Secret Service

The Sixth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2014 (Part 4 of 4)

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

mamoru-samuragochi2

Outrageous Hoax Of The Year

Mamoru Samuragochi, the composer sometimes known as “The Japanese Beethoven” because he composed critically acclaimed works despite being deaf, was exposed as double fraud: he didn’t compose the works that made him Japan’s most popular classical composer, and he isn’t even really deaf!  Samuragochi hired a musical ghostwriter named Takashi Niigaki to compose more than twenty compositions for Samuragochi since 1996.

Funniest Outrageous Hoax

Fake Panda

This.

Unethical Artist Of The Year

Performance artist Maximo Caminero, who  walked into the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, entered a special exhibit of sixteen ancient Chinese vases painted over in bright colors by celebrated Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, picked up one of them, and immediately after a security guard instructed him not to touch the exhibit, allowed the vase to fall from his hands, shattering into bits. Caminero admitted that smashing the pottery, which was valued at a million dollars,  was intentional, and was his protest against in support of local artists like himself whose work is not exhibited at the museum while the art of international artists like Weiwei is.

Unethical Veterinarian Of The Year

Fort Worth, Texas veterinarian Lou Tierce lost his license for five years as a result of, among other transgressions, his telling the owners of a Leonburger (it’s a very big dog) that their pet was terminally ill and had to be euthanized, then secretly keeping the dog alive in a small cage so he could use Sid’s blood for transfusions to Dr. Tierce’s other canine patients. Eventually an assistant at the clinic blew the whistle and alerted Sid’s owners, who rescued their dog and sicced the law on the worst veterinarian since Dean Jones menaced Beethoven.

Unethical Doctor Of The Year

Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s medical expert, endangered the public by defying a voluntary quarantine for possible Ebola exposure,  because she just couldn’t bear to be without her favorite soup.

Scam of the Year

Jonathan-Gruber-1

The Affordable Care Act.

 Unethical Federal Agency Of The Year

The Secret Service. Lots of competition in this category: the Veterans Administration, the I.R.S., the CDC, the Justice Department, NSA…but when you essentially have one job to do and do it badly, sloppily carelessly and dangerously, there’s really not much more to say Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Un-Named Members Of Mitt Romney’s Campaign Staff

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
My guess? This whole Secret Service mess makes Clint want to throw up. Then there's that Mediaite headline...

My guess? This whole Secret Service mess makes Clint want to throw up. Then there’s that Mediaite headline…

 Inside Sources Reports:

“Multiple sources inside the Romney presidential campaign confirm that a Secret Service agent provided details of President Obama’s schedule several days prior to the President’s campaign stops becoming public….In the closing weeks of the 2012 campaign, a Secret Service agent was on the ground in a key swing state to coordinate security ahead of several campaign stops by the President. The agent, who was married, made advances towards a Romney campaign staff member.

InsideSources spoke with two staffers who witnessed the events in question. Each spoke on condition of anonymity and independently confirmed the details.

In one particular incident at a bar in late October 2012, the Secret Service agent, who had a number of drinks during the meeting, unprompted and in an apparent attempt to impress one of the staffers, began providing details of President Obama’s schedule. The information included times and locations of the President’s events in the final days of the election. The President’s campaign would not release these details of the President’s schedule publicly until several days later.

The sources state that the same agent on a separate occasion provided joy rides in a Secret Service vehicle with the lights flashing.

The leaked schedule was later passed on within the campaign. Others inside the campaign recall seeing the schedule, but the source of the information was not revealed. The schedule, therefore, was met only with skepticism. The details of the President’s schedule later proved to be accurate.

Former advisers to the Romney campaign note that the leaked schedule, which was not widely circulated within the campaign, did not impact the campaign’s strategy. It received little attention as the election was days away.”

Wait...what????

Multiple members of Mitt Romney’s staff knew that a Secret Service agent was endangering the President by revealing sensitive details about his schedule in 2012, and they waited until now to let anyone know?

They had an absolute duty—as Americans— to reveal this to the Secret Service itself immediately. Were they just waiting for a juicy time to reveal it, say, after this same idiot with an earpiece got the President killed? Did Mitt Romney approve the lack of the proper response? Or some campaign strategist who feared that the revelation would backfire, and cost votes? How many Romney staff members knew the President was at risk, and kept it to themselves? Do we even know now who this agent was, and whether he is still on duty?

The damage done by the incompetence of the Democratic government is substantially amplified by the ethical obtuseness of its Republican critics.

BONUS: The Mediaite headline on this story has to be one of the worst-composed in recent memory:

“Secret Service Agent Allegedly Told Someone Obama’s Movements to ‘Impress a Woman'”

I read it two ways, and neither was what the headline was supposed to convey:

#1: Obama was trying to impress some woman

#2: Ew!

_____________________________

Pointer: Mediaite

Facts: Inside Sources

Update on the Secret Service: Mud

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

muddy

The Secret Service Director, Julia Pierson, resigned.

Because today’s news carried yet another tale of a dangerous botch by her agency, an episode in which the President was allowed to ride in a elevator with an unscreened individual who had a gun on his person, this looks like a final straw situation when no final straw was needed.

It was crucial that she be fired, by Obama, and that this be made clear, as well as why she was being fired: incompetence, poor performance by the Service, no trust of confidence by him, Congress or the public. This should have been conveyed immediately after the fence-jumper fiasco. If not then, immediately after Pierson’s embarrassing performance before Congress yesterday. The message that the President himself will not tolerate sub-par performance would be a welcome and encouraging one even as ridiculously late as that would be, six years into his Presidency.

But no. As usual, the Administration’s message, and values,  are as clear as mud. Homeland Security Secretary Joe Jeh’s statement announcement of the resignation was typical equivocal murk:

1. I have accepted Pierson’s resignation.

2. I salute her 30 years of service.

3. We are studying the fence-jumping incident.

4. Scrutiny “by a distinguished panel of independent experts of the September 19 incident and related issues concerning the Secret Service is warranted. The Panelists will be named shortly.”

5. “The Secret Service is one of the finest official protection services in the world, consisting of men and women who are highly trained and skilled professionals prepared to put their own lives on the line in a second’s notice for the people they protect. Last week, the Secret Service was responsible for the protection of the President as well as 140 visiting heads of state or government as they convened at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Likewise, in August the Secret Service handled the protection of 60 world leaders as they convened in Washington, D.C. for the African Summit. As usual, the Secret Service executed these highly complex and demanding assignments without incident. There is no other protection service in the world that could have done this.”

So if the Secret Service it is so good, and performed so well recently, why is the Director quitting? Why is a panel needed, if the agents are so well-trained and the agency performs so well?

Mud.

____________________

Pointer: Slate

Sources: Washington Post 1, 2

Will President Obama’s New Leadership Model Cripple U.S. Management Competence For Decades?

/ Jack Marshall / 89 Comments

America in ruins

 It seems to be a distinct possibility.

The President of the United States is the culture’s most powerful, visible and influential leader. Like it of not, he is also a role model for leadership and management across society. He has the most responsibility, the largest organization to oversee, and the most vital interests at stake. The management and leadership techniques he uses necessarily set a standard others, especially young, inexperienced, aspiring leaders and management, will be encouraged to emulate.

What are they learning? To begin with, they are learning to accept a startlingly low standard for “confidence.”

The President has now issued two statements that he has “confidence” in the Secret Service. The assessment has special significance because the health and safety, the very lives, of the President, his wife, his young children and his staff is in the Secret Service’s hands, and the agency would seem to have demonstrated beyond all doubt that it is incapable of meeting any reasonable expectations or trust. We know that the agents are barely trained, and that they lack professionalism and self discipline. We know that agents availed themselves of prostitutes in South America, and got drunk on duty in Amsterdam. We know that  a gunman fired at least seven bullets that struck the upstairs residence of the White House in 2011, aided by a botched Secret Service response, and that just this month a deranged fence-jumper got into the residence and was running amuck before he was stopped.

The Service’s statement on that incident was jaw-dropping, saying agents “showed tremendous restraint and discipline in dealing with” an intruder who could have had a bomb or deadly intent. How could this President, any President, any leader, any manager, have “confidence” in a security force under these circumstances, with its own management displaying such a bizarre attitude?

Well, I don’t know. It’s a brand new paradigm, the most lassez faire, gentle, kind,empathetic and understanding, hands-off, no-fault, no standards, no accountability leadership style I have ever seen at any management level higher than a lemonade stand. I’m sure many members of the public, especially those who goof off at their jobs, steal supplies, file fake reports, arrive to work stoned, never finish assigned tasks and think they have a right to keep their jobs and paychecks no matter how useless they are, would love to have Obama as a boss. Such a boss would express confidence in the most obviously inept and untrustworthy employee imaginable, and apparently mean it. And never, never fire him. Continue reading →

Making Us Suffer For Their Incompetence: The Secret Service and the Barn Door Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

White House Security

A mentally ill veteran got inside the White House Friday. He could have had a bomb, or a gun, and the President and his family might have been targets. How did this happen? Mass incompetence and a break-down in security. Multiple “rings” of protection failed. Was it because the system was inadequate? No, it was because the Secret Service screwed up.

1. A plainclothes surveillance team stands guard outside the White House fence, and its job is to spot fence-jumpers and sound a warning before they go over. The team wasn’t paying attention.

2. Omar Jose Gonzalez climbed over the fence to the lawn, where a Secret Service officer was supposed to intercept him. Gonzalez got past him.

3.  At that point, an attack dog was supposed to be released to bring the intruder down. It wasn’t.

4. A SWAT team is next in the series of obstacles, but it was late to the party, trailing the intruder, and being apparently unwilling to shoot him as procedures dictate.

5. Gonzalez reached the White House door. A guard is supposed to be directly in front of the door. Not this time. (And still no fire from the SWAT team…I can’t imagine why a white SWAT team member would hesitate to shoot an apparently unarmed black man, can you?)

6. The door was supposed to be locked. Nope.

Of course, no system is better than the human beings working within it. Like so many agencies in the Obama Administration—the NSA, HHS, Justice, the IRS, the Veteran’s Administration, the State Department, Homeland Security, the GSA—the Secret Service had shown unambiguous signs of poor discipline, lax management and poor oversight, so its performance on this occasion should not surprise anyone, though it is cause for alarm. The Secret Service’s response to a fiasco of its own making is to place blame elsewhere, in this case, in the systems it didn’t execute properly, with new burdens falling on those who had nothing whatsoever to do their collapse.

The agency is floating a  proposal is to keep people off the sidewalks around the White House, to add barriers to the perimeter, and to screen visitors as far as a block away from the entrance gates. This is immediately recognizable as the Barn Door Fallacy, in which adopting excessive and  draconian measures that might have prevented an unusual disaster or near disaster is used by those responsible to distract from the real reasons for the event—bad luck, stupidity, incompetence—and make sure that what has already happened can’t happen again, with concern for the cost to others and other considerations being discarded entirely. Thus the fact that Boston’s Logan airport didn’t follow its existing security procedures and allowed planes to be hijacked by terrorists resulted in billions of dollars of national airport security and endless inconvenience for law-abiding passengers—to stop what had already occurred. Thus a deranged young man using an elementary school for a shooting spree was used to justify arguments to ban firearms from purchase by non-deranged, honest and trustworthy citizens. Now the fact that the Secret Service can’t perform the tasks they are supposedly trained to do—and an embarrassing episode arising from the Service’s procrastination in dealing with an existing inadequacy–is being used to continue the transformation of the nation’s capital into an eyesore of barricades being prowled by secret police, so a disturbed veteran who belonged in a mental hospital won’t elude agents, dogs and doors to burst into the home of the President. Continue reading →

Hindsight Bias Case Study: Shooting D.C.’s Post Partum, Mad-Dog Driver

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
"Ok, now, let's talk about this: what other options do we have to stop this mad-dog driver, other than shooting her? Ma;'am, will you pleas take 5 in your murderous rampage while we meet? Ma'am?"

“Ok, now, let’s talk about this: what other options do we have to stop this mad-dog driver, other than shooting her? Ma;’am, will you pleas take 5 in your murderous rampage while we meet? Ma’am?”

Hindsight bias isn’t the worst or most pernicious reasoning fallacy, but it may be the most annoying, and is certainly the most common. After an event in which one or more instant decisions had to be made in seconds or minutes, critics with time a-plenty solemnly explain how they would have done things differently, and how the original decision-maker was stupid, cowardly, misguided, incompetent, unethical, or even criminal. The most striking example of a hind-sight bias victim in recent years is Penn State’s Mike McQueary, but at least in his situation there is room for argument, though I argued here that few of his critics can know how they would have responded under similar circumstances. In the case of this week’s shooting of a crazed Capitol Hill kamikaze motorist, later determined to be a troubled dental hygienist who may have been suffering from post-partum depression, I don’t think the criticism is rational, fair or justified, and shows hindsight bias at its worst.

 

Of course the Secret Service had to shoot her. It would have been reckless and negligent had they not. She had tried to crash through the White House barricades in an automobile. She had run down one officer, for all anyone knew at the time, fatally. She was refusing to stop, and was near D.C.’s Union Station, where there are people everywhere, and a car can easily run up on the sidewalks, which are wide. She had to be stopped immediately, or innocent people, maybe many people, were likely to die.

After she expired from the shots fired at her (but not before peeling away at a high speed), it was determined that the driver, later identified as Miriam Carey, was unarmed. The shooting agents didn’t know that, so it’s irrelevant. Besides, she was armed, with a deadly vehicle, and her motives were unclear. For all the officers knew, she was trying to kill as many pedestrians as she could. This wasn’t a typical situation or traffic stop. This was occurring at the center of our government, and security officers have to take enhanced precautions. The welfare of the individual causing the threat is not, and should not be, the primary concern.

Two factors in the incident seem do drive the unethical amateur second-guessing. One was that the woman’s toddler was in the car, and might have been harmed. This was not the Secret Service’s problem. Carey put her daughter in harm’s way, and if her conduct resulted in the child’s injury or death, she would have been totally responsible, not the agents who shot into the car. (They apparently were not aware of the child’s presence, so again, this in not a fair factor to consider after the fact.) The other factor: guns were involved. Thanks to programmed paranoia and gun-phobia irresponsibly planted in the culture by anti-gun zealots, many, too many, Americans arrive at a reflex position that any gun-related death is unnecessary, because guns, after all, are evil and should be banned. Such opinions should be treated as the products of deranged minds, or excessive Piers Morgan viewing.

A Facebook friend (and regular friend too), a distinguished and intelligent former journalist who I’m sure won’t mind my quoting him, asked his social network, “WAS THERE NO OTHER WAY?” That question is the epitome of hindsight bias. Sure there were other ways. Maybe an agent could have dived in the car window and dislodged her. Maybe a well-aimed shot at her hands could have made it impossible to drive. Perhaps they could have shot out the tires, hoping that the driver didn’t realize that you can still make a car with flat tires move at a pretty good clip, at least for a while. An electro-magnetic pulse might have stopped all the engines in the vicinity, neutralizing the car. Maybe Batman was nearby, or Corey Booker. None of that matters, because the security officials involved were in a unique and unprecedented situation, and had to accomplish their prime objective, stopping a dangerous individual in a highly populated area, under pressure, while in peril themselves, as quickly as possible. The proper question is not whether they could have done better, upon calm analysis and reflection. The question should only be, “Was the response reasonable under the circumstances?”

It was.

________________________________

Sources: Washington Post 1, 2

A Secret Service Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A despicable former Secret Service agent named Dan Emmett has self-published “Within Arm’s Length,” a tell-all  book about his work protecting the Clintons.  I’m not going to repeat any of his stories, and nobody should read his book either. This kind of thing is another fever on the way to the complete death of trust and professionalism.

Emmett’s job was to guard the First Family, and as part of his job he saw them all in private and unguarded moments. The Clintons had to trust that his sole objective was to ensure their safety, not to gather juicy material for a book, and they should not have had to worry about whether every stray remark or imagined slight would later find its way to the internet. “Within Arm’s Length” is nothing less than betrayal, and in my view, it falls just short of treason, and perhaps not short at all. Undermining the relationship between the Secret Service and the President of the United States, which this book does, threatens the safety of future Presidents. For agents to do their jobs, they must be trusted to the extent that nothing is withheld from them out of fear that they will disclose it. Emmett proves that such unquestionable trust is unwarranted, and in this sad era where betrayal is rewarded or shrugged off as predictable, probably impossible. Continue reading →

The 2009 Ethics Alarms Awards, Part 1: The Worst

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Welcome to the first annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the best and worst of ethics in 2009! These are the Worst; the Best is yet to come. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (and Dead Canary): Desiree Rogers

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ah, yes…the Desiree Rogers saga!

Desiree Rogers is the White House Social Secretary. She screwed up in her job. The odds are that 99% of the time, her particular lapse wouldn’t have had any tangible effect. She was unlucky, however, and it did.

It did because the Secret Service picked the same night to get sloppy, so a couple of professional cons obsessed with becoming the next Andy Warhol Stupid Celebrities of the Quarter Hour brazened their way into a White House state dinner, where, if they had been Ninjas or Steven Segal in disguise, they pretty much could have killed anyone they wanted to, including President Obama. They weren’t Ninjas; not all of Desiree’s luck was bad. They were only self-obsessed idiots. Continue reading →