The Leveller: A modern day regulator

TSA is Pathetic

I always argued the TSA was another abomination of government. Everyone jokes, including Sean Hannity, at how inept the government is at running things. The TSA is just another example.

The nation receives nothing for this charade of alleged increased security but a hard time. The latest “publc” item of note is in the delicious links.

TSA agent steals $200K worth of gear, resells it on eBay.

This is something of late we the public get to find out about. But what of the things we don’t hear is what bothers me.

I participated in a cyber security conference in NY recently where mostly government types paraded around and lectured to each other.

The DHS has a subdepartment uses a security product I’m familiar with. I also know the vendor and had numerous discussions with them about the service. Through those discussions I also learned how inept the IT staff for the DHS really is at using the product.

One anecdotal example from the vendor intimated to me that they such a hard time working with the staff to get the product setup that once it was partially setup they just let it run. The details I won’t bother going into, the product is not really very good but takes considerable effort to make work well.

One Friday the IT staff at the DHS needed to call in for support because something on the product quit working. Basically the agent called in and said look its about 4:30 (on a Friday afternoon) and unless you can get this fixed in about 5 minutes for me well have to call you another time, I have to run a catch a train in about 5 minutes.

We are talking about homeland security here? So we also already knew the DHS was just another abomination of government but with everything else it only matters that people “feel” good about their security efforts.

No new president will be able to abolish this entity for fear of the political cost. This organization does very little if anything to help the nation be more security and in fact may inhibit it, because people think it obviously is a needed entity to defend the homeland from terrorists. And no political person understandably wants to be associated with decreasing this nations security.

What good is the DHS. Some of us know the truth.