The disclosures by Edward Snowden over the past year have raised the public’s awareness about the U.S. Government’s surveillance tactics and capabilities to defend our nation against another 9/11 magnitude attack.
The disclosures by Edward Snowden over the past year have raised the public’s awareness about the U.S. Government’s surveillance tactics and capabilities to defend our nation against another 9/11 magnitude attack. There is much emotion both positive and negative around this topic, and admittedly there is much positive debate. However, the further we are from the memory of the events of September 11, the less we seem to believe that the measures and technologies we created and put in place to detect and identify potential terrorist activity are as necessary as we believed they were on September 12, 2001. Next month will be the 13th anniversary of the attacks on New York, Washington, DC, and the heroic efforts of those on Flight 93 that prevented a third attack from hitting its target.
Since that fateful day in September, there have been significant improvements in our intelligence and law enforcement capabilities. Having literally grown up in law enforcement and security over the past 35 years, it is hard for me to believe that the investigative methods we used back in the 1970s have evolved to the technological capabilities we have today. As a young investigator, I was told to read and memorize O’Hara’s Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation. At that time, countless interviews, checking laundry marks and other mundane techniques were the mainstay of police work. Surveillance was performed by putting people on the street and watching from parked cars and vans disguised at Bell Telephone service vehicles with portholes cut out for still cameras. Those entering the law enforcement or security fields as young police or security professionals take for granted the investigative techniques we couldn’t even imagine 30 years ago. Information sharing was limited only to those who you knew or with whom you had a close connection – there was no such thing as intelligence information shared across jurisdictions by fusion centers.