security

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 →

Reagan Building Security Follies: We Are Incompetent Too.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ronald_Reagan_Building_-_Washington,_DC

Once a month I give an ethics seminar at the Reagan building in Washington D.C. This is a massive, confusing, and absurdly expensive government edifice that serves as a center for events, conferences and exhibits, also houses some agencies. Any terrorist who got inside with out a map and a Segue would rsik wandering around lost for a week, but there are also usually elected officials, judges or VIPs in the vast expanse,  along with a Boy Scout troop or two.

Usually I am dropped off, and go in through a main entrance off of 14th Street. So I have to go through a metal detector, have my brief case x-rayed, and, for extra measure, get wanded, because my metal hip joint sets off the alarm. (50% of the time, I may add, the process is executed by surly, rude security officers.)

Yesterday, though, I drove myself into the city. The security officers stopped my car at the garage entrance, asked for ID, and checked my car’s trunk (not the back seat), and allowed me to park. Then I took the elevator to the floor where my lecture venue was, and proceeded to the seminar, where I easily slaughtered all 320 people in the room by detonating the bomb under my suit. OK, that’s not true. But it could have been.Nobody checked my brief case: the bomb could have been there too. There is no screening if you drive into the garage, beyond the trunk search. This has been the system for years, and both Bush administration and Obama administration officials must have been made aware of it years ago. Either the ritual at the front entrance is for show, wasting our time and submitting us to indignities for reasons of public perception only, or the lax security at the parking garage is a blatant and dangerous security flaw that should have been fixed. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

militia

I don’t agree with everything in Michael’s  take-down of a comment by Eric R. to my post, “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post,” but as an example of the genre ( mastered on Ethics Alarms by the 2011 Commenter of the Year tgt and others), it’s a gem. The main point, that the Second Amendment has significant symbolic value as a right that reminds the government that the citizens of a democracy will not bare their throats to central power, is a crucial one, which I touched on in an earlier Ethics Alarms post. An armed insurrection against the government would be a catastrophe, of course. Still, while those Americans who believe that arming citizens against possible government tyranny trust too little, the citizens who argue that the government should be able to disarm the populace in the name of safety trust far too much.

I did remove one small non-substantive part of the post, because I really dislike mockery as a device on Ethics Alarms (the unedited comment is still under the original post.) I particularly think Michael’s identification of the reasons underlying the recent spate of mad dog killings is seriously off the mark. My own list, in order of influence would be…

  1. The difficulty of getting seriously disturbed individuals institutionalized, and the lack of places to keep and treat them.
  2. The availability of assault-type weapons to such disturbed individuals.
  3. The failure to enforce existing gun regulations
  4. The increasing difficulty and complexity of life generally, making it harder for those who are poor, poorly trained, not especially bright, or emotionally fragile to compete and succeed.
  5. The pervasive media, which creates false norms of success and happiness that are unachievable for most Americans.
  6. The culture of guns and violence, which is intensified by the entertainment media, but which is also a core American characteristic that isn’t going away.
  7. The publicity given to mass murderers by the news media.

But I digress.

Here is Michael’s tough Comment of the Day, to the post “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post”. The bold sections below are quotes from Eric’s comment: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

“When will America choose to protect children instead of guns?”

—- The headline writer for the Washington Post, introducing columnist Petula Dvorak’s column this morning on the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting, which took the lives of 26, including 20 children.

Newtown shooting

Presumably the Post’s headline writer was inspired to come up with that headline by the similar statement from Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, who was quoted in Dvorak’s essay. Edelman said,

“This latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke. It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to fail to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.”

This is not quite as irresponsible and dangerous as the Post’s headline, but it is close. The suggestion that greater safety and security compels and justifies abandoning the core rights that make the United States unique and free is the ticket to tyranny, benevolent or otherwise. Continue reading →