Secret Service Critics Pounce After White House Breach 221
HughPickens.com writes On Friday evening, a man jumped the White House fence, sprinted across the North Lawn toward the residence, and was eventually tackled by agents, but not before he managed to actually enter the building. Now CBS reports that the security breach at the White House is prompting a new round of criticism for the Secret Service, with lawmakers and outside voices saying the incident highlights glaring deficiencies in the agency's protection of the president and the first family. "Because of corner-cutting and an ingrained cultural attitude by management of 'we make do with less,' the Secret Service is not protecting the White House with adequate agents and uniformed officers and is not keeping up to date with the latest devices for detecting intruders and weapons of mass destruction," says Ronald Kessler. "The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance." But the Secret Service must also consider the consequences of overreaction says White House correspondent Major Garrett. "If you have a jumper and he is unarmed and has no bags or backpacks or briefcase, do you unleash a dog and risk having cell phone video shot from Pennsylvania Avenue of an unarmed, mentally ill person being bitten or menaced by an attack dog?" But Kessler says Julia Pierson, the first woman to head the Secret Service, has some explaining to do. "If the intruder were carrying chemical, biological or radiological weapons and President Obama and his family had been in, we would have had a dead president as well as a dead first family."
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Guy walks on White House lawn, agents take him down. Nobody was hurt, never was the president or his family in danger. The Secret Service did his job. End of story. The rest is just the usual sensational media hysteria.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. Here's the key part of the comments:
Secret Service is not protecting the White House with adequate agents and uniformed officers and is not keeping up to date with the latest devices for detecting intruders and weapons of mass destruction
In other words, buy more stuff for more security theater. This is probably the same guy who thinks the TSA actually provides security.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
lol@WMD (Score:3)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
And if he'd have been an Extraterrestrial Assassin, or a Time Travelling Killbot, or plenty of other really F-N unlikely things...
By the way, the chemical weapons that could be used to take out someone in the building without being in the same room, and possibly closer than that, is going to need something that would have to be concealed in a backpack or the like anyway. This isn't a hollywood movie with their james bond size lighters that gas entire military bases, or their john wayne evershoot guns that apparently carry hundreds if not thousands of rounds of ammo.
All the tiny stuff you can hide in a pocket is going to require you to be really close.
Now that chances of the intruder actually being a threat is actually really small. The odds of him having anything realistically dangerous without a sufficiently sized container to hide it in, like the previously mentioned backpack, is also really small.
Over the decades, there have been lots of people that have broken into the white house grounds. I've never heard even a single one of those reports in the last century being of hostile intent. (Weird and or confused, but not hostile.)
So, with odds like that, you want them to do something horribly over-reactive to make them look really bad and get called fascist nazis by the press, just to make you feel a little better? Not going to happen so long as they maintain even the slightest iota of common sense.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that chances of the intruder actually being a threat is actually really small. The odds of him having anything realistically dangerous without a sufficiently sized container to hide it in, like the previously mentioned backpack, is also really small.
This intruder had a knife, though I can't find details on what kind it was (12" bowie, or 1.5" Swiss army). A hostile person with a knife, within 21 feet of you, is widely considered a lethal threat. Many police departments teach their officers that they can use lethal force against a hostile person with a knife within 21 feet. The same is taught in concealed handgun licensing classes in many states. Twenty-one feet is chosen because that's the distance an average person can travel, from a standstill, in one second.
Over the decades, there have been lots of people that have broken into the white house grounds. I've never heard even a single one of those reports in the last century being of hostile intent. (Weird and or confused, but not hostile.)
Plane crashed INTO the White House on purpose in 1994 [nytimes.com]
This guy didn't break in... Guy deemed not crazy shoots at White House, trying to kill President Clinton. [wikipedia.org]
Neither did this guy [wikipedia.org], but both of them were active threats, and either one of them could have just tossed their guns over the fence before climbing it themselves.
The secret service is in a tough spot: they can't really just shoot dead every deranged person who comes over the fence, but sooner or later someone wearing a suicide vest or explosive underwear is going to come over the fence with a dead-man's switch. And we all know he doesn't need to hurt anyone or do any damage for the government and populace to overreact and start doing things much worse than terrorists could ever do.
It's a real threat.
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Have you ever seen a problem in government where the proposed solution wasn't giving a particular agency more taxpayer money to squander?
Yes(!?), the single most common solution with the current congress, is to "solve" the problem by cutting funding to the agencies they don't like. Which is why so many of them simply doesn't work, and gets worse and worse, as they get punished for their issues by cutting their funding even more.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively.. maybe congress could stop cutting their budgets and allow for some extra room. I'm sure the Congress will love the idea of cutting (pick favorite target of the majority party of either wing) to boost Secret Service spending.
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Alternatively.. maybe congress could stop cutting their budgets and allow for some extra room.
Or, since the POTUS was never in the slightest danger, maybe we can afford to cut the Secret Service budget even more. The savings could be used for something even more critical to the long term security of our country: debt reduction.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
For FY 2014, the budget allocation for the Secret Service was 1.546 billion.
As of July 31, 2014 there is 17.6 trillion in debt.
Cutting the Secret Service budget to 0 would relieve 0.00878% of the debt.
Nice try, though.
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Yes, and apply that "logic" everywhere and you end up with what we have now: each program is supposedly critical and has no room to cut, and so NOTHING gets cut.
Not that I agree with the President on many issues, but his protection IS something that is critical.
Lower security when they're on vacation (Score:2, Interesting)
How many snipers had this guy in their sights thinking "please don't make me shoot you." The Secret Service agent at the door did their job as did the rest of the unit.
Yup, if the the President or family had been at the White House instead of on vacation (again) the snipers would probably have taken him out, and the door would have been locked anyway, and there would have been more agents around.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no perfect security, especially if the attacker is willing to die. The US use attack-drones in a few countries, how well are they set up to defend against them?
When Bush II went to London the Secret Service wanted all kinds of measures taken, including closing part of the London Underground. The mayor at the time said NO. When Bush went to the Frankfurt area as part of the same tour, the Secret Service came up with a laundry list of measures they wanted implemented to reduce the risk, the Germans actually listened and life in a corridor between Frankfurt Airport and Mainz pretty much ground to a halt for a day. Pathetic.
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There is no perfect security, especially if the attacker is willing to die. The US use attack-drones in a few countries, how well are they set up to defend against them?
The SS has long been rumored to defend the White House from air attack with Raytheon Stinger missiles from the rooftop, although the first priority is to evacuate the current resident of the Oval Office. Shooting down planes in a densely populated area is one of those lose/lose propositions.
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A while back my wife had to go to Jeruslaem on the same day George W. Bush was visiting there. I let her know she was going to spend the day sitting in stand-still traffic.
Turns out, I was wrong. So many people assumed the same thing that nobody travelled to/from the city that day. The roads, when not blocked, were empty.
Shachar
lock the front door before spend $1.5 billion (Score:3)
Absolutely there's no such thing as perfect security. I say that as a security professional. My wife, a childcare professional, will tell you that locking the front door is a good idea, if the house is a target. They spend a billion and half dollars every year on the secret service, who doesn't bother to lock the door. That's how government does things.
Re: lock the front door before spend $1.5 billion (Score:2)
Oilcan completetly see how having unfettered access for the security is better than a locked door .
Casinos don't have locking doors either ,they have 24/7 security .
Double barrel locks are a higher risk in killing you in a fire than the added security of not being able to break a window and reach in to unlock .
pass their forearm near the card reader to unlock (Score:2)
Oilcan completely see how a security agent can open the lock by merely passing their forearm near the card reader as they approach the door. Wear the security card on the forearm, hip, or other appropriate place and even a relatively inexpensive reader such as many office buildings use will allow instant access by authorized personnel, while keeping unauthorized people out.
Everything is an excuse for more security theater (Score:5, Interesting)
I am sick of this. Every. Fucking. Thing. that happens is an excuse to pump money into the militarization of the US of A with the accompanying security theater. I've been in Europe for about 15 years. I am not going to talk about whether Europe is better or not, I've been around enough to know that it's apples to oranges. But I can compare between the America I grew up in and love and what I see today.
When Obama came to visit Brussels last year, myself and several thousand other people were locked in our offices for three hours because the only exit was on the street that his motorcade was scheduled to come down, only he was two hours late. When he passed, he rolled by in his motorcade with military escort; the last vehicle was an SUV with the back hatch open and a couple of dudes with machine guns in it. While I was having a smoke afterwords, one of the older ladies in the building told me about Clinton's visit in the 90's... she saw him out jogging in the foret de soignes park.
Every time I go home to visit my family, it makes me cry a little bit. Crime rates are their lowest since well before I was born, yet all I hear is about how important it is to take measures to keep myself safe. Last year I was jet lagged and went out for a walk at 2am for some air... a cop actually stopped me to ask me what I was doing! A middle aged man, clean-shaven and wearing light-colored clothes while walking on the sidewalk is now a cause for suspicion in suburbia. When I was growing up, I used to go out at that time on a weekly basis and actually do bad stuff. Never even saw a cop then.
It is time for us to wake up as a country. It is popular to say that 9/11 changed everything, but in fact it only changed us. We need to stop being so pussy-shit and do a little cost-benefit ratio analysis on the stupid security stuff we do. What is more likely to extend the average lifespan of your community's inhabitants, putting a dozen patrolmen on the streets or building a gym? I bet I know the answer to that one.
Oh, and the president is just a man. His family is just a family. He is an important man serving the country and deserves to be protected by said country, but if he bites the dust he'll be replaced and it ain't worth many millions of dollars on technical gadgetry when we could use that money to pay down the deficit.
Re:Everything is an excuse for more security theat (Score:4, Insightful)
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GP here, although I've got no proof of that. You clearly did not read what I wrote. I am saying that it is perfectly safe pretty much everywhere in the US, but we've managed to convince ourselves that it is getting worse every year.
For what it's worth, I am from Centennial, Colorado and my neighborhood was solid middle class 40 years ago and remains so today.
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On slashdot, GP usually means "Grand-Parent (post)", as in:
Grand-Parent post
.. Parent post
.. .. This post.
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Oh, and the president is just a man. His family is just a family. He is an important man serving the country and deserves to be protected by said country, but if he bites the dust he'll be replaced...
... by Joe Biden. That's as compelling a reason as any to keep President Obama healthy.
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The crux of the problem is very simple: Americans whine ... not do. There has not been a significant political movement since the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther and others.
Americans whine about security and get it. At the end of George Orwell 1984 Winston says: "I love Big Brother" and Americans do as it is a figure to whom they can whine too and cheer simultaneously.\
If Americans stopped whining about places they never go, like their own inner cities, foreign countries, and the overfl
Do NOT Talk to the Cops (Score:3)
You are required to identify yourself to a police officer who asks (per Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada). You are not required to show them identification documents. There is no good reason to do so. Do not do this. Tell them your (real) name. Certain states (not California, mind you) may have state laws requiring you to give the police such information as your address and date of birth; the Supreme Court has not ruled on the legality of these laws. I would probably not comply, but that on
Re: Everything is an excuse for more security thea (Score:2)
"Paying down the deficit" doesn't mean what you think it means. A budget deficit = spending more revenue than you take in during the year. Its the equivalent of adding another $200 billion to your $17.6 trillion credit card balance every year. Of course, unlike the average consumer, the government has the power to raise their own credit limit and print money to pay the monthly interest payment.
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The Deficit has not been as low as $200B since 1985. It hasn't been as low as $500B since 2008.
And isn't expected to be as low as $500B again....
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Crime rates are their lowest since well before I was born, yet all I hear is about how important it is to take measures to keep myself safe. Last year I was jet lagged and went out for a walk at 2am for some air... a cop actually stopped me to ask me what I was doing!
Let me flip your two sentences there.
Last year I was jet lagged and went out for a walk at 2am for some air... a cop actually stopped me to ask me what I was doing! Crime rates are their lowest since well before I was born, yet all I hear is about how important it is to take measures to keep myself safe.
There you go, in that order you can see what is referred to as "cause and effect".
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Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
yup.
what would people be saying if the Secret Service popped that guy's melon with a sniper bullet.. in front of all the tourists. body would sit there for hours with a yellow tarp over it while the press broadcast that image all over the world.. and the "why did you have to shoot that guy" crowd would come out of the woodwork.. or, they were ready to shoot, but there were too many innocents on the OTHER side of the target... this will blow over in a couple days.. had they wounded or killed an innocent, there'd probably be Congressional hearings.
you will give up some security when you balance it with the appearance of bing civilized.
they COULD put razor wire on the fence, but they don't
they COULD build gun towers with searchlights, but they don't
POTUS could cruise around in an (actual) armored vehicle, but they made it look like a Caddy (that can't possibly be a safe as one of those EOD trucks - or Bradley with reactive armor)
the USSS could wear SWAT gear while they're flanking POTUS when he's walking the rope line shaking hands, but they keep their weapons hidden and wear suits.
you know the Secret Service wants to keep POTUS in a box and only let him out for TV.. but they let him get danger close to the public.. all for appearances sake- and this DESPITE Squeaky Fromme, John Hinkley Jr. and whoever actually got a shot off at Ford in SF.
i'm thinking the only publicly visible change to protocol is no more convertibles (see Kennedy)
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Guy walks on White House lawn, agents take him down. Nobody was hurt, never was the president or his family in danger. The Secret Service did his job. End of story. The rest is just the usual sensational media hysteria.
But, but, what if the guy on the lawn had secretly been a super ninja assassin? Or an android from the future with a 50 kiloton nuclear failsafe embedded in its torso? Why aren't you busy hyperventilating about all the hypothetical threats that are somehow unimportant on one side of a fence but are Super Terrifying if they make it to the other side?
America's Lawn was in existential danger here, and the secret service did nothing!
(In all seriousness, if you have some sort of cool exotic agent and/or he
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Sounds like the beginning of a joke, "Guy walks onto the White House lawn", shouldn't he have a poodle under one arm and a salami under the other?
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You don't even need to bring race into it, though it can certainly be a factor. Whoever the president is, approximately half the population voted for the other guy and thus have some reason to want him dead. Though very few of them sufficiently strongly to take action.
It's not just a left-right thing. The conservatives might be a little crazier, yes - but their opposites are no great standard of sanity either. It's the nature of US politics, especially in an age of mass media - it's all about the theater an
all in all (Score:4, Insightful)
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It already is a fortress. In time of war, nations protect their leaders. And the US has been at war for twenty years.
Open the doors of the Temple of Janus, acknowledge the truth. Every day that the US drops a bomb somewhere in the world is a day that the President of the United States should not sleep easy in his bed. One cannot be angry when one nation attacks another, and that other nation responds in any manner it can.
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It's honestly a bit surprising: I'm not sure if we just watch the foreigners better, or if they know that basically any failover president is going to adhere to very similar policies(only more so, because they'll have greater support for Doing Something) and so it really isn't worth the trouble, expense, or risk...
Re:all in all (Score:4, Interesting)
To borrow from HHGttG, maybe the foreigners realise the purpose of the president is "not to wield power but to draw attention away from it"?
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But war these days isn't one nation attacking another - at least not since the Iraq invasion. It's one nation attacking or being attacked by loosely-organised underground groups, or rebels with no legal recognition. Sometimes it's one nation invading another while pretending desperately it isn't invading. We don't have any more nice simple wars with a clear villainous side everyone can agree needs to be defeated in open war - it's all gotten very complicated and messy.
Why the bother (Score:2, Interesting)
So in the worst case scenario all you had to do really is to bring in the vice president or hold a new election. Yeah that sounds like the end of the world.
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The whole comedy industry would be upstaged and then bankrupted by a Biden presidency.
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Nobody home (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they don't guard it as strictly when the POTUS and family aren't home? I'm pretty OK with that.
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wasn't there something a while ago about someone getting hammered for firing a .22 at the white house (think two inch thick laminated glass) while the president was abroad, yet he still got it for attempted assassination?
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Hypotheticals (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to defend the president 24x7 against absolutely any threat that includes non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, then you'll need to forget about putting the white house in the middle of a city, and never have the president step outside of an armored and sealed environment. If you want to protect against a threat that includes nuclear weapons, now you need maybe a 10 mile buffer zone between anywhere the president goes and the rest of civilization.
On the other hand, half of the other national leaders can bike to work if they want to. Granted, terrorists aren't gunning for the leader of Norway the way they would be for the US president.
In the end, security is a balance. Sure, we could have sentries that shoot anything that moves and a minefield in the white house lawn, but as was pointed out that results in lots of dead crazy people on the news. There is no question that the style of secret service the US has is going to lead to a few dead presidents each century, which is basically what the trend has been. I just don't see a way to fix things without making other things much worse. The problem is that there are a lot of nutjobs who think that killing one person will somehow solve the world's problems, and that the last election was just a one-time delusion that could never happen again.
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On the other hand, half of the other national leaders can bike to work if they want to. Granted, terrorists aren't gunning for the leader of Norway the way they would be for the US president.
The leader of Norway is a king. One is not so quick to shoot a king, they are royalty, you see [youtube.com].
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They don't need fancy gadgets (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just puffery because it is trendy to beat up on every government agency now, and the SS in particular after the Columbia prostitute scandal.
They have everything they need to protect the president but they are smart and respond to each threat based on the *actual* threat it poses. The snipers that hang out on the White House roof could have dropped the man before he made it ten feet, but had they done so everyone would be screaming about how they killed an unarmed man when the president and his family weren't even on the grounds.
Re:They don't need fancy gadgets (Score:4, Insightful)
This is also why the Secret Service collaborates with the FBI and other intelligence agencies to proactively assess threats.
If you've not seen or heard any evidence of a planned attack, and no one potentially has any sort of firepower or exotic weaponry, or could be in DC, then the unarmed crazy man is almost certainly an unarmed crazy man who you should just tackle down.
The same naysayers would be screaming if the Secret Service had shot an unarmed crazy man as being somehow emblematic of Obama being a tyrant.
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I heard he had a dreaded assault knife with him.
So the blade was matte black rather than silver?
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Bad press (Score:4, Insightful)
From the summary: "risk having cell phone video"
Sounds like the decision making is largely driven by 1) Will we get caught doing X on video? and 2) What will the press say?
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The colloquial theory is that a free press is necessary to prevent abuses of governmental power, and it certainly has worked that way in the past.
Nowadays, the constant need for another lead contributes to the fear mongering.
What has changed? (Score:2)
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There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the white house. What has changed with our society that our president needs to live in a castle with a moat and defense force?
A lot more people willing and often eager to die for the [insert crazy, often religion-based or partisan cause here] movement.
Regardless, you're making it sound like this is a recent development. This has been the case going back well over a hundred years.
More and serious threats (Score:5, Informative)
There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the white house.
Back when rather few people actually traveled any significant distance. Also back in those days the federal government mattered rather less than it does today. It's only since the Civil War that the federal government has started to play more of a role than state government in the every day lives of people.
What has changed with our society that our president needs to live in a castle with a moat and defense force?
A lot has changed. Maybe the fact that every president since Johnson [wikipedia.org] has been the target of known assassination attempts or plots. Four presidents have been assassinated (Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and Garfield) and two were wounded by would-be assassins (Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt). When you are the leader of a nation there are some crazy people out there who will kill you if they have the chance.
Losing your nation's leader is a BIG deal. It causes very serious problems no matter what country you are talking about.
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Actually, it's television. Before TV (and now the Internet) you pretty much had to see people in person - radio was a poor simulacrum. Now, you can ' be with' your voters, up front and personal, pancaked and coiffed to look perfect.
With the Internet, you can tailor yourself to be exactly what the voter wants you to be. No more bad hairdays. No more potential assassins.
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It's only since the Civil War that the federal government has started to play more of a role than state government in the every day lives of people.
More recent than that. Until the New Deal the federal government was actually smaller than most state governments, and definitely had less impact on most peoples' daily lives.
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I'm gay. I live in Belgium. Our Prime Minister is gay. I saw him in the club Friday night. It doesn't _have_ to be like it is in the US.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but your example really doesn't have much bearing. The US has 30X the population of Belgium. 40X the GDP, 56X the military personnel and probably 100X the impact on world events -- all of which means there are perhaps four orders of magnitude more people interested in killing the US President than the Belgian Prime Minister (these things scale non-linearly), even when the US isn't actively trying to piss off a lot of people. Which, unfortunately, it has been for several deca
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Weaponry. The worst you might have had to worry about then was a man with a shotgun or hunting rifle. Now you need to be ready just in case North Korea lost what little sanity they have and sent one of their maybe-it'll-work nuclear weapons over, or some bomb-maker found a way to get the good type of explosive and packed a track full of it.
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There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the White House.
That lasted until WWII.
Until the 1980s, anyone could enter the Pentagon and wander around the corridors. (George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, decided during WWII that there was no way a building with as many people as the Pentagon could keep spies out, and requiring badges would give a false sense of security.) In the 1960s, anyone could enter most Federal buildings in Washington, including the Capitol and all the House/Senate office buildings, without passing any security checkpoints.
US Presidents can't be locked away (Score:5, Insightful)
Presidents are politicians. They must keep in contact with the voters to get re-elected, and the accessibility of the current president has been welcome. It helps defuse concerns about his level of education separating him from ordinary citizens, or forgetting what it's like to be black.
Assessing the strange "what if he'd been carrying a weapon of mass destruction" concerns:
1) The simplest pony yield atom bombs have to weigh at least 40 pounds for the nuclear material alone, based on rough guidelines for U-235 critical mass published in various magazines during my career. Jumping the fence and sprinting across the White House lawn, carrying something that heavy is difficult and _will_ give the Secret Service personnel more time. Such a device would be more effective _outside_ the White House during a semi-public event where the President is outdoors, such as an inauguration.
2) Chemical attacks have similar problems. An aerosol or chemical poison would have to basically flood the air of the White House, which has quite good climate control inside. That means getting past the ventilation system, which would be a _very_ good place to put the sensors and stop the air flow if there were such an attack.
3) Bacteriological weapons would, again, have to get from the attacker's entry to the President. Such a biological agent would be more effectively spread by leaking it during a White House tour, not by a run across the White House lawn.
The Secret Service reacted well, with measured restraint. Better staffed guard posts might be useful, but they are _expensive_. If you estimate the presence of 20 more patrolling guards, 24x7, at roughly $100,000/guard/shift covered, that's roughly $6,000,000/year. Which federal budget shall we strip for that funding?
Yes, Yes You Do (Score:2, Insightful)
"If you have a jumper and he is unarmed and has no bags or backpacks or briefcase, do you unleash a dog and risk having cell phone video shot from Pennsylvania Avenue of an unarmed, mentally ill person being bitten or menaced by an attack dog?"
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I don't think that the dogs protecting the white house are trained simply for pain compliance like your day to day police dogs are. I've always imagined them to be German Shepard's that are trained to think they are Terriers and Whippets. When the rep made that comment about not using the dogs when the runner is not carrying a bag, he was probably referring to the protocol that tells them when it is OK to use the dogs, like when the suspect has to be stopped but the risk to the human agent is too great. As
Get the right breed of dog. (Score:2)
Get the right breed of dog and give it the right kind of training. There are dogs that were bred specifically for catching people while causing minimal harm - back then this was desired so the people caught could be publicly hanged, but I guess the dog won't really care that today it's more about avoiding negative publicity.
A lock on the door? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance.
On what is arguably the most heavily guarded building on the planet some idiot thinks a little lock on the front door is going to keep the bad guys out? Exactly what would be the point of this little door lock? What would it protect against?
Talk about someone with no clue when it comes to security.
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I'm sure their plan doesn't involve rushing him out the front door. There's an old bunker under the east wing, the PEOC - I'm guessing they probably evacuate down there within seconds of an incoming threat, and have some means of further evacuation via tunnel from there onwards by which they can get him clear of the building without anyone seeing him. Probably into an innoculous-looking building by which he may be rapidly taken by either innocuous-looking but armored car or by helicopter to the nearest runw
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[...] to the nearest runway at Dulles International Airport [...]
Far more likely to take him to Andrews AFB.
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Agreed. I just looked at the map of Washington for the closest runway, but missed Andrews because it wasn't labeled as such.
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Unless he needs some time to finish reading "the pet goat"
Kevin Costner would taken the guy down (Score:3)
Conflicting priorities (Score:2)
The problem is that the Secret Service was made part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The Secret Service has a legitimate security function. The Department of Homeland Security is about manufacturing fear and maintaining insecurity for political purposes.
So no wonder the Secret Service is confused about its objectives.
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Before that it was part of Treasury. That made sense WRT its main mission of dealing with financial crimes including counterfeiting, but never WRT protecting the President.
Being in HS makes more sense WRT protecting the President because, you know, he's American. But not so much WRT to protecting the money.
The President was out. The Secret Service did OK. (Score:4, Insightful)
It was a Friday evening. The President had left for Camp David earlier, and his main protective detail went with him. Most staffers had gone home. The guy got just inside the outer doors, where there is a security checkpoint, before he was tackled.
The Secret Service made the right choice not shooting the intruder dead on the lawn. They certainly had the capability to kill him. They would have been heavily criticized, with pictures of the dead body on national TV.
On September 12, a man wearing a Pokemon hat and carrying a stuffed animal jumped the White House fence. [nymag.com] He was tackled and arrested. Should he have been killed?
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the point of law enforcement including those guarding the President is to render suspects for trial, not meet out punishment.
And think about it this way. What would have happened on the world stage if someone wearing a cute hat from a childrens show carrying a stuffed animal of the same, otherwise unarmed is mercilessly gunned down on the seat of power, in full view of lots and lots and lots of tourists, passersby, etc...
Also, if a man legitimately has plans to attack the president, Chances are n
Fortunately, no one was injured (Score:3)
However, using state-of-the-art Channel 5 computer technology, we'll show you how disastrous it could have been. Here's how it would have looked if the plane had crashed into a school. Now here's how it would've looked if the plane had crashed into a school for bunnies. Now here's how it would've looked if the plane had crashed into a school for bunnies but one passenger had survived, gone home, and mercilessly beat his wife. -- Family Guy
Keeping it reasonable. (Score:2)
Isolated event, and the guy was brought down. There'll always be a risk as long as their are fanatics or loonies who don't give any though to their own personal safety, but there comes a point of diminishing returns.
Suppose they hired 10 times as many Secret Service agents? That just increases the odds of one of them going bad and offing the President himself. (Not a likely event, but having 10x as many agents also means more chances of confusion in a crisis, etc, etc.)
Security is never perfect (wasn't t
Thank god for the Secret Service (Score:2)
"If the intruder were carrying chemical, biological or radiological weapons and President Obama and his family had been in, we would have had a dead president as well as a dead first family."
And Joe Biden as President.
am I the only one who's thinking this is hype? (Score:2)
I think its been said before in this thread, but it bears repeating, that the SS(Secret Service) as enough fucking money.
Meanwhile in Canada (Score:3)
http://www.thestar.com/news/ca... [thestar.com]
While not our Prime Minister, he might be our next one...
SLASHDOT MISSED THE "NERDS" ANGLE (Score:2)
Buried lede?
Man jumps White House fence, enters building DRESSED AS PIKACHU! [twitter.com]
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I guess those electric-type attacks weren't as effective against Secret Service as he'd hoped.
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I annoyed my kids when they were younger - pointing out the only Pokemon with a power I admired was Snorlax [wikipedia.org].
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The president is not king! (Score:2, Insightful)
Here in the US, there is really very little relevance to whether or not anything DOES happen to the president. We have a rather robust chain of command going down how many elected positions? I'd personally rather lose 20 presidents than spend a dollar more on presidential security. It's not like loss of a president would lose us that much face with the global community, except perhaps in those regimes where their 'elected leader' is slightly less elected and slightly more concerned with staying in power and
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Getting your name above the fold would hardly be a deterrent.
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I'm not the one panicking over "bioweapons" or some other bullshit chickenshit fantasy doomsday scenario.