “hostile surveillance” while another team on foot looked for people with suspicious behavior and reported them. My entire hostile team was reported many times, and me the most. I did something stupid; my sister tipped me off on some people following me and I ran. Here’s a tip: never, EVER run. I was a running joke around her office a few days after that (pun so intended).
So on October 26th , I got another shot at the whole thing (more than a year after my first one). I, along with the brother-in-law of my sister’s boss and a military/police guy who is pretty experienced and knows the area well, were to be terrorists scouting out potential targets in downtown Atlanta.
I played it differently this time. I didn’t spend much time at the target but gave it a fair scouting that I thought a potential terrorist would give. I spent time in a library, newsstand, park. I tried not to be too obvious, and I certainly didn’t run.
I actually met up with the other role players and my sister, her boss, and an advisor (he worked counterintelligence for the Navy for a while, went all over the world with spy-esque stuff) at a cafe. The military roleplayer among us actually knew one of the people in the surveillance team -- and get this, she comes into the restaurant! He actually confronts her and tells her he’s actually just a student at the university downtown and he’s here taking classes. She believes him and tells us everything about the surveillance team! Talk about blowing cover…
At the end of the day we did the classic meetup with the trainee class of people learning to spot terrorists. And guess what: I was never suspected. The team filed maybe 30, 40 reports and not a single one was on me. A lot can change in a year and a half, and apparently I’m a far better terrorist now than then.
But there was a question that appeared when I first did this at the capitol and then again on the 26th: should all of this really be happening?
DHS pulls together a huge number of people: counterintelligence, military, FBI, FEMA, lots of corporate security people -- and it spends billions on creating high tech security networks and surveillance in many high-profile places across the country. And I’m sure these things do make these places secure. I guess the Suntrust building is more than safe, and good ‘ol Governor Purdue will be just fine (although his executive security team didn‘t notice me sneaking next to him the first time I did role-playing, something that shocked DHS). But is that how we want to live our lives? Maximum surveillance everywhere? Huge numbers of people pulled into expensive projects all over the nation to guard against mostly non-existent threats? Is there a “too much” to these things? I notice that everywhere I have seen these surveillance detection operations there is a mass of poverty; and I usually hear DHS people or someone who works with my sister laughing about the “homeless bums” that they usually recognize as non-targets as terrorists (they keep tabs on that stuff). When there is such enormous poverty, and massive ignorance about what the government is doing with so much of our money with such massive surveillance -- well, it just makes me wonder if the people of this country would actually approve of these priorities. I’m not sure I do. I’m not sure I want to spend a few million dollars training and protecting Coca Cola when that money could uplift a few ghettos, when it means that if you’re a frequent Atlanta traveler you probably have a fat file in an archive somewhere from all the surveillance done on you.
I think we’ll have to have this debate in our country sooner or later. I’m not sure how healthy a country is where all this goes on right under our noses, safe in its continuity because we’re too ignorant to know about it. The world should be what we want it to be -- right?
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