Chertoff has set about reorganizing the department. Scott Weber, who was Chertoff's senior counselor at DHS until February and is now a partner at the law firm of Patton Boggs, says, "I think the department is more responsive now. I saw it become more responsive in my own tenure there." He adds, "People need to be realistic in their expectations as to how quickly an agency can mature."
In an interview, Robert Stephan, the DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, said that he had no knowledge of HomeGuard and that anyone who worked on the case has since left. The department, he said, did successfully pilot a more traditional webcam program that pipes surveillance images to local law enforcement centers; that program will start being deployed this year. For key facilities such as dams, pipelines, and nuclear and chemical facilities, "there's a very extensive use of surveillance technology across the board," he said.
Moreover, the department maintains a comprehensive inventory of key assets and resources, sorted by sector, location, and risk. (For obvious reasons, it's not made public.) Later this month, Stephan said, the government will release its National Infrastructure Protection Plan, the fruit of a two-year strategic effort. And, since the HomeGuard days, DHS has established a science and technology directorate that seeks and evaluates homeland-security innovations, matching them to real-world needs. "The right brains are much more connected than they ever were before," Stephan says.
"I think we've been able to build a much better interlocked defensive web than ever before," he adds, "but we still have a considerable way to go."
He might want to give Jay Walker a call. Walker says that the intervening years have only improved HomeGuard's technology and that he and his company would "step right up" if the government decided to look at HomeGuard again. "We didn't go away saying, 'We'll never deal with the federal government again,' " he says. "We went away saying, 'They've got a tough job; they've got to evaluate a million things.'"
Perhaps they should evaluate this one.
© Copyright 2006 National Journal
Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.
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