Reply from the author
I think this is a first for the message board: having the actual author of an article cited commenting.
I for one would be interested to hear your counterpoints to Jasperdog's.
Thank you. I am pleased to do so. I do not respond to individual criticisms, however. As E.B. White, the literary critic, said to all his critics, "You may be right." I take his position. Indeed my critics may be right and I give them my permission and blessing to be so.
That being said, it is my sense that the panic of the Congress sustained by political activists created several bad statutes and parts of statutes after 9-11. Further, some of the consequences of those laws could not be foreseen. The assembly of the DHS from its various components went very much against the tradition of the US government and the people by concentrating extraordinary police powers is in one department. To a large extent this seems to have been with no true planning policy but more nearly large funding pressed by lobbyists and others and then applied to a host of undefined and indefinable problems. The sense of the Congress and the people was clear when Adm. Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program was defunded. However, the reality is -- and I think many of us knew it -- was that the defunding was political theatre. TIA continued under another name. The TSA and Lockheed developed the TWIC as a TIA kind of exercise.
The TSA was perhaps a logical consequence of airline difficulties. It is very hard to see how and when -- except for internal maneuvering and turf building -- the TSA was or is qualified to deal with seaport matters. There was substantial contention between the USCG and the TSA over the matter as I understand it. Be that as it may, the TSA ended up with the job. The USCG vets every person with an MMC or license quite well. There was nor is there a need now for the TWIC for mariners. I refer you to the Emerson quote in my column -- it is clearly applicable to the TWIC program. I am told by senior Coast Guard officers that except for the military order, the TWIC is not well regarded in the USCG at all.
As to trust and mistrust, the government has never defined national security in any clear and uniform fashion. It comprises an inchoate mixture of terrorism, crime, natural disasters, man-made disasters, economic policy, trade policy, public health concerns, nuclear attacks, intelligence, surveillance technology, continuation of government and the suppression of insurrections among several others. Whenever a turf needs building, the magic words 'national security" are invoked and things start to move with apparently less justification than other matters.
The national security concept as encompassing almost everything has now become an established fact. There are degrees and certifications in it. There are conferences and various journals There are speeches and blogs and websites. A corner has been turned in American history.
Thus is seems that the government has maneuvered itself into a position in which it has predicated its utterances on "trust." The government Constitutionally is created by the people. Thus, the government is saying in essence that it is "we" the government who does not trust "them" the people. The consequences of the bad policies and laws after 9-11 virtually dictated that. Essentially, I sense that we have lost control of the government and the government senses that. When there is loss of control, the stronger party will inevitably take advantage of that. Governments, historically, do that and never give it back once taken. That is the real concern here.
If the government does not trust the people, why should the people trust the government? No amount of Secretarial or Administerial assurances can get around that underlying a good deal of the malaise in this fundamental shift in the trust equation. The TWIC is a good example. The TSA was designed not to trust mariners. It has created an atmosphere of mistrust and antagonism in the TWIC which is reciprocated by mariners. It is all in all a bad downward spiral which has no real end in sight, I think.
The political language has conflated safety and security. Safety is a concept of negligence. When there is negligence things are not safe. Security is a matter of control of people, places and things. They are vastly different. Further, there has been conflation of freedom and liberty. Freedom is the ability to act under one's conscience. Liberty is what the law allows one to do. Therefore, in Franklin's words, "He who is secure is not safe and he who is safe is not secure." Henry said "Give me liberty or give me death." He did not say "Give me freedom or give me death." He was already free to express his conscience, treasonable though that expression may have been
The TWIC, when all the technological language and ""geek-speak" is stripped away is a method of security and therefore a method of control. It is an access system. Any other definition may sound fancy. It is likely wrong. It does nothing to make our ports safer. It likely, from what I have seen, does not make them more secure. The latter is because of its foundational fallacy. In real time it cannot be maintained. Further, in real time the technology is not yet available to make it maintainable. The secret I have divined is that no one cares. I have heard of concerned people -- good citizens -- advising the TSA of lost cards. One would think that would be important. That apparently is not the case and the TSA is fully not responsive in many of those cases.
It seems to me that the TWIC was yet another "making up as it goes along matter" which, as in many cases, simply does not work because of contractor greed and bureaucratic ignorance and incompetence and lassitude. Further, it will not work because it cannot work as I have discussed. The MMC, the CDL, background public records checks of a simple sort would have done just as well and a lot less expensively. The USCG as a military organization knows well how to do that and has done it well for some time. Hence, the USCG should control port security, not airplane bag searchers.
As to costs, I am aware of the mariner contribution to cost. One should always look at the change orders and add-ons for any federal contract. The total payment to Lockheed netted substantial sums.
I stand by my column as do my editors.
With best regards,
John A C Cartner, '69
Member, D.C. Bar Association
Enrolled member, The Law Society of England and Wales
