[sfx]

>"More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

>"The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded."

and this scares me the most:

>"Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs."

More more more, funny how all this makes me far more uneasy then any terrorist threat. At least I can fight off a terrorist, lord help you if you try to say no to the SWAT team wanting to search your home for a teenager who made a homemade explosive.

[rayiner]

DHS isn't an organic entity that sprung up from 0 to 230,000 in the wake of 9/11. It is just an amalgam of a bunch of agencies that already existed. It includes the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, FEMA, TSA, and Secret Service, along with a bunch of smaller agencies. Of those, the only new thing is TSA, which is 56,000 employees. And while annoying, TSA is mostly doing the same job private companies used to do under contracts with airlines.

[sfx]

That's an excellent point, though it still is relatively scary. Such as the powers the DHS has in "constitutional free zones"[1]. It makes me nervous having 230,000 people having this much power because they're under the umbrella of "DHS".

[1] http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-sec...

[twoodfin]

That's a rather loaded term to describe a tradeoff between individual rights and the government's legitimate interests. Moreover, it's a balancing that has survived Supreme Court scrutiny, IIRC.

[wiml]

It's a funny "balancing" that means that 2/3 of the population does not have the right to be secure in their persons or papers, freedom of movement, the requirement of due process, warrants, and probable cause before being handcuffed or cavity-searched, and so on.

[rayiner]

That's a huge exaggeration to the point of verging on an outright lie. See: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774...

[wiml]

I'm not sure what assertion you're claiming is a huge exaggeration? The Federal government claims a 100-mile region in which the border-crossing exceptions to the Constitution apply. The court judgment you cite says that's BS and the government does not have that much leeway. The comment to which I was replying appears to argue that the 100-mile rule is a tradeoff/balance that has survived scrutiny.