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Release Date: December 14, 2006
Washington, D.C.
George Washington University
Well, I want to thank the provost for that very kind introduction and for reminding you all that I've been here before. And it's been a welcome occasion for me, and I hope it's been welcome for you, as well.
I also want to thank Frank Cilluffo, the director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute, for hosting me upstairs to talk to a number of people who are involved in various think tanks dealing with the issue of homeland security.
And of course, I want to greet all the distinguished guests, colleagues, federal, state and local and university officials who are present to hear my remarks.
I'm coming up on the second anniversary of my assuming the office of Secretary of Homeland Security. I am still, as we speak, the Secretary with the shortest term of incumbency. But in two months, I'll be the Secretary with longest term of incumbency. So that gives you an idea of how young the department is.
And a lot of what I need to do, of course, as Secretary is to communicate with the public about what it is we do and why it is that we do it. And that's why I'm particularly happy to be here with this audience at this university and with the members of the Homeland Security Policy Institute because this is exactly the kind of forum where we ought to be talking about and discussing and even debating the measures that we need to take to secure ourselves in the 21st century.
Now, as I look back over two years, or almost two years in office, I have to say there have been three transformative experiences for the Department of Homeland Security and for those of my colleagues who work within it.
The first of these was the intense national spotlight that was turned on the issue of immigration. This problem has been around for decades, but in the last couple of years, it has taken on a public -- it has received a degree of public attention on a sustained basis that I don't think has ever been the case previously.
A second transformative experience for the department was the terrorist plot in London this past August, which was directed against international airliners flying from the United Kingdom to the United States. This was, by any measure, the most sophisticated plot against the United States that came near to fruition since September 11th. It tested our ability to share information and to rapidly adjust security measures in the face of a very large-scale, potential attack against the United States. It was a measure of how far we've come since September 11th.
And the third transformative event was Hurricane Katrina, which struck within a few months after I arrived at the department. It tested our department's preparedness, in fact preparedness at all levels of government. And it tested our ability to respond in myriad and in some respects unimaginable ways.
Each of these transformative experiences challenged our department and our government in the area of homeland security. And we have matured as a result. Let me talk briefly about each of these.
As I've said, immigration has been around for at least 30 years as a public issue. But it has not, in my experience, received the fevered pitch of attention that it's gotten in the last couple of years at any previous period of time.
In order to look at this problem to try to see if we could turn it around and resolve it once and for all, we realized we had to take as a department a sustained, system-based view of the problem of immigration because it's not just a question of more boots on the ground, or more technology, or tougher enforcement in the interior, or changing the rules with respect to immigrant workers. It's about all of those things. It's about understanding the system as a comprehensive whole.
And that's why we came up with the Secure Border Initiative, which is the implementation of the President's commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, something that addresses the entirety of the problem from the border itself all through the interior of the country and touching upon the very significant economic engine that fuels the vast majority of illegal migration.
Among the things we did to implement this comprehensive approach in the last two years were ending catch-and-release at the border. You'll recall that was a promise I think I made even here when I spoke a year ago, and it was directed at a pernicious and demoralizing policy under which non-Mexicans who could not simply be returned to Mexico were released because we did not have the ability to detain them before we sent them back home. Not only did that undercut the enforcement effort of our Border Patrol, but it sent the signal to people seeking to come into the country illegally that if they were able to make it in, they had a high likelihood of being released even if they were caught. And that was, of course, a very perverse incentive. So we analyzed the system. We applied the resources and since the summer we have ended catch-and-release at the border.
We launched the SBI Net contract, an unheralded and unprecedented comprehensive technology approach to getting full situational awareness at the border and to giving the Border Patrol the tools they need to characterize intrusions into the country and to respond effectively. We're going to begin the first phase of this in 28 miles, starting at the very beginning of next year. And that's going to complement the President's commitment to double the Border Patrol to over 18,000 by the end of 2008.
In the meantime, as you know, we have had the National Guard join us at the border. And so we are beginning to see the first real results of a comprehensive approach to dealing with the challenge of illegal migration. Using metrics such as the number of apprehensions and what we see on the south side of the border in terms of activity and staging areas, the Border Patrol has informed me that we have seen measurable progress in the last two quarters of fiscal year 2006, as compared with the same time periods in the prior year.
These metrics of progress -- apprehensions, ending catch-and-release, and as you saw yesterday, much more vigorous enforcement in the interior, including a dramatic increase in criminal penalties against those who willfully violate the immigration laws, show that when we apply a comprehensive strategy, we can start to produce real results.
But of course, not all of this is within the power of the department or even the executive branch. To develop a truly comprehensive solution, we must put into place the final piece of comprehensive immigration strategy, and that is a temporary worker program. Only a temporary worker program will give us the ability to deal with that tremendous economic draw which has time and again over the years defeated all the enforcement measures that the government has placed on the border to try to get security for this country. And so we look forward to working with Congress this coming year to put the final piece of comprehensive immigration reform into place.
Now, on August 10th, many of you awoke and turned on your television and your radio to learn of a dramatic plot that had been disrupted in the United Kingdom, a plot in which al Qaeda-linked individuals sought to get on airplanes destined to the United States and to detonate those airplanes while they were en route from the United Kingdom.
Behind the scenes, in addition to all the very fine intelligence work and enforcement work done by our British partners and done in cooperation with our intelligence agencies and with our law enforcement folks, there was a tremendous amount of work that needed to be done to totally revamp the security procedures at our airports in the period of six hours between the time we were able to communicate to TSA what the true security situation was -- because we couldn't obviously put at risk operations that were highly secret -- and the time that people were going to start boarding airplanes the following morning under a brand new and much tougher regime of security measures. We had to redesign the program. We had to make sure that the screeners in the six-hour period were adequately educated about what the new rules would be. We had to harmonize with our counterparts in London and all across Europe. And we succeeded in doing this in a way that after the first day caused essentially no disruption in the amount of waiting time and the amount of inconvenience to the traveling public.
This was, I think, a signal accomplishment of the maturation of TSA and the department. This highly classified operation was kept secret until the very last moment, and then in that intervening night, we all pulled all-nighters to be able to get our entire system retooled so that we could efficiently and safely allow the traveling public to travel internationally while we were taking this plot down in the United Kingdom. That is both a sobering reminder of the fact that we still face threats of enormous magnitude, but reflects great credit upon all the lessons we've learned over the last five years about how to turn security around efficiently, effectively and quietly when we need to do so.
And finally, about a year and a half ago, we suffered the blow of Katrina, followed very closely thereafter by the blows of Rita and Wilma in what was a uniquely devastating hurricane season for the United States. It forced us to focus on the fact that this country had not adequately planned for a true catastrophe, whether it be a natural catastrophe, or a manmade catastrophe, that the kind of rigorous planning at all levels and the building of capabilities that were necessary in the admittedly rare catastrophic instance was not there. And therefore, although there was tremendous work done by, for example, the Coast Guard in conducting 33,000 rescues, it was a vivid demonstration of the fact that improvisation is no substitute for preparation.
Since that period of time, we've embarked on a very ambitious program of retooling FEMA to make it a 21st century response organization that includes a comprehensive review and adaptation of emergency plans, including a great deal of work that was done this past year to get ourselves prepared in the event we had another serious hurricane season in 2006. It meant a much strengthened partnership with the Department of Defense for the first time ever in this country's history, joint planning -- preparing in advance mission assignments for the Department of Defense to be able to quickly and effectively come to assist civilian authorities in a way that was not -- for which the capability was not there before 2006, these are measurable steps forward. And they're important steps forward. But I also have to say we've got a lot more work to do.
We've got to continue to build out our total asset visibility. And we've got to do a much better job, frankly, of how we manage the process of recovery. We still have tens of thousands of people who suffer the lingering effects of Katrina. And as the city of New Orleans and as the state of Mississippi and the state of Louisiana try to recover and rebuild in what is a mammoth task, we have to make sure that FEMA does not become so enmeshed in its own bureaucratic processes sometimes that they lose sight of the need to have simple common sense and humanity in dealing with the public. So we're going to have to continue to crack down and make sure we get this job done.
Whether it be, therefore, in the area of immigration, or in the area of managing an international airline threat, or in building a 21st century response capability, DHS employees over the last two years have exercised enormous perseverance, skill and dedication across a very demanding set of responsibilities.
And just to touch on a couple of other areas where we've had some real accomplishments this past year, for years we had a very significant backlog in terms of processing those who were eligible for citizenship. We laid down as an objective the elimination of the immigration backlog at Citizenship and Immigration Services. And we recognized that that backlog was causing real pain and hardship to millions of people who were waiting for a decision about whether they had met the requirements for American citizenship. I am pleased to say that the backlog within CIS is now gone, and notifications are now being made within months.
We've also improved our immigration databases and our fingerprint databases so that for the first time we have real interoperability in a number of cities between the FBI's law enforcement database and DHS' immigration databases. That is producing real results in terms of allowing local police to identify individuals who have both immigration warrants and law enforcement warrants pending against them.
And we've also made major steps in refashioning our intelligence collection and sharing activities of the department under the leadership of our chief intelligence officer, Charlie Allen.
And we're now working very intensively with state and local officials to set up 20 intelligence fusion centers across the country. These centers, which we've funded with about $380 million, will have embedded DHS analysts in state and local offices and also state and local analysts at DHS, improving the flow of two-way information and fusing our intelligence -- not only horizontally across the government, but vertically at all levels, as well.
All of these accomplishments are a true testament to the remarkable talent of well over 180,000 DHS employees who face immense challenges every day protecting our borders on land and in coastal waters; analyzing intelligence 24 hours a day, seven days a week; protecting air travelers during extremely busy travel seasons and responding to fires and hurricanes and earthquakes and other natural disasters that often put their own lives in danger. These hardworking men and women of DHS deserve our gratitude for these and so many efforts over the past year. And I'd like to thank each of you personally for your service to the department and to our entire country.
So that's looking back at some of the challenges and accomplishments that have matured our department. But our work is not done. So what are we going to set as our goals and priorities for the next two years?
I like to break these into five categories: First, we've got to protect Americans against dangerous people; second, we've got to protect Americans against dangerous things; third, we've got to make sure that our critical infrastructure is sufficiently hardened so that even if dangerous people or dangerous things are used in an attack, we can resist that attack -- we have to build 21st century response capabilities; and finally, we have to unify the department into a seamless whole, one in which people are both parts of proud components with real legacies, but also working together to build a visionary new 21st century government organization.
So let me talk a little bit about the key goals in each of these areas. First, protecting Americans from dangerous people. A big part of this job is making sure we don't have terrorists coming into our country. We have a huge challenge. Over 400 million people every year enter the United States just through our ports of entry. I'm not talking about between the borders. We can't let them all in blindly because some small number of them do represent a real risk to the United States. That surely is a lesson of 9/11.
So we have to have a way to manage the risk. We have to have a way to know who are we going to focus on, who is the higher-risk person that ought to be pulled into secondary and questioned, and how do we separate those from the very many millions of people who we should move through as quickly and as conveniently as possible.
Well, in order to be able to do this, in order to be able to make an intelligent assessment of who you ought to look at more closely, we use a number of tools. First, of course, we have our watch lists. Those are name-based. And if we know the name of someone who we have reason to be concerned about, we can obviously pull them out based on that. But there are a lot of terrorists or criminals out there whose names we don't know, but who we know something about. We know, for example, that if a certain credit card was used to pay for their ticket, that credit card is linked to someone who's been a terrorist. We know that a certain contact number is linked to other people who have traveled who we've previously identified as terrorists.
Go back to 9/11; a number of the hijackers used the same contact number when they purchased tickets in the U.S. So sometimes a little bit of information like that is able to give us a real insight into who we ought to take a closer look at. And by the way, this is not an insight unique to me. Having the ability to collect and analyze this kind of targeting information was one of the principal recommendations of the 9/11 Commission when they looked at what happened on 9/11, as well.
Now, of late, people have seemed to take notice of this, although it was something that I publicized, in fact, boasted about, on a number of occasions. And they've raised concerns that somehow by looking at things like the credit card used to buy a ticket, or the contact number, that were violating privacy laws, or were violating constitutional rights. My answer is, far from it. What we are doing is a sensible, totally constitutional and privacy right-respecting effort to make sure that we don't inconvenience the rights of most travelers, so that we can focus more sensibly and in a more risk-managed fashion on those people that do potentially pose a threat.
And let me give you some idea about what the results of this have been. Using this kind of automated process of analyzing information that the law permits, in fact, mandates, that we collect -- Congress mandates that we collect this information -- using our ability to analyze this information we have been able to identify and to deny entry to over 500,000 people coming into the United States in fiscal year 2005 who shouldn't be coming in here -- whether it's because of terrorism links, or because they've got criminal histories, or because they're smuggling people in.
Let me give you one example. We had an instance where someone came in and would buy a ticket for themselves and a number of minors, and they'd enter the U.S. and then they would leave and only buy a ticket for themselves. Then they came in again with a ticket for themselves and minors and they left again with only a ticket for themselves. Well, this kind of process tells the border inspector, the next time that person comes in, you'd better pull them into secondary and maybe look a little bit more closely. And as a consequence of doing that, we were able to uncover a smuggling ring, a human smuggling ring, bringing children into the country. That is exactly what the public has a right to expect; it's exactly what Congress wanted us to do; and it's a critical illustration of how information, wisely used and sensitively evaluated, can produce positive results for security without compromising anybody's civil liberties or privacy.
But we've got to go beyond that. We have additional tools besides some biographic information. We also have biometric information. We are currently underway deploying 10-print fingerprint-reading machines in foreign consulates and places like Saudi Arabia and Britain, with the view to getting these kinds of 10-print biometric readers in our major ports of entry and our consulates overseas by the end of 2008. What collection of 10 fingerprints will do is enable us with respect to any foreigner seeking to come into the U.S. to run their fingerprints against latent prints picked up in battlefields and safe houses and training camps all over the world, so that if anybody has trained in an al Qaeda training camp, or sat in a safe house, or been conducting activities -- terrorist activities on a battlefield, and if they've left their fingerprints, we can pick those prints up and we can make sure that person doesn't cross into the United States even if we don't know what their name is.
And finally, the third piece of this is continuing to push forward on secure documents. Just as we've insisted that as a condition of our Visa Waiver Program, we have much more secure passports from countries that participate in the program, we are continuing to work ahead on our Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and our Real ID Act, all designed to make sure that our border inspectors, when they confront documents, are looking at documents that are secure, that are tamper-proof, and that are based on underlying reliable information.
Again, I want to directly confront the issue: Is this somehow an invasion of privacy? I think the answer to that is dramatically illustrated by yesterday's events. For every single person whose identity was stolen by someone who forged their name and their Social Security number on a driver's license, or on an identification document, ask that person, do you feel your privacy is better protected if someone can walk around with phony documents, with your name and your number? Or is your privacy better protected if you have the confidence that the identification relied upon is, in fact, secure and reliable, and uniquely tied to a single individual?
I think this is an example where security and privacy go hand-in-hand. It is a win-win for both if we are disciplined and intelligent about the way we analyze the risks.
I'm not going to go through the whole long list of all the individual measures we're going to take with respect to our other goals. But I will tell you that we will continue to produce initiatives in the next two years on each of the categories I've described. As I've said previously, by the end of next year we expect to have virtually all containers coming into the U.S. screened through radiation portal monitors.
And as we announced just a few weeks ago, we are now beginning the process of working with our foreign allies overseas, in places like Pakistan and the United Kingdom, to build the capability to scan for radiation material, and to X-ray containers, even at the ports of embarkation, before the containers are loaded on ships.
We're going to continue the work to elevate the security of our chemical and of our critical infrastructure. Congress has finally given us the authority to do some regulation of chemical plants. We are grateful for that authority, and within a matter of a very few weeks we're going to have our regulation -- proposed regulation out in public.
Tomorrow, I'll be releasing new rail security regulations that are looking at the issue of hazardous materials not only at the chemical plants, but when they're in transit by train between one chemical plant and another plant. Because, remember, we've got to look at the entire system. Yes, it's important to make sure the chemical plants are secure, but we have to make sure we have better security when toxic materials are moving between chemical plants. So we'll be addressing that in the new regulation tomorrow.
We've taken important steps to increase the security of air cargo on passenger planes over the last year, including a regulation mandating 100 percent inspection of passenger parcels presented at airline counters. In each case, we've managed the risk, we've balanced the cost and the benefit, and we've taken concrete steps forward.
And finally, as we talk about the issue of 21st century response, let me focus on one particular challenge that I think we've been talking about for the last five years, and that is interoperability. One of the dramatic lessons of 9/11 was the cost in human life when we do not have at least command-level interoperability in cities and in regions. We have, in fact, made a significant amount of progress. There now exists technology -- gateway technology -- that does allow command-level communication among different kinds of first responders and different kinds of jurisdictions, even if they're using different frequencies. But we also know that there are some obstacles to getting to the level of interoperability that I think we want to achieve.
Some of it is governance, getting all the players to sit at the table and agree on what the rules of the road are going to be. And some of it is giving clear guidance with respect to the next generation of technology, so people can begin to make acquisitions that will migrate to a level of technology that is really befitting the 21st century.
So what we are doing is completing a survey of 75 high-threat regions and issuing a scorecard as to what is gapped -- what the gaps are and what the shortfalls are. And that's going to be done within the next few weeks, by the end of the year. With that in mind, and with the technology available for both a short-term fix, we're going to push forward to closing those gaps by the end of calendar year 2008. And frankly, a good deal of our effort in terms of pushing out money for grants in the next year or two is going to be focused on this issue of interoperability. This is a challenge we've made a lot of progress in addressing, but we ought to close the gap between where we are now and our final end-state as quickly as possible.
And finally, I know this will be of particular interest to my colleagues who work in this vast department, we've got to complete the job of integration. We've got to finish making a joint path, not only to all of our business functions, whether it be acquisition or finance management or IT, but our career paths, so that we have a way forward for DHS employees that involves not only the specialization and the learning of individual component missions, but building towards the kind of integrated mission-oriented approach that the department as a whole has as its over-arching goal.
The purpose of creating this department was to bring a lot of different capabilities in one place so we could plan a joint mission and execute a joint mission. And we are going to drive a set of career goals and a set of management goals that are going to point us in the direction of getting that done by the time this President leaves office. And that includes putting forward the first concrete steps to building a joint unified campus that can assemble all of the headquarters components of DHS in one place.
Let me step back, finally, and talk a little bit about -- on a personal level -- about the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years. Probably the most important thing a Cabinet Secretary in a department like this can do as an individual is to clearly articulate a philosophy for leadership of the department that is intelligible and sensible, not only to the members of the department itself, but to the American public. And that means talking about things like risk management, which means not a guarantee against all risk, but an intelligent assessment and management of risk; talking about the need to make a cost benefit analysis in what we do, recognizing that lurching from either extreme forms of protection to total complacency, that's not an appropriate way to build a strategy; and finally, a clear articulation of the choices that we face as a people, and the consequence of those choices.
People ask sometimes, what do we envision with a change of control in Congress? And there's been a lot of talk about increased oversight. I welcome increased oversight, because I welcome debate about the fundamental strategy that we are undertaking in homeland security. This is a set of decisions the American people, in their entirety, must own because we will all live with the consequences of these choices.
If we decide we want to bankrupt ourselves for security, we will pay the price of that bankruptcy. But if, on the other hand, we begin to hear -- to heed some of the arguments I've lately read that somehow our concern about homeland security is overblown, that terrorism is really only a "rather limited threat," that terrorism "should be treated essentially as a criminal problem," if we start to heed that argument, then I feel we're going to feel consequences in the loss of lives on the part of our loved ones, our friends and our acquaintances.
So we need to make sure we define very clearly what is at stake and why we're doing what we're doing. People ask me sometimes, what is the -- causes you to lie awake at night? And truthfully, it all -- no matter how I express the answer to that question, it all boils down to this: If there is an attack in this country, I'm going to have to look the American public in the eye, I'm going to have to look Congress in the eye, and I'm going to have to, most important, look in the eye of the people who lost family members in that attack and account to them about whether we have done everything we reasonably could to prevent that.
So I have a very keen, personal sense of responsibility that I share with all of my colleagues in the Department of Homeland Security, and all across the United States, to make the right decision, the sensible decision, not one that simply says, protect everything in a way that's unrealistic, but one that recognizes the real dangers that we face and advances real solutions to address those real dangers.
So that's, in a nutshell, what keeps me awake at night -- my responsibility to do my job, and the responsibility which I share with everybody else in the Department of Homeland Security. It's about balance, it's about clarity, and it's about being sensible.
So I'm going to welcome the debate on the question of homeland security. In the end, the architecture that we put into place between now and the next two years is going to be the architecture this country carries into the war against terrorist extremists for the next 20 years. We had better get it right, we better understand the significance of the choices we make, and most important, we've got to get the entire American public to embrace what we're doing. This can't be an issue of party, it can't be an issue simply of ideology. It's got to be a personal issue to every American, because we will all live with the consequences of the decisions we make in the couple of years to come.
Thank you very much.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on December 14, 2006.