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Release Date: December 3, 2008
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010
Mr. Cook: Thanks for coming. I'm Dave Cook from the Monitor. Our guest is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. His last visit with the group was in February. We welcome him back.
His first tour in Washington was a clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Brennan that followed his graduation with honors from Harvard College and Harvard Law. He has a lifetime appointment as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to become the second Secretary of Homeland Security.
Other career way marks include service as a U.S. Attorney from New Jersey, special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, law firm partner, and Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. Plus at the biographical portion of the program, now under the exciting McCandel details, as always we're on the record here. There is no embargo. There is no live blogging, but after breakfast is over, blog and tweet to your heart’s content.
The Homeland Security Department is preparing an official transcript of the session, thus all the microphones. We'll e-mail a transcript to you. Russ tells me that the document will not be released to the rest of the media until this evening. The tiny TV cameras recording the session for use by the monitor's website, a destination that holds my future.
Finally, if you'd like to ask a question, send me a subtle non-threatening signal. I'll do my best to call on one and all by name. If my synapses fail to fire and I can't come up with your name, please provide it yourself before asking Secretary Chertoff your question. We'll start off by offering our guest the opportunity to make some brief opening comments, then we'll move to questions from around the table.
With that, sir, the floor is yours. Thanks again for coming.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, thank you very much for having me. Thank you also for delaying this.
I know we originally wanted to do this earlier and I had a meeting at the White House so that you accommodated me. I appreciate it. I'll be brief since you want to ask questions. I want to begin by saying I always touch wood metaphorically when I say it. That is, we look back over the last seven years, and in some ways the bottom line from my standpoint is the fact that --
Mr. Cook: Mr. Secretary, we are going to need to get them to turn off the air. People can't hear you.
Secretary Chertoff: So I always touch wood when I say this, but to me in some ways the bottom line is that for the last seven plus years we have not had a successful attack against the United States. I think that is a tribute to the President's leadership and in some ways some of the criticism I see now about "fear mongering that occurred after 9/11 is a luxury we can only indulge in because we haven't been attacked."
I guarantee you, if there are "Mumbai" attacks every year in this country, no one would be talking about fear mongering. So I think that's the big picture story and obviously some part of this belongs to DHS, but a lot of it belongs to the intelligence community, the military, the Department of Justice, including the FBI, obviously, good partnerships with people overseas. This is not a rest on your laurels speech, but it is a recognition that we've achieved something and we have to be careful not to squander what we've achieved.
The lesson is not we don't need to do anything because obviously there's no problem. The lesson is we've done a lot to prevent the problem from coming to fruition. We have to keep making sure that as we make adjustments going forward we don't lose sight of the fact that security is really the principal obligation we owe the citizens of this country.
If you and your family are not safe, if you and your family are not able to be confident that life and limb would be protected, then almost everything else doesn't count. In terms of where we're going with the transition, I am pleased to say we've had a lot of interaction with the transition team, which seems very professional.
I have spoken to my successor/designees who I have known for a long period of time and of whom I have a very high opinion. I think she'll be terrific if she's confirmed, which I'm confident she will be. I think I'll actually meet with her a little bit later this morning. I look forward to talking to her and I think the department is poised to carry the transition forward in a very smooth fashion including having a large number of career people in the senior positions.
The third and last comment I'd make is in terms of where we are with the strategic threat. About a year and a half ago I talked about the fact that I do think we were entering a period of greater strategic threat than previously, largely because of the safe havens that have been developed for al Qaeda and other similar groups in South Asia. I think, you know, that remains my view still in terms of where we are. We've had some successes, but the other side has had some successes as well, most recently, of course, in Mumbai.
We have seen a continued illustration of the intent to carry out attacks by these ideological extremists, Mumbai, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the U.S. Embassy in Sana, Yemen. Plots have been disrupted in Germany, Britain, all over the world. This is very, very much a live threat, and so we need to stay ahead of that.
The last thing I would say, and again I've said this a lot, so it shouldn't be a news flash, but it's validated mostly by the weapon of mass destruction commission, the Gramm-Tallinn Commission, which is just I guess issuing its report. In the long-run, what we have to be most careful about, this is the long run -- it's not next week -- is a weapon of mass destruction. And the high consequence attack has got to be from our standpoint the highest priority at the federal level. It has been. We have made a lot of progress and I'm happy to talk about this.
We have made a huge advance in terms of our scanning and screening for material coming into the country. As David Ignatius pointed out today we were working on a small boat strategy beginning 18 months ago. We didn't just wake up because of what happened in Mumbai. We've got a general aviation strategy we have unrolled, and these things obviously are not finished, but we've launched them off to a good start. We need to continue to have a dedicated and persistent attentiveness to these issues. So with that I'm happy to take questions.
Mr. Cook: Let me follow up on two things you said myself, and then we'll go to David Wood, Bryan Bender and Gordon Lubold to start. You were talking about having a small boat strategy on the Mumbai thing. Other than that what are the lessons of Mumbai? One of my colleagues at the Monitor talked to a terrorism analyst at Georgetown and said that no police force anywhere could have been prepared to counter this type of operation. Would you agree with that? And how vulnerable are U.S. cities that haven't been especially hardened like New York and Washington for that kind of Mumbai attack?
Secretary Chertoff: Obviously, we're still fully unpacking the lessons of Mumbai. Let's remember. We have lived in this country with people who pick up guns and kill other people for as long as I remember; and, probably, decades before that we have Virginia Tech. We have the sniper in this region.
You're not going to prevent that from happening 10 percent. You know, violence and craziness whether politically motivated or emotionally motivated is part of life in the human domain. The key is you want to minimize the risk by having good intelligence and by having effective response, because effective response in a low signature attack, meaning one that doesn't give a lot of intelligence warning in advance is your best bet for mitigation.
I think the mere sophisticated police departments have a good capability to respond. Probably the less sophisticated ones would be a little bit slower off the mark. One of the lessons we learned is the key is swift instant management. This is going to key into my point on the issue of FEMA, which I know there's been some suggestion there are a few more to be pulled out of the department. I'm not going to get into classified material here. Just go to the Wall Street Journal. The reporting a couple of days ago about Mumbai was the fire department, the emergency managers and the police came on the scene and according to the news reports they were not well coordinated.
That in a nutshell is the argument for keeping all this stuff consolidated. When you look at a crisis or an emergency, you cannot stove pipe your emergency response and your police response. You have to have a coordinated plan and a coordinated execution. And that's why what we've done in terms of joint planning, incident management, integrating prevention response is to my mind the best way to minimize the risk of a Mumbai type attack. But I want to emphasize minimize does not mean eliminate, because you can't eliminate the risk. All you can do is mitigate the damage and reduce the risk.
Mr. Cook: The last one from me, the bipartisan commission on prevention of WMD proliferation on terrorism for today is widely reported to say that our margin of safety is shrinking, not growing. Do you agree with that assessment? And what does that say about DHS that that's true?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I mean, it's hard to know what they mean by the margin of safety. We have reduced our vulnerability, but of course over the passage of time the knowledge base that you need in order to fabricate a dirty bomb, the biological weapon or a chemical weapon, that knowledge base expands.
You have Internet. You have all kinds of ways in which people learn how to weaponize or create dangerous biological and chemical weapons. So in that sense we're in a race against time. We want to continue to harden and protect ourselves, and increase our response. The other side is going to continue to learn more about doing things. I think we've made a lot of progress in two areas.
In the nuclear area five years ago there was zero scanning for radio activity coming into our ports. Now we're at about almost 100 percent. We didn't have a general aviation strategy in terms of minimizing the risk of brining a nuclear weapon in overseas and in general aviation. We have now begun the process of implementing a strategy including working on pre-clearance of aircraft overseas and getting more information about who's coming in.
On the biological side we have stockpiles now. We have biological first generation biological detectors in 30 cities, but I will also tell you we're facing resistance. For example, we've argued that the big challenge with respect to biological weapon and chemical weapon response is how do you get the antidote or palliative or, you know, the medicine. How do you get it out, distributed?
We know, for example, that with anthrax, if you take CIPRO, you're going to be okay. How do you get the CIPRO out there? We have argued and we've begun this process, and I signed the letter to the Secretary of HHS launching this, that you ought to distribute as widely as you can in the population medical kits that would have antidotes for the most common types of biological weapons.
There was a lot of pushback, the traditional medical community does not like this idea. They worry that if you give antibiotics out to people they'll misuse them, and that will increase the likelihood that you'll have drug resistant types of viruses or biological vectors, bacteria. But, here's the problem. You know, that's a great argument on the part of the public health community that will be very unpersuasive the day there's a massive anthrax attack. But people say, why hasn't this been dealt with already. Why didn't you take care of this three years ago?
The answer is because many people in the public health community fight tooth and nail against this initiative because they believe we shouldn't be focused on a remote possibility with a high consequence. We should be focused on the day-to-day issue of over-immunizing or over-distributing antibiotics. So I think to me this is the kind of debate we have to have; and, you know, this is a welcome opportunity with this new report to address what I think is an urgent need to begin to distribute these kinds of remedial measures as widely as we responsibly can, so that that's the way to eliminate the distribution problem.
Mr. Cook: Mr. Wood?
Question: Mr. Secretary, I'd like to take you back to Mumbai for a second. Have your analysts identified anything out of that incident that you think requires top attention right now?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, when I do an analysis with the bureau, I think we're going to disseminate in the next couple of days to our stakeholders what we see as the lessons of Mumbai. As we sit here, there's no one revelation I get out of this. It confirms a number of things. I know.
We need to have a small boat strategy. We've been working on that and we're moving forward with that. We need to have a robust and prepared Coast Guard. Working with Admiral Allen we have built the capability. We need to recognize that technology is an enabler for terrorism. It was again reported today without getting classified material about how terrorists were able to use everything from watching TV to cell phones, to other kinds of technological tools to advance their schemes.
We've been aware of that. That's a challenge for us, because it exists in the world. So there's no great revelation to me that there's something we didn't think about. It is however, a very emphatic reminder that this problem is not going away. I know in the last two months all the discussions have been about the financial crisis, and that's certainly an important thing. But we're going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time, so I believe and I'm confident my successors will believe that the people in these jobs, the security jobs, must continue to focus on that.
Question: Well, the technical part -- have you looked at jamming as a potential defense?
Secretary Chertoff: There is the capability of jamming, for example. You see this in Iraq -- remote detonation -- things of that sort. One of the questions that always arises is if you could should you shut down the communication system. The problem is there's a plus and a minus. One of the pluses is it's a great warning system. We even saw on 9/11 that the use of cell phones from planes actually was an important tool in terms of our uncovering what happened. So that's a very tough judgment call.
Mr. Cook: Mr. Bender?
Question: A couple of things you talked about, scanning for nuclear materials. There's been some back and forth between your department and the congress over what exactly that means. There are some things you should actually scan every single container as opposed to having detectors in every port.
Talk about that, if you can. Do you think that that is feasible? Is that overkill? And then maybe just one quick follow-up would be, since you are the longest-serving secretary, what's sort of biggest piece of advice you would have first?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, we actually stand, meaning to pass through a radiation detector, 98 percent of the cargo that comes into the United States through our sea are land borders. And, so, we are close to 100 percent in terms of scanning. We don't inspect or X-ray every container.
The people who should do this are arguing for a position that is simply not possible. I mean, it would be the equivalent of strip-searching every single person who gets on an airplane, opening every single container or x-raying every single container. We could do that, but there wouldn't be an airline system, because no one would fly.
And you wouldn't have a port system, because it would take days to get through the ports. So you've got to use a combination of technology. So if you scan everything or virtually everything, but use intelligence-driven analysis to determine which containers need to be opened or which need to go through an X-ray system. I've been a bit of back and forth with congress over their requirement that by 2012 everything be scanned overseas as opposed to here. I think scanning overseas is a perfectly good thing to do and sensible, particular based on places which are high risk ports, provided it's physically practicable, and it's agreeable to the foreign country.
But you are not going to get 100 percent, because you can't make every other country do that. And when people in Congress go how dare you say you're not going to do 100 percent, I feel like saying, well what do you want me to do. Promise we'll invade every country that doesn't allow us to scan? They don't answer that question and that's the kind of an argument that I think is not going to be my domain. It will be the next secretary, maybe even the one after that, will have to address with congress.
What we ought to do is focus on working with governments particularly in ports which are higher risk for exporting nuclear material and see whether we could do some scanning over there. And we've done that. We've done it in Pakistan at the Port of Kasim. We've done it in Honduras. And we're looking at some ports in Asia where we're working with authorities over there. And so I think that's a constructive approach. I'm not against scanning overseas where practicable, but where practicable, and I want to underscore.
In terms of the biggest challenge to my successor it is the willingness to take on very deeply embedded special interests that tend to have very specific views on a particular issue. Every time you put a security measure in place, you're goring somebody's ox. It's going to be some business is going to have to be inconvenienced. You know, people at the border are going to complain. It's unfriendly.
That means we're going to get less tourism; and, the problem is again those are great arguments until the attack occurs. And then, all of a sudden, the failure to have secure identification, the failure to check the general aviation, all that stuff seems again very unpersuasive. All the measures we are arguing for: secure documentation under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, general aviation, screening and preclearance, small boat strategy; each of these things is a way of avoiding or minimizing a very foreseeable risk. If these don't get done, because individual industries or powerful politicians or lobbyists can stimey them, then at some point when something happens they'll be a conversation about why we didn't get done what we have absolutely foretold is a risk. And that to me is I think it was my challenge and it will be the challenge of all my successors to keep striving forward on this.
Mr. Cook: Gordon?
Question: Sir, do you know if there are calls to completely reorganize the national security apparatus and to make it better? I assume you agree that some changes were needed and to talk about them. What's the danger in making changes and how far do you think it should go?
Secretary Chertoff: I think there ought to be a presumption against reorganization, because we've done a lot of it. I'm not talking about just my department. And each time you reorganize, you freeze everything. People become uncertain what their future is.
All actual substantive work becomes impeded and then you lose time. So I'm not saying you can't look at some of the lessons and say well we ought to integrate that, but I think there's a presumption in my mind, against any massive changes. At a minimum you ought to take a couple years and make sure you're using existing structures as well as you can. The other thing you tend to get is we need a czar. We need to have a czar to do this and a czar to do that. And then you have czars on top of czars, and then czars fighting with czars. And you need a super czar on top of the czar. Maybe you need a czarina.
Secretary Chertoff: So, you know, we've heard you have to have cyber czar. You have to have a WMD czar. You have to have a czar for this and a czar for that. Just remember, all these things are extra layers. There is a challenging coordinating across agencies; and, I do think, you know, it's important to have a White House mechanism that does that.
But, you just need to be careful that often the quick fix is to say, oh, we'll make that person the head of the super head. And then they had to want to build a big bureaucracy or not. And I put a big yellow light on go slow in terms of reorganizations.
Question: Does that mean you don't agree with the WMD czar reported?
Secretary Chertoff: It means I would ask myself the question: What is any czar -- without getting specific -- add to the existing mechanisms? There are people now in the National Security Council who focus on these issues. The DNI set up an anti-proliferation person. I bet most people have forgotten about that, so you've got to ask yourself. What is this going to add? What is it going to do that is not there? Sometimes the answer is to give more effective support to the person that's already been assigned the task as opposed to creating another person at a different level, who is now going to have to coordinate with more people.
Mr. Cook: Stewart?
Question: You spend much of your tenure working to gain credibility with the public with the strong enforcement, and I just wanted to see, whether you think you've regained enough credibility for Congress to move forward with those -- tract and other -- of comprehensive immigration. And if there's something that still needs to be done, what is it?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I can't speak, I can't tell you what the public thinks. I mean I can tell you what we've done. I can tell that if you look at the most recent Pew study, you will see for the first time in memory -- except maybe right after 9-11 where everything froze up -- we have seen a decline in the number of illegal immigrants in the country. And I think every measure has indicated for the first time we've seen a real significant decrease quarter to quarter in terms of illegal immigrants coming into the country.
It doesn't mean the job is done, but it means for the first time we've reversed them and we're moving in the right direction.
Here, I'll make a little bit of news.
Mr. Cook: It's always helpful when people let us know.
Secretary Chertoff: We promised at the end of the year, by the end of this calendar year we would have over 18,000 members of the Border Patrol, that I was called yesterday by the head of CBP and his deputy and they told me we are 18,049. So we've achieved that goal. We'll obviously continue to increase beyond that.
We have built a good deal of fence, and I think by the time we leave it will be about 90 percent done or substantially done, which is a positive metric.
So I think we have made a very good down payment on confidence and enforcement. It may that the next administration will have to continue to invest in order to get confidence.
I do believe at the end of the day comprehensive reform -- and I think we were pretty close to, you know, hitting the sweet spot we've always proposed in '07. I think that's in the end, though, the right long-term solution.
I think what would be a mistake is if one side tried to dramatically skew it one way or the other. And do think that my personal experience has been you've got to really establish credibility through enforcement in order prepare the table, so to speak, for other elements of comprehensive reform?
Mr. Cook: Chuck, Tom?
Question: Mr. Secretary, obviously someone has released that to me that the Department is still a work in progress, that all of these agencies still are getting brought under one roof. Do you look back now and say, "You know what? Maybe this shouldn't be here. Maybe this should be somewhere else."
There's been some talk, for instance, that FEMA or that Obama might take FEMA out of DHS. What's your reaction to that specifically? And is there part of this umbrella of agencies that you say, "You know what? This one shouldn't be --"
Secretary Chertoff: Let me say three things. First of all, every agency is a work in progress. Department of Defense is still a work in progress.
From 1947 to gold war nickels in 1986 it was not a well-integrated organization. That was 40 years. And I remember, I think one of the results of that was the failure of the hostage rescue, you know, at the end of the Carter administration.
And you still see stories about things that don't work. You know, Secretary Gates had to get rid of some top leaders because he wasn't happy with the way things were working.
So nothing's ever complete.
Second, there's a little myth with the department, about the 21 agencies. There are really not 22 agencies that are part of the department. I think someone must have looked at the number of direct reports to come up with 22.
But many of them are very small things, like the Office of Narcotics Coordination is a very small number of people.
There are essentially eight major operating elements in the department. Seven is an operation components, and then our National Protection and Programs Division, which does the infrastructure protection -- is probably the eighth.
So although we're a big department, it's a little bit of an urban legend to suggest that it's such a massive group of different disparate departments.
I think you can always argue you should have added something, like maybe DEA should have been part of it, or ATF. And you could argue, you know, that -- I've argued for example, that on the long-term housing, that ought to be a HUD responsibility and not a FEMA responsibility.
But I think if you look at the main things we do prevention, protection, response, and recovery, particularly in emergency context, it all should be in one place; because that way when you're putting together a plan and you're responding to something, you can look at all the challenges and have all the tools to bring to bear on it.
If you don't do that, you wind up having turf fights about stuff. That's what was happening in Mumbai, according to the paper. You had the fire people doing one thing, the police doing something else, the army doing something else.
So let's come specifically to FEMA. And actually it's hard for me to better than Senator Lieberman did and Senator Collins did in the Times today.
But if you look at every time we've had an emergency response, it has been the ability to bring to bear the tools of DHS to support FEMA that has made the response better.
And Hurricane Gustav, when we had an emergency, we had to do a last-minute evacuation of medical people, and I was down there myself. FEMA doesn't have helicopters, FEMA doesn't have buses. FEMA has people who come, and you know, they'll pay money for things, they'll contract for things.
So had the Coast Guard, had Customs and Border Protection immediately in there, able to help us with the evacuation as well as the National Guard. We used our UAVs and communications equipment from some of the other components to give us situational awareness.
When we had a problem getting distribution at the points of distribution for Hurricane Ike in Houston, we got people from TSA to come and actually do the physical distribution.
If FEMA were by itself, they would have none of those tools. They wouldn't have their own helicopters, they wouldn't have a large number of people they could surge.
So they would have to borrow them from other agencies. And although that's doable, it makes it slower than it would be if one secretary can do the entirety of the approach.
So I think, you know, the argument I've mainly seen is well, you know, FEMA should focus on response that's different than law enforcement.
And you know, I tell you, there a number of places in the country where the fire departments and emergency services departments and the police do not get along. They take that attitude that they will not work together. I think that is an ill-advised and short-sided view.
Take biological attacks. Everything is integrated. Your ability to detect, your ability to prevent. That's very much influenced by how effective your response is going to be.
If the people who do response just do response and the people who do prevention just do prevention, how are you going to build a common plan to make sure they operate together?
I guess I'd conclude by saying this. Right now in the national security domain, there's a discussion about how we have had stovepipes between war fighting and reconstruction and dare I say nation building, once you've actually won the immediate battle?
And increasingly there is a recognition that jointness needs to be part of national security. Why would you want to move back to stovepipes in Homeland Security? That doesn't make any sense to me.
And I think that jointness is the wave of the future. So that's my opinion.
Question: Are there indications for expansion?
Secretary Chertoff: No, because, you know --
Question: Has more law enforcement -- that even law enforcement agencies --
Secretary Chertoff: No. Here's the case I would make. In a platonic world you could probably sit down and make some adjustments. I think the way we have it now, we've reduced the number of players to a manageable number. I think things work well together, and we've built pathways to coordinate among the major elements.
And this is where I come back to my earlier point. The cost of another reorganization and the question about, you know, who's going to where? And then of course you compromise the authority of the Secretary. Because what's the Secretary's ability to mandate things to happen in the department if people are wondering "Well, maybe she won't be my boss in a year."
So my view is in a very practical way, I would let things build and get reinforced over the next period of time. And you know, if after the next Secretary has had a couple years, they say, "You know I've decided I think I should get this in, or put that out." I think that's a different discussion.
Mr. Cook: I want to go next to Francine and then Demetri, to Tom Frank, Shane Harris, then Mike Isacoff.
Francine? There you are.
Question: I'd like to go back to the immigration discussion, and walking and chewing gum at the same time. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be done in the country. A lot of big stuff.
And during the election, immigration slid down on the list of America’s concerned. So in reality, as you just said, fewer illegal immigrants coming in, whether it's border measures or the economy, and so on.
So does that mean that in the list of big stuff to do in Washington that immigration reform is actually necessarily and quite logically slip down the list, in terms of urgency?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, we have to do a lot of things at once. Fortunately not everybody has to do everything. That's why we divide things up among departments.
I think immigration slipped down, to be honest, because we were starting to see success.
Question: Mm-hmm.
Secretary Chertoff: And when things get successful, they're not talked about that much.
Terrorism became less of issue. You can bet if we had an attack every six months, that would have been topic 1 through 10 on the election cycle.
So it's kind of perverse function of success that you wind up not being in much in the public debate.
That's not a bad thing, though, because it allows a little bit of time for more deliberate discussion, analysis, and decision-making.
I think in the end, if the problem is not dealt with, hmm, there will be more stress, because enforcement while I think it is an important condition for further comprehensive reform, as we may continue to make progress, eventually it will start to become harder and harder to reduce the marginal flow.
And that's when having a safety valve in terms of temporary workers, for example, will actually help enable the enforcement to continue to move forward and progress.
The other thing is I recognize that while we have increasing unemployment, it's probably that bringing more workers in part of comprehensive reform is not going to be an appealing thing to do.
But we can use the time to design a system so that if and when we do start bringing people in, we're comfortable we have the right biometric identification, we have the right tracking systems, and we have the right monitoring systems so that we can feel comfortable that people being allowed in legally we will now be able to account for where they are, and be able to assure that they'll leave when the time comes, if they're supposed to leave.
Mr. Cook: Demetri?
Question: Mr. Secretary, the last 18 months there have been major cyber attacts on (inaudible) – the White House, the World Bank, also defense companies. And everyone talks about it, but actual concrete steps have been taken to, one, deflect attacks -- what new policies have we put in place – and (inaudible) things like that?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, again staying out of classified areas, I'll tell you what we've done. The military can speak to what it has done in terms of protecting the military systems.
We have begun a process of reducing the number of access points on the part of federal civilian government domains to the internet, so that we can begin to deploy a more robust intrusion detection capability called EINSTEIN-II, which gives you real-time ability to detect signatures, -- characteristics of net attacks.
At the same time we're working on the next generation, which would actually give us the ability to block attacks. And so we're moving towards an end-state when we will have a much better ability to control what comes into the federal government domain, so that we can prevent malware from getting into our systems.
But you're quite right in pointing out it's only about hacking over the internet. We are looking at our protocols in terms of what you can put into -- you know, when you put in a DVD or a thumb drive, you know, how do we make sure people don't put in corrupted devices into a system where they then create a problem.
This, by the way, shouldn't be a news flash to everybody, because for years I've been hearing people talking about, "Don't bring your DVD from home, your CD from home, and your CD ROM and stick it in, because it might be corrupting the system."
But we have to continue to push on how we regulate that better. That may be part of it that's a technology fix. A lot of it are the systems that we put in place.
So I think this is all actually underway. The biggest challenge is going to be working with the private sector. And we are in discussions with the private sector through our sector coordinating counsels and our infrastructure protection division about how we can enable them to protect their own systems.
Some of that may be information that we can share with them from other parts of the government. Some of it may be technical capabilities. They may have technical capabilities that actually they can share with us.
And I think in the end that's going to have to be worked out in a partnership vein.
Question: Just a follow-up --
Secretary Chertoff:Yeah.
Question: How do you manage the privacy concerns -- corporations. We need to see --
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I think from the government domain, the answer is it's a government domain. Everybody is warned when you get on the system, this is not your system. And so I don't think that's a privacy issue.
The privacy issues are while we are not suggesting going into the private sector and saying "We want to sit on your network and we want to patrol your network."
Some people have argued that we should do that, but I don't agree with that.
Well, what we said is we want to engage with you. How can we help you? They're going to have to make the decision about their networks. And in the end if they choose not to have their networks monitored or they don't want our help in monitoring their own networks, they're perfectly free to take that approach, and they have to live with the risk of that.
So in a nutshell, my answer to the privacy objection is we have to have a consent-based model. If you consent to our working review, then there's no privacy issue, because you've consented. If you don't want a consent, then we shouldn't impose ourselves on you.
Mr. Cook:Tom?
Question: Mr. Secretary, I wanted to ask a follow-up on the WMD report. Do you think there needs to be more emphasis on radiological bombs or WMDs, and where should it be placed? In cities or ports?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, we do it everywhere. So let me tell you what we're doing. We, for radiological bombs, where the material -- the material that makes a good radiological bomb, the nuclear material, is different than the nuclear material that you'd use in a nuclear device.
And unfortunately, much of the radioactive material you could use in a dirty bomb is not unavailable in the United States.
So we've begun a program, for example, with hospitals, which is currently underway, to have them secure their radioactive material that they use in medical processes, so that that's not, can't be easily stolen.
We're also working with the manufactures of the medical devices to see if they can reconfigure their next generation of devices to use a different form of radioactive material, one that would harder to weaponize or put in your dirty bomb.
So that's one approach. Another approach is obviously to have the scanning and detection capability for air, sea, and land entry into the United States, to make sure people aren't bringing in nuclear weapons.
We are working with the City of New York on a pilot project called Security in the Cities to put radioactive detection devices in certain strategic entry points into the City of New York.
On the biological side, we have our Bio Watch, you know, over two dozen cities. It's a detection capability, it's never given us a false positive on detecting some kind of a biological threat. Some of these occur in nature, by the way, so they're not all hostile.
But we need to get to the next generation, which we are currently developing, which will give us a much faster assessment and response time.
All of that is going on, and we've got to do all of it. There's not one thing to be done; there are many things to be done. And the good news is we're doing many things, and we've set a path which can be built upon for the next administration.
Mr. Cook:Shane?
Question: May I just as a quick question, sir? Can you give us a new sense of how you appraise the cyber security threat overall and what are the biggest vulnerabilities? The financial sector, its infrastructure --
Secretary Chertoff: I think there are three types of threats.
I think the one everybody talks about is the network hacking threat. And as has been said publicly, obviously, you know, we've seen certainly in the past that some state actors can play a role in that. But you can also get terrorist groups or private actors, including criminals who can do that.
The next level threat -- not much paid attention to, but in my mind also important -- is compromises in software or hardware, which allow people to penetrate systems.
There was a story in the Wall Street Journal -- and the reason I keep mentioning the paper is not because I'm trying advertise the paper, but because I'm trying to tell this is all open source, I'm not going to give you classified stuff -- but there was a story in the paper about peoples whose financial information was stolen in Europe, because embedded I think in the circuit boards of the ATM machines, was a little device that was kind of like a beacon, it would phone home every 24 hours with material information it captured.
Insuring the supply chain, making sure there's software and hardware in a global environment is not compromised. That's a critical issue. And I think we have just begun to think about how to do that. It's going to be hard to do.
And then the good old insider threat, the corrupted employee who comes in, sticks, you know, a thumb drive in, or downloads something, hmm, remains a threat.
So I think all these things have to be addressed, they're all part of our cyber security strategy.
Generally the financial sector, as I understand, is quite good and attentive to this stuff. But it's got to be something that even in the kind of nuts and bolts world of physical infrastructure is an important concern for everybody who has valuable assets.
Question: And a follow-up how is the National Cyber Security Initiative transitioning into the next administration?
Secretary Chertoff: Well I mean they're getting briefed on it. And I'm going to be -- you know, my successor and the transition teams have been read into what we're doing and they've seen what we're doing.
This is obviously really about a year or a year and a half old, and so there's going to be a lot of room for the next administration to develop it and implement it.
Mr. Cook: Mr. Isacoff?
Question: Mr. Secretary, we're coming to the end of the Bush administration. I want to see if I can get you to be a little bit philosophical -- you said the great success in counter-terrorism has been that we haven't been attacked. But the new president was elected in part by arguing, at least in this area, that there were serious excesses in the War on Terror. Abuses of power that damaged U.S. national security around the world and damaged our image Guantanamo -- convention treaties, aggressive interrogation techniques.
I want to ask if you accept the critique that there were excesses in the War on Terror? You were involved in many of the debates about these issues. And if you so, if you could sort of use your analytic powers for which you are so well known, to sort of identify what they were, where things could have been done differently to avoid a lot of the criticism --
Secretary Chertoff: I guess I'd begin by saying this. You know, when the house is on fire, you go and you put the fire out. Now later somebody's going to say, "You know, you shouldn't gone through the door this way. Maybe you should have gone through the door a different way. Or, you know, it would be better if you use a different type of fire hose or something of that sort."
But that's the benefit of hindsight.
So the first thing I would say is this: you must live with the responsibility of knowing that if you failed to present something, you will have to look into the eyes of the people who's loved ones have been lost, and explain to them that you did everything reasonably possible to prevent something.
And if you're not prepared to do that, then you're not doing enough.
So I think that that's, for all those who have benefited from the protection, biting the hand that protects you is similar to biting the hand that feeds you.
That being said, when we were confronted on 9-11 with an unparalleled attack, and a very clear sense that we had no real idea that it was coming and therefore there was obviously a huge gap in our knowledge about what was coming next, we were presented with a set of tools that had not been designed to deal with the issue.
So a lot of people try to take those tools and make them work as effectively as possible.
Now was it done perfectly out of the box? Of course not. No human endeavor was done perfectly. When Abraham Lincoln told Chief Justice Taney basically to stuff it, in terms of his order on habeas corpus, that probably wasn't perfect, but it was what Lincoln had to do at the point of time that he was worried about Baltimore and Maryland seceding from the union.
The one thing I would say -- and I think you know I said this in 2003, when I was a judge -- I do think that it has been appropriate for some time, once the immediate emergency is over to go back and start to say, "Okay, now that we've stabilized the situation, are there some things we can do differently?"
Because no doubt there are some things you want to adjust. Either you want to ratchet back or you want to ratchet up. And that's fair, and that process of adjustment ought to take place over a period of time.
So you know, I think there are things that the government as a whole has been slow to debate. And that's partly because the debate has often become an unproductive exercise in fingerpointing, in which people on each side of the debate are categorized as either being, you know, blood-thirsty criminals or, you know, unpatriotic wimps.
And I think by and large, with the exception of a few people who actually do fit those categories, almost everybody on both sides of the debate really does want the good of the country.
There are some differences. And I have actually have had private discussions with people who are, you know, fairly described as very civil liberties oriented.
The gaps between us are actually quite a bit smaller than you would think. Everybody who sees the same problem wants to fix it.
We do not seem to be able to have this debate in public though, because as soon as it becomes public, everybody retreats to their typical position of manning the ramparts and throwing bricks, and as a consequence, we've not been able to get some of the stuff refined.
Question: Just a quick follow-up. I remember your 2003 speech, and that was five years ago.
Secretary Chertoff: Right, yeah.
Question: So I'm just saying, if you could just be a little more specific. You say we've been slow, the government has been slow. Where precisely, as you look back, should adjustments have been made?
Secretary Chertoff: I think what I said then -- and I don't think I'm saying anything, you know, dramatically new -- is for example, on the issue of processing, adjudicating the cases of detainees in Guantanamo, you know, all right, people up, it's the heat of battle, you've got to come up with a plan to adjudicate these. And I think that it's taken a very long time, and that's hurt, frankly, the credibility of the government, and it's made it harder for everybody.
And I think putting together -- you know, of course Mike Mukasey recommended this eight, nine months ago -- putting together a legislatively endorsed plan that finds a way to balance the various considerations. You know, that would be a good thing.
Of course, Congress hasn't acted on that. And it would have been better, had that been done earlier.
And by the way, there was discussion about this, a lot of discussion about this, going back over the last few years about what would it look like, how would you balance the need to protect security against the need to protect, you know, people's rights, even people who are accused of being terrorists?
And actually think that there was a lot of agreements to what that might look like. But it didn't seem to be able to get translated into the political will to actually have a piece of legislation and a piece, you know, and something that everybody could agree on.
So this is a little Pollyannaish, but I've been around in Washington for a long time; even when I didn't live here I was around a lot. And I've seen a lot of the battling back and forth. And 9/11 was an epiphany for me, because it taught me that whatever differences of opinion we have about policy, the enemy is in a cave somewhere, the enemy is not here in the United States.
So we ought to remember our first priority is to deal with the real enemy, not treat ourselves as enemies.
And I think unfortunately the level of political debate and the way in which it's conducted has made it hard to do that.
I'm hopeful. You got a new president. I'm hopeful everybody stands down on the nastiness and extreme rhetoric and that we all take the opportunity -- and both sides have the agree to this -- to sit down and try to calmly figure out what is the right answer.
And it might mean that the right answer or the agreed-upon answer isn't what my perfect, you know, personal belief is, but it might be something that I would wind up saying, "You know, that's pretty good. I think that's livable." And visa-versa for the people on the other side of the debate on some of these issues.
The last thing I would say is that -- now I've forgotten the last thing I was going to say.
Secretary Chertoff: So I probably said all I need to say.
Mr. Cook: Yes, sir. Last question.
Question: Governor Napolitano has made this (inaudible). Some democrats are still pushing for an alternative to the physical fence. So based in part on your experience with SBInet what would you counsel the Governor (inaudible) technology to replace the physical fence? And if I could ask a second question (inaudible). How important has Operation Streamline been?
Secretary Chertoff: The same answer. Which question which I'll answer first is Streamline has been very important. The prosecution of people for illegal entry has a huge deterrent effect, and it's been very successful where it's been used and I think the more it's used the more successful it will be.
The fence, we've never argued to fence the whole border. We've argued that in some places technology is the right answer. In some places physical fencing is the right answer. In some places a blend of both is the right answer.
And if you work with the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection, as I have they can explain with precision why certain techniques work in some areas and not in others.
In Yuma, for example, Yuma sector, before we built fence in, people would just run across the border, like dozens, hundreds, because they could disappear into a town literally in half a minute, and there was no way to stop it. The fence has totally shut that down cold. That sector has seen a dramatic drop in crossings.
There are other areas where I would say fence isn't very helpful in a physical way, and that's where what I call virtual fence or technology works.
So I guess I'm kind of the ultimate pragmatist. I believe in figuring out what works, based on the facts, and doing what works in a particular place that you're trying to address. And that's going to be a mix of different techniques. ;
For those who say the fence doesn't work, I can tell you, you have to argue with the facts. The reason that the flow in Yuma went down was significantly because the people who used to stream across the border can't do it any more.
Now is it impossible to get over a fence? No. But it takes time. And that time particularly in an area of the border that's near an urban location, that time becomes critical to success or failure on the part of the Border Patrol.
So I think that when you sit down -- you know, we're going to have most of the fencing that we want done anyway -- I think when you sit down and you analyze it, you'll see that there's a good mix that has to apply in different places.
Mr. Cook: We want to thank you for this visit and for the previous ones. Thank you.
Secretary Chertoff: And I want to thank you for hosting. I find these very stimulating. It's great to talk to a lot of you at once. I really appreciate the work that you do. It's very hard, I know, to understand and explain complicated issues, and I can't say I never have a complaint, but I do appreciate the work you do and I think it's important.
And for what it's worth, I do read the clips, and it's one of the ways in which I do manage the Department, in the sense that it tells me things I've got to ask about.
Now sometimes the answer is the newspaper article was wrong, but sometimes the answer is the newspaper article is right. And sometimes that tells me there's something we need to fix.
And so for that very important service, I want to thank you.
Mr. Cook: Thank you, sir.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on December 3, 2008.
