Homeland Security Project

The coronavirus is America's first 50-state disaster, and each governor is dependent on outside help that may never come writes Juliette Kayyem.

Juliette Kayyem writes that even with a robust government response to the novel coronavirus, many people will be in peril. And the United States is anything but prepared.

Juliette Kayyem, Faculty Chair of the Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Project, has been proving real-time perspective on the coronavirus on Twitter. 

The authors describe how the current coronavirus outbreak demonstrates how hospitals and clinics, when overwhelmed, leave a significant portion of the afflicted population unattended.

The House of Representatives recently held a hearing concerning continued poor workforce morale at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As important as workforce morale is, the problem at DHS is a symptom, not a cause. The big issue plaguing DHS is that the department is essentially broken.

This paper argues that these potential vulnerabilities deserve rigorous, urgent, and thorough investigation. First, it draws from cybersecurity literature, and reviews general sources of vulnerability in digital systems. Next, with these sources of vulnerability in mind, it reviews the health intelligence systems used in the US as well as in a current Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It then It then reviews the possible motives state actors have to attack health intelligence systems, drawing on recent examples of state-led efforts to manipulate, conceal, or undermine health information. It then speculates about what an attack on a health intelligence system might look like. It concludes by proposing a research and education agenda to thoroughly interrogate these issues and generate policy recommendations needed to address them.

Bill de Blasio warned New Yorkers on Friday that their city might be subject to retaliatory attacks from Iran. “I’m not saying this to be alarmist,” the mayor said as he and his underlings ticked off—in a slightly alarming fashion—a series of defensive measures the city might take after the American air strike that killed the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Though the New York Police Department had received no specific, credible threats, de Blasio and other officials warned of more bag checks at the subways and increased police presence throughout the city. The city is no stranger to terrorism and would maintain a better-safe-than-sorry posture. “If you see something, say something,” de Blasio said.

Recent talk of homeland threats, and the just-in-case operational response, are based on nothing more than the rather uncontroversial assessment that Iran will feel obliged to do something to respond to the killing of Soleimani. The homeland-security practices to which Americans became accustomed after 9/11 long ago became a bad habit—one more divorced than ever before from the kinds of threats the United States might actually face. Intended to calm the public, gestures like the ones de Blasio described presume that Iran would be both reckless and capable enough to target an American city—and that greater vigilance alone would prepare us for that possibility. Now nearly two decades old, the post-9/11 style of security theater also risks masking the real vulnerabilities in the American homeland against a potential Iranian action.

In this article, we develop a new framework for combating transnational criminal activity. We argue that global illicit flows, perpetrated by organized crime, in the interstices of lawful trade and travel, embody a critical and debilitating non-state security threat in today’s world, one that the Westphalian international system of sovereign states remains ill-equipped to confront. Accordingly, we seek to generate a wider discussion in the field regarding a revised approach to this threat that is situated within a global framework of collaborative law enforcement which incorporates, in appropriate fashion, certain military and counter-terrorist strategies.

The propositions we advance in support of a revised approach to countering transnational crime and its globalized web-enabled criminals include: (a) terrorism is one species of transnational crime; (b) the criminal justice model of arrest, prosecution, conviction and incarceration is a partial and insufficient response to transnational crime; (c) national security and law enforcement functions should be viewed analytically as a “public security” continuum rather than disciplines separated by bright lines; (d) countering transnational criminal organizations effectively may require development of a hybrid law enforcement/military capacity and new strategic and tactical doctrines, including safeguards against abuse, to govern its deployment; (e) joint border management within nations and between them, coordinated with the private sector, is required and inter-agency cooperation and multilateral institutions must be strengthened in accordance with new international norms and (f) North America, a region construed as extending from Colombia to the Arctic and from Bermuda to Hawaii, could develop in the future, together with the European Union, as an initial site for a model pilot of the new approach.

Juliette Kayyem writes that there are challenges our children face in this world. One of the risks they do not face — because science and medicine have found a cure — is a public health pandemic of diseases that used to kill our most vulnerable and youngest. 

U.S. counterterrorism agencies lack the authorities, funding, and political direction to meet the evolving terrorist threat to the United States. Efforts to expand the counterterrorism toolkit to include prevention of all types of terrorism, known under the Bush and Obama Administrations as “countering violent extremism,” or CVE, and under Trump as “terrorism prevention,” have struggled to take hold and the programs have been underfunded and politically unpopular.  These efforts have also suffered from the perception that they were biased towards stopping al-Qaeda and ISIS-inspired terrorism and have ignored the threat posed by “right-wing” terrorists. The United States must accept that counterterrorism should evolve beyond relying on law enforcement and intelligence alone to prevent the growing threat of domestic terrorism. This evolution should include developing a bipartisan consensus for addressing all forms of terrorism; funding the types of CVE programs we deliver overseas at home; and updating our terrorism laws to incorporate preventative and restorative approaches that build on the best practices and lessons learned from tackling other forms of crime and targeted violence, such as hate crimes and gang violence.