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Release Date: January 10, 2008
Washington, D.C.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you everybody for your hard work and dedication and continued service. As usual, you’ve provided a great deal of meaningful advice and expertise. And as usual, I’ve enjoyed working with you and also getting the benefit of that advice, as I have over the past three years.
If I can ad lib for a moment and echo again on that issue of oversight – you know, we do want meaningful oversight, but it’s not just a matter of the fact that 86 committees and subcommittees require a lot of reporting and testifying and briefing, but it’s that you wind up with competing agendas, so that instead of having, as do most departments, a single set of committees in the House and the Senate that have coextensive jurisdiction and a comparable perspective on the mission, we wind up with a number of additional committees that have little slices of the department within their jurisdiction, and of course they are very interested in advancing their particular policies and they tend to be inconsistent with each other. And so we get a lot of conflicting congressional direction as opposed to consistent congressional direction.
As we look to next year when there will be a new administration – nobody knows at this point what party will occupy the White House – it’s a good opportunity for everybody to think about whether a good gift for the incoming President, whoever he or she may be, would be a somewhat more refined and disciplined congressional oversight process.
Getting back to the script, Judge Webster, I’d like to thank you personally, of course, for your continued leadership of the Council, and your – of the consultation with me, both in the larger and in smaller settings, over the past year. And I look forward to continuing to work with you as I do with the other leaders of this Council and the various committees.
I also want to observe you’ve had the opportunity to meet with our leadership team, including some new members of that team. And I’m very proud of them of getting with our Acting Deputy Secretary Paul Schneider, who’s very, very experienced; an example of someone who, though a presidential appointee and a political appointee, has a deep and rich career experience, frankly with presidents of both parties, which I think is emblematic of this department as a – very much of a non-partisan effort to protect Homeland Security.
Also, on the positive side in terms of Congress – because I want to praise Congress, not just criticize – I want to thank the Senate, and in particular Leader Reid and Leader McConnell, for working with us to confirm some of our senior leaders last year, including Under Secretary Robert Jameson and Assistant Secretary Julie Myers, who I was pleased to swear in earlier this week.
I’d like to thank Doug Hoelscher for his leadership over the last few years in helping us coordinate the activities of the Council. I’m grateful for his service and wish him well. And he’ll be replaced by Jeff Stern, who will be helping us coordinate your activities and facilitate your activities over the coming year.
Before I get into some of the remarks about the individual reports and where we’re headed this year, I’d like to take the opportunity to swear in members of the HSAC and Senior Advisory Committees who haven’t been formerly sworn in at this point. These include, among others, two people with whom I’ve had longstanding personal relationships. One is, of course, Judge Louis Freeh. We first got to know each other when we were down the hall from each other at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan – longer ago than I care to mention. He’s a terrific public servant. Also, Mayor Palmer, who I also know for a long period of time, going back to the (inaudible) days in Trenton almost 20 years ago. So I’m delighted to welcome them all.
And Judge Freeh, Mayor Palmer, Mr. Payne, Mr. Stanley, and Mr. White, if you’d join me. If you’d kindly raise your right hands and repeat after me:
I, (state your name), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Well, as you’ve heard, this council and committees have been involved in a full range of activities. In particular, last summer I asked the members of the council to look in particular at two subjects through the Essential Technology Task Force and the Administration Transition Task Force.
Of course, the Essential Technology Task Force, although it sounds a little bit dry, actually really looks at an issue that’s really very much at the core of our ability to operate as a department. As George Vradenburg pointed out, you know, we face an environment in which technology transforms itself very rapidly. And we don’t want to be in the position of what we sometimes find ourselves facing at home, which is we buy ourselves a new computer system and then a year later it’s not working anymore and we have to get a new one. That’s not really great at home, and it’s certainly not great for the department.
And so looking at alternative ways to keep up with changes in technology, including looking at the possibility of leasing services and end results, as opposed to equipment and hardware, I think is going to be very important to make sure this department can keep pace with cutting-edge, technological changes – and of course there are very impressive individuals contributing to this task force.
I also want to observe, before I get on to talking about the Transition Task Force, that we’ve already taken on board and implemented the work of the Future of Terrorism Task Force and the Culture Task Force, which provides some very valuable recommendations, which I think will carry forward into the next administration.
I want to make note of the fact that, as Don Knabe observed in his presentation – and I want to thank him for participating – it is very important we get a REAL ID regulation out there. And so the good news is we’re doing it tomorrow. I’ll be announcing the REAL ID roll-out of the revised regulation tomorrow. I’m not going to jump the news here, except to say that we have taken on board a lot of comment. We’ve worked very closely with the states, in terms of developing a plan that I think will be quite inexpensive, reasonable to implement, and produce the results that, as the committee pointed out, are a part of the core recommendation of the 9/11 commission, which is secure identification when driver’s licenses are presented.<
This is a win-win. As long as people use driver’s licenses to identify themselves for whatever reason, there’s no reason for those licenses to be easily counterfeited or tampered with, and there’s every reason to have the confidence that the license is secure and reflects a person’s true identity and their legal presence in the United States. And I think we’re going to accomplish that by moving forward with REAL ID.
I’d also like to thank Deputy Secretary Balboni for his comments on fusion centers. I think that is a very important success. And we’ve had the opportunity, through the ITAC Group – the Threat Assessment Coordination Group – to bring state officials on board with us in terms of the whole issue of intelligent-sharing. So we can (inaudible) to make progress on that.>
With respect to the other recommendations that have been talked about this morning, I want to thank everybody who worked on those. I’m going to have senior department officials assigned to actually implement a lot of these specific recommendations. But again, Glenda, Jared, Dick, Don, Rick and John, thank you for your very fine work on all of these issues.
As we turn to the issue of transition, first, I’d like to recognize Clay Johnson’s presence. I know Clay worked very hard with the Transition Task Force, and I appreciate his good advice. I think it’s going to be very important to make sure we get this right.
We understand this is the first transition this department has undertaken. And it’s a matter of pride, I think, everybody in the senior leadership, that we make this a seamless transition and one about which we can all be proud. It is important not only because I think professionalism requires that we turn over the keys to a well-functioning machine, but because, as Glenda said, we know that the period of transition is a period of heightened vulnerability, not because we have any specific piece of intelligence as I sit here but because our observation over the last several years, including as recently as this summer when the new British administration came in and faced attacks within a matter of days, underscores for us the fact that it is in the transition period, when people are doing the handoff, that there is a natural degree of confusion which creates an invitation to people to carry out terrorist attacks, or other damaging enterprises.
And that’s why we have to make sure that the handoff is as smooth as possible. This will require the cooperation not only of the outgoing administration but of the incoming administration. And we’re going to look very closely at the recommendations that have been made here so we can begin that transition planning as we go forward.
Finally, although we do have a transition, it doesn’t mean that we are done with our work in this administration. We have over a year left and we’re going to make use of every single day of that year. The President often talks about a sprint to the finish, and that’s very much – that’s the way I try to run road races, and that’s very much the way we’re going to do our work this year.
We have in particular a number of initiatives that we do want to drive forward between now and the time that we leave office. One of those, obviously, is border security and immigration enforcement. We have made strides every quarter in reducing the flow of illegal immigration coming into this country. And we’ve made strides every quarter, as I’ll describe in greater detail in our closed session, in enhancing border security: building fence, recruiting Border Patrol.
I’m delighted to say that as of the close of last calendar year, we had over 15,000 Border Patrol agents, which is a dramatic increase from where we were just a year and a half ago when we initiated our Secure Border Initiative. We’ve got almost 300 miles of fencing built – pedestrian and vehicle fencing. That is a tremendous increase from where we were a year ago. We’ve got technology rolled out. We’ve got unmanned aerial systems rolled out. So we are doing a lot. We are committed to meeting the milestones that we announced at the beginning at the end of this calendar year. We’re on track to do it and we’re going to get that done.
A second element, which I’ve indicated by talking about REAL ID, is we want to continue to drive forward on secure identification. I know you understand this, but it bears repeating. As long as we require people to identify themselves when they get on airplanes or come into sensitive buildings or undertake other kinds of activities, as long as we require people to identify themselves, it makes no sense to allow people to falsify identity, or to masquerade as other people. There’s nothing good that comes out of that.
False identification leads itself to national security threats. False identification facilitates illegal immigration, which I’m hearing again and again as a very big concern for the American people. False identification facilitates identity theft. In this world in which we live, the most valuable asset you have is your name. Your name is the key to authenticating a whole range of transactions and activities that are of value to you as an individual. And that means protecting your identity and protecting the tools of identification are the same thing as frankly locking up your bank vault. And so it’s important that we have secure identification; and we’re going to get that very, very close to completion this year.
Third issue, which will be a little bit new, maybe, to some of you, although you may have heard about it, is cyber security. I feel we’ve made enormous strides going forward this past year with respect to physical security. It’s very much tougher to sneak through our ports of entry than it was several years ago. We’ve got our radiation portal monitors deployed so that virtually all of our maritime cargo goes through radiation detection.
But there is a tremendous asset that we have frankly not made enough progress in protecting, and that is the asset of our cyber environment– all of the data and all of the processes and transactions which occur in the realm of virtual reality and our cyber network. And protecting that is something that we’re going to take a giant step forward with this year. We’re working on a government-wide strategy for cyber security. We’ve gone to Congress last year for money, which Congress did give us in this mass appropriation we got. And we’re going to make that a very big priority for this year.
Finally, the institutionalization of the department. That means doing things like succession planning – we’ve spent a lot of time on that; making sure that we have a career development pathway that encourages jointness and encourages a single-mission focus, as opposed to stove piping that was the hallmark, perhaps, of where we were five years ago. And I think that building that capability of having an institutionalized department, including a project we’re working on to create what we call a J-3 or a J-5 – a truly unified planning and operations capability, like DOD has – that is going to be a very big part of what we’re going to do this year.
So this will be a year where we’re going to set some very high requirements and some high thresholds for performance, because I don’t think we can afford to let this year be a kind of a languishing year, even as we look forward to the fact that we have to prepare for a transition.
So thank you very much for your service. And I think now, Mr. Chairman, I turn it over to you so you can move to the next part of the program.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on January 10, 2008.
