There is a danger in overestimating the competence of the Administration, thinking that the permanent bureaucracy will do the bidding of their political masters. The color-coded system is a pointless joke, in terms of making us more secure. But it’s not supposed to make us more secure—it’s supposed to save senior civil service jobs in case of a successful attack.
This is much sadder, and in a way less comforting than The Awe-Inspiring Bush-Cheney-Rove Machine Did It to Scare Us. If the Evil Empire did it, then the Evil Empire is at least powerful, and organized, and could maybe protect us if they felt like it. Homeland Security did it to Cover Their Asses. When you are covering your ass, you are considering what happens if you fail. Which is very, very close to planning to fail.
I’ve blogged about why the August 8 Presidential Daily Briefing flak is overblown. (Sometime I’ll fisk the PDB, but not right now.) Shorthand—There is Always a Korlian Death Cruiser. There are always threats on the horizon and potential threats to the US. Post-9/11, every time the NSA intercepts an inflammatory email, there is as much cause to panic, and as much specific information, as was in the PDB. And, post-9/11, “Who could have predicted this?” is not going to be enough to save anyone’s job. The Orange Alert means that “the government heard something somewhere about an attack, real or imagined, at some time in the near future in some part of the US.” If prevention fails and the attack comes off, Don’t Blame Us—We Raised the Threat Level.
The threat level was “white noise” because There is Always a Korlian Death Cruiser. Homeland Security “raised the threat level” every time something happened, or might have happened. I’m sure it was based on real information. But, in intelligence, even “real information” is sometimes wrong or useless. Where the movie’s MIB were wrong is in estimating human psychology. In the MIB world, if the existence of the MIB and the aliens did become public knowledge, then humanity would not panic. OK, they would panic in the short term, but only until they got used to the idea of aliens are here, the MIB exist, and the crazies were right. They wouldn’t be paralyzed with fear of the Korlian Death Cruiser or of the Andromeda Plague. Human psychology adapts and copes. People would follow the interstellar news obsessively for a while, until they didn’t. Ordinary folks would get used to it, just like people during the Cold War got used to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Most people didn’t stay up all night reading Kremlin memos to determine if they would drop the bomb or not. Either they will, and I can’t stop them, or they won’t, and then I’ve got to get up in the morning and go to work.
This is much sadder, and in a way less comforting than The Awe-Inspiring Bush-Cheney-Rove Machine Did It to Scare Us. If the Evil Empire did it, then the Evil Empire is at least powerful, and organized, and could maybe protect us if they felt like it. Homeland Security did it to Cover Their Asses. When you are covering your ass, you are considering what happens if you fail. Which is very, very close to planning to fail.
I’ve blogged about why the August 8 Presidential Daily Briefing flak is overblown. (Sometime I’ll fisk the PDB, but not right now.) Shorthand—There is Always a Korlian Death Cruiser. There are always threats on the horizon and potential threats to the US. Post-9/11, every time the NSA intercepts an inflammatory email, there is as much cause to panic, and as much specific information, as was in the PDB. And, post-9/11, “Who could have predicted this?” is not going to be enough to save anyone’s job. The Orange Alert means that “the government heard something somewhere about an attack, real or imagined, at some time in the near future in some part of the US.” If prevention fails and the attack comes off, Don’t Blame Us—We Raised the Threat Level.
The threat level was “white noise” because There is Always a Korlian Death Cruiser. Homeland Security “raised the threat level” every time something happened, or might have happened. I’m sure it was based on real information. But, in intelligence, even “real information” is sometimes wrong or useless. Where the movie’s MIB were wrong is in estimating human psychology. In the MIB world, if the existence of the MIB and the aliens did become public knowledge, then humanity would not panic. OK, they would panic in the short term, but only until they got used to the idea of aliens are here, the MIB exist, and the crazies were right. They wouldn’t be paralyzed with fear of the Korlian Death Cruiser or of the Andromeda Plague. Human psychology adapts and copes. People would follow the interstellar news obsessively for a while, until they didn’t. Ordinary folks would get used to it, just like people during the Cold War got used to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Most people didn’t stay up all night reading Kremlin memos to determine if they would drop the bomb or not. Either they will, and I can’t stop them, or they won’t, and then I’ve got to get up in the morning and go to work.
2 Comments:
They tweaked it. Now, there are localized alerts that fly under the media radar. Like the threat to mass transit that went away in August.
Or, to be even more pessimistic, intelligence collection from Pakistani/Afghani captures has reached a point of diminishing returns, so the pipeline isn't getting the poop-in-your-pants information. The Korlians have changed to a scrambled frequency that we haven't cracked.
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