It is easy to accuse cops of bulldozing militant freelance photographers out of their civil right to snap photos of any place at any time. Call the police Gestapo. Gain a merit badge from the local ACLU advocate. Then feel good and smug about summoning common sense and popular support to this cause. It's easy, gratifying, convenient – and wrong.
Wisdom ultimately sides with law enforcement on this debate, no matter how inelegant the trek to reach this point. Why? Because the ill-considered photo of a critical infrastructure site taken by even the most innocuous, self-styled photographic artist is destined for long life and unfettered travel via the Internet. Its worst destination: a terrorist's target folder, where it serves such nefarious purposes as (1) exposing defenses or attack pathways to a worthy target, or (2) drawing attention as a potential target to attackers who had never before noticed this target.
Events occur. Conditions alter. The world changes. Weapons screening as a condition of gaining access to an airline flight that you are paying for may have been unthinkable in the 1950s. Today, it would be more unthinkable, even irresponsible, to board a flight without such screening. The events of 9/11 changed many views, even those of one of today’s critics of the cop who tries to intervene when a camera-wielding free lancer casually starts photographing critical infrastructure sites. With the memory of 9/11/01 receding, George Will now brands the police attempt at intervention an instance “of government overreaching in the name of security.” (Details are in “A snapshot of our times,” Washington Post, January 18, 2012.)
When the events of 9/11 were still fresh, though, Mr. Will offered a different opinion. Then (Washington Post of November 4, 2001) his view was
“All Americans are, potentially, intended victims of terrorism. What can they do about that? Americans who live in large cities develop a certain urban wariness -- an instinctive alertness, a set of prudential strategies for minimizing dangers. A similar heightened alertness is now a civic duty…an important component of the meaning of citizenship: Public safety is the public's business. Public authorities take the lead and some of them work at it full time. However, at all times, and especially in times like these, it is every citizen's business.”
The real debate should be how to constrain naïve perpetuating of vulnerabilities through unthinking proliferation of photographs that offer targeting value for terrorists. A corollary debate of equal legitimacy may be how to enable defenders to stop reckless photography without being needlessly heavy handed, or even how to craft a process to appeal abuses of legitimate photo-taking. (Some common sense and courteous interchanges between cops and photographers could solve most cases without mutual expressions of outrage.) The focus should not be on “overreach” at the expense of security. Even a hackneyed truism to the effect that one’s right to swing his fist ends where my nose begins should offer an analogy to help understand why casual photography of critical sites is not a good idea in the world we live in now.
— Nick Catrantzos
Friday, January 20, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Holiday as Homeland Security Selection
Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Day, colleagues and I in a fledgling homeland security practice had to choose whether to take our one variable holiday on this Monday in January or, instead, to opt for taking off Veteran’s Day later in 2002. All of us were veterans, yet most of us chose this day. Why?
To begin with, we were all new to the organization and to each other, and all recent transplants from other employers, some having recently left the military or military contractors. We left to join what was then mainly a State Department contractor who had decided to invest in a practice area aimed at supporting homeland security efforts of state and local government. None of us knew with any certainty how this would pan out or what we would be doing as the year and our practice developed in earnest. So, what guided our decision?
The current state of affairs and the projected operating tempo later in the year were our only guides. The current state of affairs was more than a little chaotic, with mad scrambles to find office space and work stations for the new hires coming on board. Location no doubt played a part. Our office was in the Metropolitan Washington D.C. Area, and our first customer was the government of the District of Columbia, albeit through two intermediaries, a world-renown engineering firm and a virtual nonentity known only to the District as a favored contractor. What were we doing? Vulnerability assessments for complexes of local government offices and activities, most of which had been chastened by the events of 9/11/01 and, in the aftermath, had managed to capture $900,000 of federal funding for shoring up their vulnerabilities, with promises of even more subsidies to follow. Vulnerability assessments were things my firm understood well from working overseas for the U.S. Department of State. Our engineering prime contractor, who was then discussing a strategic partnership with us, felt particularly well suited to taking our products and transmuting them into task lists for work that they could then project manage based on the government customer’s desires and budget. Meanwhile, our local DC prime contractor offered insider knowledge of the byzantine contracting practices of the local government and facilitation skills to handle the kind of client-facing, invoice-processing duties that would free the rest of us to concentrate exclusively on productive work. So much for the theory, in any case.
By the time this holiday rolled around, however, the business relationships were still in their larval stage, some of our people had yet to get hired, and the ultimate customer had not yet fully prioritized the work. Meanwhile, the vice president heading our group, an inveterate marketeer with a flair for grand visions, confided to us that we were only scratching the surface. By the end of the year, he was certain that we would be growing exponentially, that our funded backlog of work would keep us triple-booked, and that the national and business importance of our growing commitments would be so great that we would not want to pause for time off by the time November came along. Take the holiday now, before this juggernaut gets into full swing, was the ultimate message. And so we did.
Was it a wise choice? Not on business grounds. Few grand predictions come to fruition as initially conceived, and this case was no exception. We did some good work, some productive work, and some profitable work. But the business arrangements that were hastily formed had an Alka-Seltzer constitution and life span. They were built to fall apart. Within two years, those of us on the front lines of performing vulnerability assessments had all moved on to find other employers and productive assignments, many of us disappointed with not so much our work as with the lost opportunities we saw as public and private entities started finding in homeland security a Procrustean bed in which to fit any pet project in need of liberal funding.
The only connection to MLK surfaced in retrospect. Martin Luther King had a dream of social justice. We, too, had a dream. Ours was of shoring up critical vulnerabilities of our country and advancing the cause of anti-terrorism when most of us were too long in the tooth to return to uniform to engage in counterterrorism, the direct fight against al Qaeda and its like-minded counterparts. Both dreams guided action. Martin Luther King’s, though, proved much more transformational than our little answer to what we considered a clarion call to action for security practitioners. In a small way for us, perhaps, there remained a little nobility in the struggle.
-- Nick Catrantzos
To begin with, we were all new to the organization and to each other, and all recent transplants from other employers, some having recently left the military or military contractors. We left to join what was then mainly a State Department contractor who had decided to invest in a practice area aimed at supporting homeland security efforts of state and local government. None of us knew with any certainty how this would pan out or what we would be doing as the year and our practice developed in earnest. So, what guided our decision?
The current state of affairs and the projected operating tempo later in the year were our only guides. The current state of affairs was more than a little chaotic, with mad scrambles to find office space and work stations for the new hires coming on board. Location no doubt played a part. Our office was in the Metropolitan Washington D.C. Area, and our first customer was the government of the District of Columbia, albeit through two intermediaries, a world-renown engineering firm and a virtual nonentity known only to the District as a favored contractor. What were we doing? Vulnerability assessments for complexes of local government offices and activities, most of which had been chastened by the events of 9/11/01 and, in the aftermath, had managed to capture $900,000 of federal funding for shoring up their vulnerabilities, with promises of even more subsidies to follow. Vulnerability assessments were things my firm understood well from working overseas for the U.S. Department of State. Our engineering prime contractor, who was then discussing a strategic partnership with us, felt particularly well suited to taking our products and transmuting them into task lists for work that they could then project manage based on the government customer’s desires and budget. Meanwhile, our local DC prime contractor offered insider knowledge of the byzantine contracting practices of the local government and facilitation skills to handle the kind of client-facing, invoice-processing duties that would free the rest of us to concentrate exclusively on productive work. So much for the theory, in any case.
By the time this holiday rolled around, however, the business relationships were still in their larval stage, some of our people had yet to get hired, and the ultimate customer had not yet fully prioritized the work. Meanwhile, the vice president heading our group, an inveterate marketeer with a flair for grand visions, confided to us that we were only scratching the surface. By the end of the year, he was certain that we would be growing exponentially, that our funded backlog of work would keep us triple-booked, and that the national and business importance of our growing commitments would be so great that we would not want to pause for time off by the time November came along. Take the holiday now, before this juggernaut gets into full swing, was the ultimate message. And so we did.
Was it a wise choice? Not on business grounds. Few grand predictions come to fruition as initially conceived, and this case was no exception. We did some good work, some productive work, and some profitable work. But the business arrangements that were hastily formed had an Alka-Seltzer constitution and life span. They were built to fall apart. Within two years, those of us on the front lines of performing vulnerability assessments had all moved on to find other employers and productive assignments, many of us disappointed with not so much our work as with the lost opportunities we saw as public and private entities started finding in homeland security a Procrustean bed in which to fit any pet project in need of liberal funding.
The only connection to MLK surfaced in retrospect. Martin Luther King had a dream of social justice. We, too, had a dream. Ours was of shoring up critical vulnerabilities of our country and advancing the cause of anti-terrorism when most of us were too long in the tooth to return to uniform to engage in counterterrorism, the direct fight against al Qaeda and its like-minded counterparts. Both dreams guided action. Martin Luther King’s, though, proved much more transformational than our little answer to what we considered a clarion call to action for security practitioners. In a small way for us, perhaps, there remained a little nobility in the struggle.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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