How Over-Zealous and Overly Aggressive Homeland Security Policies Can Backfire

(The following was my research paper for my final project for my grad class).

How Over-Zealous and Overly Aggressive Homeland Security Policies Can Backfire

          In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. federal government created new departments, gave more power to and expanded existing ones, and wrote into law new acts. These include creating the Department of Homeland Security, (DHS), passing the Patriot Act, (and later, passing the National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA), and augmenting the size, force, and power of local police forces. The government claimed to take these measures to combat terrorism. However reports from news agencies, human rights organizations, think-tanks, and scholarly research have shown that terrorism has never been and is not a major threat to Americans, certainly, there are at least a dozen other causes of death that have caused more American deaths than terrorism. The first part of this paper will analyze the threat and death rate of terrorism against Americans, compared to the threat and death rate of the government against the American people. It will also go into how Homeland Security policy makers dealt with these issues. The second part of this paper will analyze the rights of the American people taken away or being taken away from terrorism, compared to the rights taken away or being taken away by the government, from a Homeland Security perspective. Lastly, this research paper will explore a case study of Homeland Security in action.

          Before delving into the topics, first it is necessary to identify the actors in this issue. The principal actors are government agencies, as they are the ones that enforce the policies. These include DHS, the National Security Agency, (NSA), the Department of Justice, (DOJ), Customs and Border Protection, (CBP), FBI, and all local and state police and sheriffs offices. 

          The two main concerns that privacy advocates and human rights organizations have in relation to federal agencies and local police forces’ actions in Homeland Security is the militarization of police, and the taking away of peoples’ human rights.  The first one is important when talking about the threat and death rate of terrorism against Americans, compared to the threat and death rate of the government against the American people. Here are some statistics that will illustrate this concept:

·         Americans are 8 times more likely to get killed by police than by a terrorist. All emotions and political slants aside, strictly statistically speaking, the American police is more of a threat to the American people than terrorists are, (www.huffingtonpost.com). Not counting 9/11, that statistic jumps to Americans are 29 times more likely to get killed by police than by a terrorist.   

·         SWAT Teams invade more than 100 private homes every day, (www.abajournal.com).

·         The number of police raids has jumped from 30,000 in 1995 to 45,000 in 2001, (same source as the one above).

·         DHS will purchase 450 million bullets over the next 5 years, including 75 million in 2014 alone, (www.businessinsider.com).

·         DHS also purchased 2,500 mine resistant APCs.

          DHS coordinates with the FBI and state and local police forces to achieve its goals of stopping terrorist attacks and disaster response. Some of DHS’s mission statements that pertain to this topic are as followed: prevent terrorism and enhancing security; secure and manage our borders; enforce and administer our immigration laws; and ensure resilience to disasters. Behind the statistics are the policies that result in the statistics. The problem is that current homeland security efforts undermine preparedness every bit as much as they support it. Homeland Security officials and local and state police chiefs also involved top-down management systems and military-style command and control strategies in planning and implementation, often focusing on a doctrine of offense and preemption, (Bach). They are so focused on offense that they lose hindsight of the main goal of homeland security: to protect citizens’ lives and human rights.

          This leads to the first of two articles that form the backbone of looking at the actors’ approach to Homeland Security. Robert Bach and David Kaufman say in the very first sentence of their article that federal, state, and local authorities must work with citizens to achieve security. Constantly attacking citizens, taking away their guaranteed human rights, and ultimately creating a narrative or implying that they are the enemy is not working with them in any sense of the definition. That is why Bach and Kaufman say security has eluded us since the “War on Terror” started.

          So focused on offense that policies set by agencies such as the FBI and DOJ can break trust between the government and its citizens, the fundamental concept that Homeland Security relies on. Citizens cannot trust a government whose policies can be seen as making the citizens the enemy of the government. Such a policy would be the FBI’s and DOJ’s guidelines as what actions could be done by a “potential terrorist”:

Ø  Purchasing anything with cash most of the time instead of a credit or debit card.

Ø  Opposition to war.

Ø  Opposition to abortion.

Ø  Frustration with the two main political parties.

Ø  Buying a large amount of bullets, (doesn’t say what a “large amount” qualifies as).

Ø  Being concerned about your privacy from the government.

Ø  Complaining about the quality of tap water.

(www.publicintelligence.net)

       These actions are what ordinary, non-terrorists do every day. These are actions that many FBI and DOJ employees do. Is the FBI and DOJ calling their own employees potential terrorists? If government agencies want to protect Americans and their rights, a peaceful engagement of communities in collaboration would be much more effective in enhancing the resiliency and security of the nation, (Frazzano).

       This is what the second article talks about: government agencies redefining their cultural and operational identities to accurately combat new and emerging threats. It also introduces a concept called “The Whole Community,” in which “shared understanding of community risks, needs, and capabilities leads to an increase in resources through the empowerment of community members.” Nowhere in the article or in this concept does it suggest that the large majority of American citizens are potential terrorists due to doing ordinary tasks. DHS policies must incorporate the concept of The Whole Community, as this shows that DHS is working with the communities, not against them. 

       In comparing the amount and severity of the American people’s human rights taken away by terrorists and taken away by the government, the only right the terrorists took away have been the 3,000+ peoples’ right to life that they have killed since 9/11 to the present. The rights that the government has taken, is taking, and has the power to take away if it wants to, are:[1]

§  Freedom of speech. For example, protesting certain government policies is called “terrorism,” for which the government can kill U.S. citizens for. Talking against certain police actions or simply asking a police officer questions is called “assault,” or “resisting arrest.” There is no need for the government to convict a person of terrorism, they only label them a “suspected terrorist” and then kill them.

§  Freedom of the press. There have been 7 instances in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media, the most during any U.S. presidential administration in history. In comparison, it has only been used 3 times before Obama took office. It has stolen emails, phone records, and tracked the movements of journalists, (Fox News reporter James Rosen, for example), it secretly seized records for telephone lines and switchboards used by more than 100 Associated Press journalists, and prosecuted sources of journalists with felony charges, (Zongker).

§  Second Amendment. The Obama administration, and many past administrations, has repeatedly infringed on American citizens’ right to bear arms. While it is not DHS policy that affects this right, the police forces are the ones that enforce states’ laws relating to this amendment. Whether it has been trying to ban magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, or trying to reinstate the 1994 “assault weapons ban,” (www.whitehouse.gov), Obama has made it clear, through his actions and words, that he does not believe that the second amendment means that Americans can own guns.

§  Fourth Amendment. From allowing home invasions by police and SWAT teams without a warrant, to having the NSA steal personal information from customers of many U.S. companies, to stealing emails and phone calls from ordinary American citizens who haven’t committed terrorism, nor committed any other crime. Some statistics related to this would be, for example, that the NSA surveys 75% of all American Internet traffic, (www.reuters.com), and collected near 100% of American phone calls in 2006, down to 30% today, (www.digitaltrends.com).

§  The Fifth Amendment: The Patriot Act, and later, the NDAA, gives the government to hold an American citizen in prison indefinitely, without charges, or access to an attorney. That effectively destroys the 5^th amendment.

§  Sixth Amendment: Those same two pieces of legislation also takes away an American’s right to a trial, nullifying the 6^th Amendment.

          Examples of some of these rights being taken away from American citizens can be seen in the case study of this paper, which is the case of Sarah Abdurrahman. Sarah, her family, and some friends were returning from Canada to the United States through the Niagara Falls border crossing on September 2^nd, 2013. Sarah, and everyone in her party, are American citizens. They had been attending a wedding of another family member in Toronto, Canada, and now were returning home on Labor Day.

Sarah Abdurrahman

           When they got to the border crossing, they were immediately detained by CBP agents, with no explanation. They were held in a freezing cold room without bathrooms for six hours. Sarah repeatedly asked an agent why they were being held, but he answered “It is not your right to know.” Then they took all of their cellphones after demanding they unlock them. They didn’t get their cellphones back. After about five and half hours in detainment, one of the detained men, Khaled Ahmed, was put into handcuffs, without warning, taken from his family and put into a jail cell. The officers did not inform either Ahmed or his family why he was being taken. The rest of the family was soon released but CBP refused to tell them where Ahmed was. Eventually, they told the family that another “agency” was coming to pick Ahmed up. The agency ended up being the Michigan State Police, picking up Ahmed for an unpaid ticket for a crooked license plate (i.e. not screwed on right) from 2006. After Sarah got home, she tried to contact CBP and DHS to demand an explanation, but they never picked up the phone. Since CBP never gave Sarah a reason for doing all of this, she can only assume it was because of her and her party’s religion, (Sarah wears a hijab), (Reuters). 

          It is illegal for law enforcement officers to perform searches or detentions based solely on your race, national origin, religion, sex or ethnicity. The CBP officers infringed on Sarah’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. CBP and other Homeland Security officers are allowed to conduct stops and searches with no probable cause or arrest warrants at the border, under what is known as the "border search exception." The exception allows for routine searches. However, once you start holding citizens for prolonged detentions, it falls under non-routine searches. For that, the officer needs a particular and objective basis for suspecting that person of illegal activity, (Reuters).

          There are a number of conclusions and observations that can be made from this story. One is that the rapid expansion of and the lack of oversight over CBP contributed to Sarah being treated the way that she was. CBP has grown so fast in the decade that it has existed that government oversight has not kept pace. CBP had 10,817 in 2004. Today, it has 63,560. Therefore, there is no logical reason for CBP to not treat Muslims like they did Sarah. None of the CBP agents in the example even got a harsh comment from any supervisor. Nothing bad happened to them, so in their minds, they are thinking: why should we change our behavior?

          This is not the only time something like what Sarah experienced has happened. Human rights groups, such as the ACLU, have seen that these human rights abuses happen regularly, i.e. it is not an isolated incident that can be blamed on just a few bad CBP agents. No, they infringe on Americans’ human rights daily, meaning it is a DHS policy; the policy makers at DHS and CBP, along with training instructors, are teaching the CBP to act this way. That means certain DHS policies run contrary to the Constitution. There is no other reason why this problem is so widespread and across agencies, not just in CBP. This case study could not capture an agency breaking more Amendments than the Fourth and Fifth. But that doesn’t mean that at other times, in other situations, that DHS and local police forces are not breaking the other Amendments listed on the fifth and sixth and pages.      

          CBP’s actions run in line with the narrative and training that DHS’s approach has to Homeland Security. An overly aggressive Homeland Security doctrine saw Sarah and her party as potential terrorists, hence, their human rights being broken. Citizens are the first line in Homeland Security. Many terrorist attacks have been stopped because concerned citizens report what they heard/saw someone doing to police. That is the vital link between authorities and the communities that Bach and Kaufman talked about. If that link is broken by human rights abuses, and aggressive and rude behavior by the authorities, then the nation as a whole will not be as effective in stopping terrorist attacks and achieving security.  

Works Cited

          “American journalist and family detained and harassed at US border.” September 24^th, 2013. http://rt.com/usa/abdurrahman-npr-border-detain-291/

          Bach, Robert and David Kaufman. “A Social Infrastructure for Hometown Security: Advancing the Homeland Security Paradigm.” Homeland Security Affairs, Volume V, NO. 2 (May 2009). 

          Balko, Radley. “How did America’s police become a military force on the streets?” ABA Journal, 1/8/2013.

          Erman, Michael. “NSA surveillance covers 75 percent of U.S. Internet traffic: WSJ.” Reuters. 8/20/2013.   

          “FBI “Communities Against Terrorism” Suspicious Activity Reporting Flyers.” February 1^st, 2012. https://publicintelligence.net/fbi-suspicious-activity-reporting-flyers/

          Frazzano, Tracy, and Matthew Synder. “Hybrid Targeted Violence:

Challenging Conventional “Active Shooter” Response Strategies.” Homeland Security Affairs, Volume 10 Article 3 (February 2014).

          Johnson, Robert. “The Department Of Homeland Security Is Buying 450 Million New Bullets.” Business Insider, 4/5/2014.  

          Nield, David. “New reports say NSA phone tracking covers 20-30 percent of calls.” Digital Trends. 2/8/2014.

          Whitehead, John. “Vigilantes With a Badge: The War Against the American People.” Huffington Post, 2/26/2014.

          White House. “Now is the Time to Do Something About Gun Violence.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/preventing-gun-violence

          Zongker, Brett. “Report: Obama brings chilling effect on journalism.” The Associated Press. 10/13/2013.  

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[1] The following bullet points are merely quick summaries of the rights the government has taken away from us, as a whole paper can be written just one of these bullet points.