Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast Roundtable

Release Date: February 27, 2008

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact 202-282-8010
Washington, D.C.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, good to be here.  We are hitting our fifth anniversary on March 1.  And I’ve been in this job a little bit over three years, so I’ve had an opportunity to look back and to see how far we’ve come in what I think, by the institutional standards of the government department, is a remarkably short period of time.

And let me touch on some, you know, very brief points.  We’ve got five major objectives to what we do.  One is to keep this country safe from dangerous people.  One is to keep dangerous things out of the country.  One is to protect and harden our various nationally significant critical infrastructure.  One is to respond effectively and to enhance preparedness.  And the last is to integrate and really develop a 21st century Department. 

If you look at what we had done -- let’s say with the first issue.  Some people have talked about -- let’s not say some people -- I have talked about three pathways for terrorists in this modern world:  communications, money, and travel.  Prior to 9/11, we had a lot of capability with respect to communications.  It may not have been all aimed at terrorists, but the capabilities were there.  And that’s obviously in other departments and the intelligence community.

Soon after 9/11, we moved forward on terrorist finance, with various lists that essentially “blacklists” certain financial institutions for supporting terrorism.  One of the challenges, of course, has always been that it’s a low-cost endeavor to carry out most terrorist attacks.  Therefore it’s really hard to choke off all of the financial support that’s out there, because even a few thousand dollars can support a terrorist attack.

But the biggest gap was travel, and people entering the country.  And that was what the 9/11 commission focused on as one of its major vulnerabilities for this country.  So let’s talk about where we have come.  At the ports of entry, we moved forward with e-passports.  We now have US-VISIT, which captures two fingerprints for everybody who comes into the country, and we are in the process of transitioning to 10 fingerprints, which allows us to capture latent -- to compare the 10 prints of people who come into the country, or who receive visas, against the latent fingerprints that we can pick up in safehouses or battlefields all around the world.  That helps us identify the unknown terrorist.

We have moved forward -- not as quickly as I would like -- with respect to securing the documentation on our land borders.  When the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative is fully deployed in June of 2009, we will have secure documents for crossing the land border.  And even as we speak, we have at least eliminated the greatest vulnerability, which is essentially unrestricted use of documents, and what we used to call -- what I call the “honor system,” where people could orally waive their way into the United States by simply saying, “I’m an American citizen.”

We are, as part of our visa waiver reform program, we’re going to begin rolling out Electronic Travel Authorization for visa waiver countries, beginning this summer.  That’s again a major step forward in our ability to identify people who are dangerous.  We’ve reached an agreement with the Europeans to get passenger name record information, which, again, is a very valuable, in terms of detecting people who have terrorist or dangerous connections who might want to come into the country.  And although we initially had resistance, the Europeans themselves are now going to adopt that system.

So I would say that we have transformed our capability to secure international travel and entry into the United States. 

Dangerous goods.  We’ve gone from what was, shortly after 9/11, zero-percent radiation scanning of containers coming into the country, to virtually 100 percent of containers being scanned for radiation when they come into the country.  We are similarly deploying a system of screening and scanning for international generation aviation.  And we’re developing a small boats strategy to look at the danger of small boats being used to smuggle in weapons of mass destruction.

Critical infrastructure.  We have thickened the layers of defense for aircraft.  We have hardened cockpit doors.  We have air marshals.  We have armed flight deck officers.  We now have a much more robust screening effort for people who come to board an airplane.  We are training and deploying behavioral detection officers who see, look at behavior, and can use that as a way of determining who we ought to take a closer look at. 

We have -- we are converting our travel document checkers from airport employees who just look at the document to see if the name matches, to those who actually can look at documents to see if there’s a problem with the document.  That’s a step forward in aircraft. 

We are deploying counter-IED and bomb-making strategies to our Office of Bomb Prevention.  We have fusion centers.  We are embarking on a cyber security program.  So, again, this is a huge change from where we were five years ago.

On response, we have our National Response Framework out.  We have budgeted and have underway the process of converting what used to be a part-time reserve cadre of workers with FEMA into a full-time -- 4,000 workers who are going to be full-time employees who can be a core around which other reserve workers can assemble.  That gives us a much greater capability to be able to deal with a major disaster. 

And I think if you look at what FEMA has done over the last couple of years -- and I was with the governors over the weekend, and I was -- I was actually startled by the number of governors who came up to me and said, you know, you guys really did a good job with our tornadoes, or our fires, or all these other things this year.  So I think we’ve made a lot of progress with respect to FEMA.

And finally, with respect to DHS, we are consolidating our financial base.  We are consolidating our networks.  It is a bit of a slow process, partly because we’re going to get funded by Congress.  When they try to cut, it tends to come out of our management piece, which is a lot of that non-glamorous but very important back-office stuff. 

I was kind of amused -- I opened a paper yesterday, Washington Post, and on the federal page they had some kind of GAO report on security for computers.  And I’m used to seeing that we’re at the bottom of that, and actually we were kind of towards the top.  So I thought, well, that’s pretty -- that really is a kind of a man-bites-dog story for the Department.

But more deeply than that, we are totally different in terms of our planning and our measuring the progress.  We now have all the components, working together to set up our equivalent of what the military has with planning and operations; a centralized planning and operations coordination office that allows all the components to plan together.  And we now measure everything.  We measure progress at the border.  We measure progress in responding to claims at FEMA. 

Three years ago, if I wanted to know how were we doing, it was almost impossible to get numbers, and it was almost impossible to get metrics that remained -- used the same standard day by day.  Now, I routinely get metrics on how we’re doing at the border, how we’re doing with respect to responding to FEMA claims, how we’re doing processing people at the ports of entry, how we’re doing at TSA with respect to wait times.  And that allows us to much more carefully monitor and address problems when we are actually implementing things.

So we’ve got a lot more to do, but I think we’re going to leave for the next administration a pretty well functioning Department that does have a good set of tools that will allow the next managers to come in.

The biggest obstacle my successor will face is, does the public and does Congress have the will to stick to the program?  Or, are we going to start to see people cannibalize Homeland Security because we haven’t been attacked for six years; it doesn’t seem like a burning issue anymore; there’s a lot of other things we could spend money on; and so therefore we will start to allow the progress to be degraded. 

And I’m hopeful that, you know -- I’m going to leave a little memo for my successor with kind of what I think are the pitfalls to watch out for, and the things that we’re doing.  And I hope that while obviously everyone is going to have their own plans for what works, the one thing that I hope doesn’t change is a commitment to finally doing what, you know, reports for 20 years have said that we should do, which is to build a serious homeland security system. 

Moderator:  Let me ask one or two quick ones, and then we’ll go around the table.  You’ve given us a good tour of the horizon of progress that you’ve made.  You’ve been giving recent congressional testimony as saying “complacency is the greatest enemy that we have, and the greatest challenge that we have.”  But it’s hard to imagine that somebody as smart as you are lies awake at night, worrying, sort of, just generally, about complacency.  Could you tell us one or two things -- one or two sort of specific things that you worry about other than the “Will we abandon homeland security”?

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes.  I’ve seen -- I’ll give you a couple of specific examples and a more general example. 

I remember sitting through part of the 9/11 hearings.  I was a judge -- I didn’t watch all of it; I watched little parts of it on the news.  And I remember over and over again hearing about problems at the border with documents, phony documents.  By the way, phony driver’s licenses were not just used by the 9/11 hijackers.  Tim McVeigh -- remember him? -- he rented his truck using a phony South Dakota driver’s license which he prepared by getting a blank form from some newspaper, typing in the information, and having somebody iron it. 

So this kind of stuff has been out there for a long time.  And yet when we try to get the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative implemented, which means shrinking the number of types of documents and having more security features, we get a firestorm from some of the border -- members of Congress, and some of the border businesses.  And their argument was, if you restrict oral declarations, if you don’t simply waive people, “Come on in, just come on in, I take your word for it,” that we would hurt their businesses; that there would be fewer impulse travelers.

And I have to tell you, I can still visualize the hole where the World Trade Center was when I was there with the Department of Justice a couple weeks after 9/11.  I don’t have any difficulties seeing the value of restricting, you know, the type of documents for security purposes if it’s going to prevent something like that.  And I put the focus on, you know, “My local sports bar is going to have a drop in business,” was hard to reconcile with my recollection of the temper of the times right after 9/11, and all the attention that was paid to the 9/11 commission.

Now, if people thought the 9/11 commission was full of hot air, why didn’t they say so at the time?  Why didn’t they say, “Oh, this is ridiculous; we don’t need more document security”?  So the only inference I can draw is that with the passage of time and the lack of a successful attack, the interest is waning, and other more, you know, kind of short-term things have come up.  But that’s part of what I’m talking about.

Moderator:  Let me ask you one other thing.  The last time you were here -- and then we’ll move to my colleague -- the last time you were here with a group, you were hard at work pushing for the immigration law package.  And I was wondering what the -- what you would say about the effect of the failure to get that legislation has had on the Department.  I notice that the Post this morning is reporting that ICE has increased its deportation proceedings markedly.  And Mimi has a story this morning, USA Today, saying that assaults on government agents along the border have increased. 

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, we’re continuing to do the piece that is in our domain to do under existing law, which is the border enforcement.  And I believe that the reason -- the main reason immigration -- comprehensive immigration reform failed was because of the lack of public confidence in the government’s commitment on the enforcement side. 

I finished reading a book by Jorge Castaneda, who used to be the Foreign Minister of Mexico.  It’s called “Ex-Mex.”  It’s a very interesting book.  And he basically says -- he acknowledges that historically what happened was powerful interests turned a blind eye to immigration law violations, economic interests and advocacy groups, and therefore we’ve had for 30 years, up until very recently, kind of a wink-wink, nod-nod on illegal immigration. 

And I think that’s right.  And I think the people -- I think we did not persuade people that the will was there to change that model as part of a comprehensive package.  So I feel that we have to kind of establish that degree of commitment and build that credibility before we go back and do it again.

I think in the end you’re going to have to have comprehensive immigration reform, because otherwise you’re fighting very hard against the laws of economics, and that’s always a very, very difficult battle to win.  But I think in the short term we’re going to have to build our credibility, and that’s what we’re going to do.

Question:  Thank you for coming, today.  I was wondering about the National Applications Office, because we had a chance to talk about that in December.  And I think it was mid-December that you said to expect the charter by the end of the week.  And then yesterday, Mr. Allen was testifying before Congress, and he said that the National Applications Office’s charter would be out sometime soon.  So I was wondering, both about what explains the delay, but also whether that -- do you think that will be -- encompass whatever -- get the program back on track, because folks I’ve spoken to in Congress seem to feel that the charter isn’t sufficient; that they want something called a “legal framework” as well as, I guess, a bunch of standard operating procedures that would detail that.

Secretary Chertoff:  The charter is basically drafted, it’s being signed, it’s going around for the final signature.  We have briefed the Hill on it.  And I think we have gotten, you know, pretty positive reactions. 

The charter is a legal framework; it’s not just standard operating procedures.  There was an original version of standard operating procedures, but we’re now -- and the legal framework is the existing laws of the United States.  We’ve made it very clear that, for example, we’re not going to use -- and there was never any intent to use, but it’s now very explicit -- that we’re not going to use this capability, for example, to intercept communications.  That will be done under the traditional method of, you know, Title III and whatever.  And that if there are unforeseen applications that arguably implicate existing laws, we will comply with the existing laws.  So this will actually be a framework that ensures that these technologies are used consistently with all the existing restrictions.

Question: But why the delay?  I mean --

Secretary Chertoff:  Oh, you know, it takes ages to get anything signed out.  You know, the lawyers get into it and they start to wordsmith it.  Then we decided to add -- finish up the operating procedure before we issued the charter so we’d have all the documents.  Then you have to track everybody down to sign it.  I mean, after three years in the interagency, nothing ever gets done as quickly as you would like.  And, of course, we did have the holidays; that was a little bit of an intervening period. 

But we are within the -- you know, it just needs to be finally signed by everybody.  And we have been briefing the Hill on this, and I think, you know, this is -- will be out very soon.  There are a couple of pieces that need to be done under the law: a privacy impact assessment, a civil liberties impact assessment. 

I hope those will come out in a week or two.  And that’s necessary before we actually go warm on the program. 

Question:  Okay, so that’s -- those are the final hurdles?

Secretary Chertoff:  Right.

Question:  Good morning, sir.  Last 24 hours, two interesting bits of news about al Qaeda.  Yesterday one of the top U.S. generals in Afghanistan briefed reporters, and he said, in effect, that al Qaeda is now so healthy presumably in its Pakistani safe haven, that it is now coordinating training, and he said “resourcing” -- which I think means funding and training -- much of the insurgency in Afghanistan.  In other words, they’re coordinating much of the war being fought against us in Afghanistan.

This morning, we are learning that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two in al Qaeda, is going to put out some sort of video or audio eulogy of Abu Laith al-Libi, the al Qaeda trainer in Afghanistan who, it is reported, the CIA recently killed with an all-fire missile in Pakistan.

So I guess my question is, I know people in the government office say, well, these statements that get put out are just, you know, chatter, and it’s sort of an annoyance but doesn’t really mean anything.  But from a Homeland Security perspective, doesn’t this sort of concern you that our enemy is able to operate so freely that, in the case of Zawahiri, he can put out 14 video or audio messages in a period of 14 months, and that these guys are now coordinating and funding the Afghan insurgents?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, I think what -- I mean, this is actually what I’ve said over the last nine months.  I mean, this started out last summer when I started to talk about the strategic picture.  I mean, I do think that although clearly worse off than they were prior to 9/11, in the last year they’ve had somewhat more freedom of movement in the frontier areas of Pakistan, and that has given them more capability to plan and train and communicate.  And that is -- it’s not a sign of an imminent threat, but it suggests something to be concerned about from a strategic standpoint. 

Similarly, from a strategic standpoint, the expansion of what I would call a franchise operation in North Africa, through al Qaeda in Maghreb, and even somewhat in East Africa and Somalia, those are bad developments. 

However, I do want to balance it out, because they’re not -- it’s not all rosy for them.  Here are some negative developments.  I think, really, the almost-close-to-the-defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq and the humiliation of having them turned on by their own Sunni co-religionists, I think is a blow to their prestige.  I think that is a problem for them that they came in, they declared an Islamic state of Iraq, and now the people who they were supposed to be liberating have turned on them and hate them.  So that’s a negative for them. 

I think it’s a negative for them when they blow up schoolchildren in Algeria, because the people they brought in under AQIM are somewhat reckless -- killed innocent people, and that hurts them with their own -- the constituency they’re trying to appeal to with propaganda.  And sometimes when you read -- when you see their propaganda, they’re actually defensive.  They’re trying to explain away stuff that’s going on that doesn’t look good.

So the bottom line is this:  There are some negative developments, but it’s not -- but there’s some positive developments, and I think this is kind of not surprising, because it’s what you’d expect from a very long struggle.

Question:  Just as a -- a one little follow-up.  Again, the General talks about -- Major General Rodriguez yesterday talked about resourcing.  Do you have a sense that al Qaeda is getting a new influx of funding from its Gulf donors, or others?  And does that concern you in terms of their ability to attack --

Secretary Chertoff:  I think it goes up and down.  I think sometimes it goes up, I think sometimes it goes down.  You know, sometimes some of our -- I think the sorties have really cracked down a lot; that’s been very helpful. 

I’ll tell you what concerns me more is, if you look at events in Europe over the last year, I’m concerned lest they recruit Europeans who have -- they have converted to their ideology, or people who have deep European roots, and that that would make Europe a more attractive target, or become a platform to attack us. 

That’s why we have pushed forward on this Electronic Travel Authorization.  That’s why we’ve -- a lot of what we’ve done over the last year has been designed to increase the information we have about who’s coming in from Europe, and -- so that we can let the vast, vast majority come without hindrance, but have the ability to identify those that we need to take a closer look at.

Question:  I wondered if you could give us your current assessment of the ability of the Guard and Reserve to perform homeland missions?  As you know, a commission before the Congress said that the U.S. Northern Command’s planning was perhaps incompetent or not what it should be, and that given the equipment issues with the Guard and Reserve which has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and all the rest of it, they’re not quite ready.  Where do you see it now?

Secretary Chertoff:  First of all, I have to say I think our planning with NORTHCOM is light years better than it was three years ago.  And, you know, I spoke with General Renuart, and before him I spoke to Admiral Keating.  We are now -- have integrated our planning around 15 planning scenarios.  And whereas three years ago when I came onto this job there was very little, there was a pro forma interaction, certainly after Katrina everybody changed their attitude, and we now work very closely together.

Now, what I -- I’m not quite -- don’t have quite as much visibility into, is the relationship within DOD between NORTHCOM and the National Guard?  It’s a funny relationship.  NORTHCOM doesn’t have a lot of regular standing troops.  My understanding is they’re beginning to try to develop some permanent forces.  And the National Guard, you know, has many missions, including missions -- you know, many missions domestically in the States.  So I think that in terms of how DOD organizes internally and how much of a standing force it wants to have, I think that’s an issue they’re working on, and probably you could ask them about that.

Question:  Mr. Secretary, to follow up on James’s question regarding the threat from Afghanistan, Pakistan and that area -- there’s obviously the U.S. troop presence is coming down in Iraq, and there are now some suggestions that some of those troops be shifted over to Afghanistan to help deal with that.  As somebody who worries about the threat here in the homeland and the idea that some of those fighters could be plotting attacks here, what’s your view on that?  Do you believe that that would help the security situation?  Do you think that that presence in Afghanistan would (inaudible) border area?

Secretary Chertoff:  I don’t think I have the visibility to the specifics of force deployment to second-guess what the generals and Bob Gates and everybody are going to recommend to the President.  I think in general it is very much in our interest, and is very much in the interest of governments in South Asia, to address this issue of terrorists and extremists operating in the frontier areas.  And, you know, exactly how to do that, given the fact that, obviously, there are sovereign countries there, you know, that’s largely a diplomatic and a military issue.

My concern, though, is to watch to see whether the terrorists are using the breathing space that they have.  And it’s not -- as I say, it’s not what it was prior to 9/11, but it’s -- you know, I’d like to see them have less -- what they’re using, that breathing space -- to launch, in the pipeline, attacks against Europe, against us, against other parts of the world.  That’s my concern.

Question:  And do you -- what concern do you have, as the government, the new government in Pakistan, assembles itself, that al Qaeda try and exploit that?

Secretary Chertoff:  The question -- I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s going to be, I think, important that they focus on the need to not allow parts of their territory to become exploited by terrorists who want to launch attacks against -- either within Pakistan, or in other parts of the world.

And I know that traditionally the frontier areas of Pakistan have been very difficult for a central government to control, and they have a long history of being independent, but if they’re allowed to be areas where al Qaeda or similar groups can plan, train and exercise, then that increases a danger to the rest of the world, as well as to Pakistan itself.  I mean, they were just -- the assassination of Bhutto is a pretty stark reminder of the threat to Pakistan, itself.  This is not just an American issue; it’s a Pakistani issue.

Question:  The Senate Committee on Homeland Security recently said that the administration has proposed a 34 percent cut to pre-disaster mitigation fund, a 35 percent cut in the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, and there’s not enough money to implement the post-Katrina Act, including these emergency response strike teams.  How do you square that -- those funding initiatives with the stated commitment to preventing the next Katrina?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, first -- the first thing I want to say is, when we talk about cut, that usually means a cut from what Congress enacted; Congress usually enacts more than we ask for.  And to me, it’s a very simple proposition.  I don’t dispute that there are many worthwhile things to spend money on, but I live in a world of mathematics, and the numbers have to add up a hundred percent.  You don’t get 120 percent.

We’ve got an expanded budget; our budget totally increased this year.  But I have to say to people who want more grant money, for example, where is that money coming from?  Should we cut back on what we’re doing at the border?  Shall we -- and this is a favorite -- should we not -- should we cut the management budget?  But, you see, when we do that, then we don’t have auditors, we don’t have acquisition specialists, we don’t have computer specialists -- and then we get criticized because we’re not managing the Department well.

In the end, the essence of budget, whether you’re in federal government or state government, is, you’ve got to make some tough decisions.  And I think the budget we produced was a well-balanced budget.  I think it funded all of our responsibilities in a way that improves our capabilities.  Could you add more?  You could add more, but what would you take it away from?

Question:  Well, I mean, of course, I mean, that’s what every Secretary says.

Secretary Chertoff:  That’s right.

Question:  But how do you defend a 35 percent reduction in disaster mitigation?  I mean, some might say that since we haven’t had a catastrophic disaster in a couple of years, we’ve gone -- the Department has gone a little soft on that.

Secretary Chertoff:  The first thing I would say is, you know, Congress may have increased the amount we originally asked for; I don’t know that it’s a cut from what we originally asked for.  But then here’s my question:  What do you want to take it from?  What should we cut?  Shall we cut border?  Shall we cut management?  Shall we not have -- shall we not do anything about our computers?  Shall we cut our acquisitions specialists so that we get criticized because we’re not managing our acquisitions?  I mean, I’m looking to see what we’re -- it’s not like I’ve spent money redecorating my office and that’s money where we’d cut.  That’s, to me, what the essence of this issue is.  I mean, I -- there are many worthwhile things to spend on.

Now, last year the way Congress dealt with the issue of the budget, the way that they were able to expand the budget, is, frankly, a lot of our border budget was an “emergency,” and so it wasn’t part of the base line.  And I know that -- you know, this used to bore the heck out of me when I was in civilian life.  But when you live with the budget, you actually see how important and interesting this is.  If you take what is a core element of your job and you make it an emergency, then you have other money to spend on things so you can increase your budget in other areas.  The problem is, it’s a little bit misleading, because it’s not really an emergency, because we know we’re going to have to spend money on the border every single year.

So unless we’re going to continue to declare an emergency every year, we’re at some point going to have to decide how we are going to make our budget number?  How are we going to stay within the budget?  And if we’re going to expand the Department -- and we did get a big expansion this year, compared to other departments -- do I have a right to say, “No, it’s not enough, you should expand it more”? And then should we, like, totally cut out funding for another department?

I mean, this is -- I always say that we’re not talking about wasting the money.  I’m not suggesting that the critics are -- you know, that hazard mitigation isn’t a good program.  It is a good program.  You’ve got to balance.  We can’t fund everything to the degree that everybody would like, because it just doesn’t add up.  The numbers don’t add up.  And no matter how much you complain, I’m the guy who has to sit there with the running tape, and it’s got to add up to a number at the end of the day, and that’s kind of what the problem is.

Question:  I wanted to ask about the border fence.  Your Department has been under strong attacks by the Democratic candidates for President, Texas politicians of both parties, landowners along the border cities and businesses, for being what they say is arrogant and inflexible and unwilling to take their views into account.

I was wondering if you have any sympathy for the residents and landowners along the border, or should they just get over this and accept the fence?  And are you satisfied that your department has consulted adequately with people along the border?

Secretary Chertoff:  Maybe I’m -- maybe this was a dream.  I thought I remembered last year a huge outcry demanding we build a fence all across the southern border.  Was that an imaginary thing?  I thought there was a huge public demand for this.  And then I thought I heard myself getting roundly criticized because I didn’t want to build double fence from sea to shining sea, and I was viewed as squishy and soft on this.  What I said at the time was, we’re going to go to the Border Patrol, we’re going to use the kind of lay down of technology and infrastructure that they think works -- and they have to convince me; I mean, I don’t just take their word for it.

So we really looked at every single mile of the border, and we came up with what seemed to be the right mix.  And in most of the border, which is federally owned land or parkland, it’s not really much of an issue, although the environmentalists protested against the fence there.  So then we had a lot of town hall meetings in Texas.  We met with mayors.

The proof of our consultation is what happened a couple of weeks ago, when I was down in McAllen, Texas.  And there the look -- they came to us and said, look, we have a proposal that’s a win-win, it will satisfy our needs to get flood -- better flood protection from the river, but it will serve the purpose of (inaudible).  And we said, great, we’re happy to listen to you.

So I’ve -- we’ve been very willing to consult.  And I sympathize with the fact that people don’t want this in their backyard, but here’s the part that I think maybe people don’t understand, and maybe here I’m a little different from what people are used to.  I’m willing to have a fair and constructive discussion, but I’m not willing to have an endless discussion.  Insulting me or attacking me does not cause me to go, ooh, I’ve been insulted and attacked, I’m going to stop doing what I’m doing.

Here’s the question I ask myself:  If the Border Patrol believes, in a particular area fencing is important because it stops the flow of drugs, it stops human smuggling and it reduces the risk to the Border Patrol, then, assuming I’m willing to compensate the landowner, should I not -- should the landowner’s personal preference, no matter how much I understand and sympathize, should that trump everybody else’s security interests?

And if I would say to a landowner, okay, you don’t want it, we’re not going to do this, and then, as a consequence, drugs come in, more drugs come into the country, and they’re sold in Chicago and New York and a kid dies, how does that work out?  Should I feel good about that, or should I feel like I’ve failed in my responsibility?  The essence of my job is to look at the total picture.  We do listen to people, but -- and that’s why this Hidalgo County -- I mean, that’s the proof of the pudding, because they came with a real solution.

But when what I hear is attacks or lawsuits, that’s not going to push us, because, see, that’s why we had the problem we had for 30 years.  The reason that my predecessors were not able get control of the border was not that they were feckless or not faithful public servants.  They wanted to do the job, but they ran into unbelievable resistance, and they were worn down -- lawsuits, political pressure.

And we got sued recently by a guy -- not because we were going to build a fence on his property -- because we were going to build it on his neighbor’s property; his neighbor didn’t have an objection.  And he said, well, wait a second, that means the illegals will come into my land; I want you to tear down the fence so it goes back over to him.  That, to me, is a microcosm of the struggle we have to do something for the greater good, which in this case is securing our borders.

Question:  You just mentioned “worn down by resistance,” and thinking about the new regulations, the new sanctions on employers for hiring, they’re starting higher fines, E-Verify, et cetera -- how do you think that’s playing out now, both in terms of resistance from business and then the ability to actually implement this from the government’s point of view?

Secretary Chertoff:  I wish I didn’t -- I wish the fines could be higher, to be honest.  We went as high as we could under the statute.  They’re still -- I still think when we can bring criminal cases, those have much more impact.  Now, I’m going to come back to -- I want to repeat again, I think in the end the right way to do this is some kind of comprehensive immigration reform.

We’ve certainly tried to streamline the temporary work programs, which should allow employers -- what we’re trying to do is get employers to use a legal way, rather than an illegal way to hire workers.  I wish we could have a bigger temporary worker program because I think that would -- we would then have the carrot to go along with this stick.  Right now all I have is the stick, and experience with a stick without a carrot is a harder to use. 

But in the meantime, we have to do the best we can with the tools we have.  And I do think that this is a marketplace that is very capable of being moved by incentives and disincentives.  And I think that as we ratchet up the pressure, some of the businesses are going to decide that they’re better off finding a way to be legal.  That’s why we have an increase in enrollments and E-Verify, by about a thousand a week.

I’d like to go further, and I’m looking to get a  new No-Match regulation out, so we can hopefully satisfy the court order that has prevented us from sending out a letter that would tell employers, if you have a discrepancy in your employee records between a Social Security Number and a name, you’ve got some obligation to resolve it.  I mean, what can you do?  You can’t just turn a blind eye.

So I think what they’re doing in Arizona is interesting, with the business licenses.  I think what we may find is that we can be successful in driving business behavior.  However, unless we liberalize our temporary worker program and find a way to address an economic need, it’s going to be very, very hard.  Now, it may be that if the economy cools a little bit, for example, in construction, it may be that some of the economic need itself will dry up, so maybe the short-term pain will lessen.  But in the end, if you’re going to do this in a sustained way, you have to handle all sides of the problem.

Question:  Thank you.  Mr. Secretary, you mentioned in your opening remarks that one of the achievements of your tenure or of the Department is going from zero percent screening of containers to near --

Secretary Chertoff:  Scanning, radiation scanning.

Question:  -- yes, near 100 percent for radiation.  My question is, how sufficient is that for the container threat coming into seaports, and there’s a lot of concern in -- along the East Coast about seaports and then rail lines, chemical transports, that sort of thing.  How do you rate that as a vulnerability?

Secretary Chertoff:  It’s not a -- first of all, it’s not -- the radiation scanning is not the total thing we do.  It’s one of a number of layers.  We have intelligence-based, actual physical inspection.  We have scanning.  We try to do a lot of our actual physical inspection overseas before the ships are even loaded.

I also have to say that, while I understand the containers are a potential vulnerability, I don’t -- there’s a little bit of a tendency in the media to treat it as if it’s just the only threat.  I think small boats are a potential threat.  I think general aviation coming from overseas is a potential threat.  To be perfectly honest, I think that if you had a nuclear bomb, it might make more sense to bring it in with a private airplane than to stick it into a container.

So the good news is we’re looking at these other things, as well.  We’re starting to raise the barrier in terms of screening for general aviation.  We’re looking toward ultimately to doing scanning in general aviation overseas before it comes into the U.S.  On rail lines, we’ve worked with the rail industry through a combination of carrot and stick; regulation and also voluntary work.

We have dramatically reduced the vulnerability through the rail transport of chemicals by reducing the dwell time; reducing the time in which chemicals in cars are sitting unattended.  The period of maximum vulnerability for a chemical on a rail line is not when it’s moving along in a kind of random fashion.  The chances of somebody being able to fire an RPG at a tank and knowing exactly where it’s going to come, in motion, are pretty small.

The big danger is if it sits for someplace for a day.  And that’s what we focused on doing and we’ve significantly reduced the dwell time.  And that’s, by the way, another method that we rely upon.

Question:  Is it -- that’s by regulation?

Secretary Chertoff:  It’s partly by regulation and partly by the voluntary work of railers.

Question:  And do you have any sense of the compliance with that?

Secretary Chertoff:  I think it’s very good.  They’ve reduced the dwell time -- you can’t totally eliminate it, because there are times that you have to have a hand-off.  But we have a regulation that requires a positive hand-off.  You can’t just leave it and walk away.  You’ve got to literally have someone on the other side receiving it.

And then partly using economic incentives, the rail industry itself has made it -- created a strong economic incentive not to let chemicals sit.  We’re focused really on in an urban area.  We don’t care if it sits out in the middle of nowhere.  But we really have dramatically reduced the dwell times.

Question:  Mr. Secretary, I want to ask you about Mo Davis, Colonel Mo Davis, the former prosecutor in the Gitmo trials, who now says there’s something faulty and said somebody is actually willing to testify on behalf of the defense.  And the Hamdan trial talks about the use of information derived from torture.  I’m wondering what you think about that and what it says about the system.

Secretary Chertoff:  I don’t know who he is, don’t know what he’s going to say, don’t know what his complaint is -- so I don’t really have anything intelligent to offer on the topic.

Question:  Mr. Secretary, I want the record to show that you’re one of the few guests at these breakfasts who actually eats breakfast.   

Secretary Chertoff:  I eat fast.

Question:  Although, Paul Bedard says he’s not sure a fruit plate counts. 

Secretary Chertoff:  I actually ate at home, to be honest. 

Question:  I see how you stay slim.  My question is, how much of the funding for al Qaeda is coming from the United States?  Is it a significant amount or is most of it coming from other countries?

Secretary Chertoff:  That’s hard to answer.  I can’t say that I think it’s a significant amount.  I mean, there is -- you know, we’ve focused on the issue of charities that fund terrorist groups.  Frankly, historically a lot of that has been focused on funding that makes its way to Hamas and Hezbollah.  So I don’t know that I can actually give you an answer.  I don’t have the sense it’s a significant amount; I think a lot of their funding comes in from other parts of the world.  But I can’t -- I can’t give you a real number.

Question:  I wanted to ask you about your trip to Mexico.  Can you tell us a little bit what’s on the agenda?  Are you concerned the Mexicans are extremely against the border fence, politicians (inaudible)?  Are you there to sell the border fence?  And also, the No-Match Letter, when does it come back?

Secretary Chertoff:  The No-Match thing, I think that -- the regulations are (inaudible).  I’m hoping we can get it out within a matter of a couple of weeks.  Then there has to be a comment period.  There’s a lot of regulations about how you issue regulations.

This is part of the security and prosperity partnership.  What we’re going to have to talk about is how can we further our mutual interest in security and work to expedite the flow of legitimate goods and people between the three countries that are part of this North American continent.

One thing I will be talking about is they have done an admirable job of confronting their organized criminal gangs.  And they deserve a lot of credit for it.  And we want to see what we can do to further help them coordinate with them on both sides of the border.  So that’s going to be a big part of what we talk about over the next -- (inaudible).

Question:  Can you say who you’re meeting with exactly?

Secretary Chertoff:  It’s generally the ministers of commerce and interior, you know, from the three countries.  So it would be (inaudible); I think Juan Camilo Mourino from Mexico -- that would be in my band -- and then there will be Secretary Gutierrez and his counterparts, and I don’t remember who they are.

Question:  In Mexico City?

Secretary Chertoff:  No, it’s in Baja, the state of Baja California.

Question:  For the border fence, given the objections you’re receiving about the border fence, why not expand the virtual fence as planned for the Arizona border instead?  And when will the Arizona virtual fence be (inaudible)?

Secretary Chertoff:  First of all, we do use the virtual fence where it makes sense.  But sometimes it doesn’t make sense.  Let me give you a quick primer on why sometimes we need a physical fence.

If the border happens to be near an urban area, the distance between the border and the time you enter an urban area, where basically you are undetectable, is literally -- can be a matter of less than a minute.  In that circumstance, a virtual fence is not sufficient, because by the time you spot somebody, they’ve vanished.  So then what you want to do is slow them up, and that’s what the fence does, it slows them up; it gives you time to do the interception. 

In other areas what we want is vehicle fence.  We’re not so concerned about who to let into a city, but we are concerned about vehicles crossing and then making it hard to detect.  So I’m willing to use virtual fence where it works. 

What fascinates me about this whole debate is people view these things as if it’s got to be one or the other.  And yet, if you spend any time at the border -- and I don’t mean just your little piece, but the whole border -- the one thing you come away with is it is vastly different.  San Diego and the middle of Tucson Sector and McAllen are three very different topographies.  It would be astonishing if there was a single approach to all those.

So we do -- when people, you know, criticize from left or the right, we do what actually makes tactical sense.

Now, we will expand the virtual fence.  Contrary to what some have improperly -- incorrectly reported -- not you -- we are not moth-balling P-28; it did work.  We want to now go to the next, what I would call 2.0, or 1.5.  There are some things in it that we want to improve and there are some things that probably it turns out we don’t really need.  But I envision that we will use this design in other parts of the border, but not in the entirety of the border.  It works better in certain kinds of terrain, and in other kinds of terrain we’ll use a different approach.

So it’s really -- I hate to say it, but to me this whole thing is a pragmatic question.  You’ve given us a mission.  I want to carry out and execute the mission.  The only thing I ask is I want to be able to do it with the tools that actually work in the real world.  I don’t want to be tied to a particular type of tool that has acquired a symbolic value; that you must do this because it symbolizes something.  Symbols don’t affect things in the real world.  I want that which is going to create the most efficient and most cost-efficient benefit to achieving our result in the real world.  That’s what I ask for.

Question:  And as far as my other question about Arizona, when will that be put in place -- the Arizona stretch, the 28-mile stretch.

Secretary Chertoff:  That’s in place.  That’s up and running.

Question:  It’s currently running?

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes, that’s currently up and running and they’re using it.

Question:  Can I ask you a 30-second question --

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes, I was a little late, so I’ll give you guys another three or four minutes. 

Question:  Thank you.  When the lights went off in Florida, did you think, “Oh, bleep”?  And how vulnerable do you see the power grid being?

Secretary Chertoff:  I mean, you know, we always really check to see if there’s any reason to believe it’s something (inaudible) terrorism, and there wasn’t any indication that it was.  You know, “accident,” “misadventure,” you know, “breakages” -- it’s always an issue.

I think there are some vulnerabilities.  We have worked hard -- that’s one of the reasons we’re focused on a cyber strategy as well as a physical infrastructure strategy to protect the grid.  But also a key element of protection of power system is resiliency and redundancy.  And I think the industry needs to, you know, have an understanding you need to have redundancy and resiliency.

I will, however, make a pitch on a small point.  We have now done, on the homeland security side, we have analyzed a couple of thousand -- we’ve identified a couple of thousand of items of infrastructure that we consider to be the most -- the nationally significant ones.  It’s between, I think --

Question:  Beyond the amusement parks that people --

Secretary Chertoff:  That was always a myth, but -- you know, there’s a list of between 1,000 and 2,000, and it’s the stuff you would expect to have on there.  And we use that as a way of devoting our effort in terms of both direct grants and in terms of advising states and localities what they ought to do to secure those things.

Likewise, in the area of, for example, chemical security, our approach is to identify the most dangerous plants with the highest risks and focus our attention on working to make sure those are secure.  That’s risk management.

But, you know, it doesn’t make sense to guard a dam against a terrorist attack if it crumbles because no one has repaired it for the last 50 years.  And this is my big lesson from Katrina, which is not a FEMA issue, but it is:  If you let infrastructure go for 30, 40 or 50 years because you’re spending money on earmarks or other things, then in the end you’re going to have something that is going to cost you a hell of a lot more money, and worse, probably cost you some human lives.

So it behooves us as a society to do the same thing with infrastructure; to look at the -- I mean, from the federal level, look at maybe a few hundred most important elements of infrastructure from the state level.  And then build a plan to fund the repair and rehabilitation of those things over an extended period of time so that, you know, you don’t have to do it all at once, but you want it, in the useful life of the object, rehabilitate it and repair it. 

Everybody does that.  Everybody does it with their house.  We don’t seem to be able to do that.  You know, the money gets thrown into one passing fancy after another; something becomes a big issue, we throw a lot of money at it.  Then something else does.

And yet, in the end, if you look at the money we’ve spent because of the flooding in New Orleans, I’m going to bet you that if we had spent 20 percent of the money over 30 years earlier, we would have not have a levy problem and we would have saved all that money.  So since a big part of homeland security is natural disasters, I can’t not observe on that lesson learned from our experience.

Question:  Can I ask one quick question on cyber security, since you just brought it up?

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes.

Question:  In all the years that you’ve been dealing with counterterrorism, have you ever seen any serious evidence that al Qaeda Central, al Qaeda Classic -- the original al Qaeda -- took any real, serious effort toward a cyber attack, to attack us, like, shutting down our power grid, our airport, air traffic control system -- any serious effort towards that type of threat?

Secretary Chertoff:  I’m not aware that al Qaeda has actually launched a cyber attack on us.  I mean, I may be --

Question:  No, I’m talking about planned or thought about.

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, “thought about” is a broad term.  I mean, I wouldn’t exclude them from thinking about it.

But I will say if you look at what happened in Estonia, it’s -- and not that al Qaeda is the only terrorist; you’ve got Hezbollah out there, you have groups in -- you have FARC, which is essentially a marriage of a criminal organization and a terrorist group.  So do I think that there are terrorists out there who think about this?  Yes.  Do I think that there are criminal groups who think about this?  Yes.  There have been stories historically about extortions against businesses based on cyber attacks.

But here’s my deal -- I don’t wait until it happens or they’ve actually got the plan before I go, wow, we ought to start thinking about a defense.  To build a defense on this is going to take a considerable investment over a period of years.  I’d like to get ahead of it.

Question:  But this has been out there as a concept for over --

Secretary Chertoff:  Yes --

Moderator:  This, by the way, will be the final last question. 

Secretary Chertoff:  -- as a consequence.  It’s a little -- I mean, to do a truly sophisticated attack, you know, it’s not as if we’re completely defenseless.  We do have defenses in place, and the private sector has good defenses, and some probably better than others.

But, again, right now, is this something I’m worried about tomorrow?  Not that much.  But is it something that I could see being a big problem in the next five years?  Absolutely.  So it behooves us to get out there now and do the investments so that we don’t wake up -- I mean, the one thing I’m sick and tired of is an approach to everything we do, which is, let’s not pay attention until the disaster happens; then let’s find somebody, we’ll have a hearing, we’ll punish somebody, and then we’ll spend a lot of money making up for what happened afterwards.  That’s just backwards.

I’m intent on looking at the stuff that is high consequence, even if it’s several years down the road -- particularly if it’s several years down the road -- and saying, you know what, let’s invest in it now.  And then if and when the time comes, we are much better situated.

Now that puts -- this is my final pitch -- that puts me in the unhappy circumstance of violating a political principle, the acronym for which I am now very -- I’ve always been this way, but I’m extra sensitive about crediting anybody for any line that I use -- so this comes from Howard Kunreuther of the University of Pennsylvania -- and he explicitly permitted me to use it -- he uses a phrase called NIMTOF, “Not In My Term Of Office.”  It is this tendency for the political process not to want to spend money unless the fruits and the benefits are harvested within an election cycle. 

And I just -- I mean, I’ve lived through too much in the years I’ve been doing this since 2001 to find that to be an acceptable way of doing business.  I think we have a moral responsibility actually to invest now, particularly in things that may not harvest during our term of office, because that’s why you take these jobs, that’s what your moral responsibility is.  If you’re only interested in making yourself look good and benefiting yourself, in terms of applause, go to the private sector -- you get business, you get paid, and you get rewarded immediately

I think your responsibility here is to look to what we can do that’s going to benefit maybe 10, 15, 20 years from now.  To me, all the things I’m talking about -- cyber, infrastructure, security on travel -- if I’m lucky, we won’t -- you will never see the benefit of that during my term of office, because it will have deterred something or it will have prevented something and it just won’t be visible.  But that’s fine.  What I wouldn’t want to do is be in a position where something happened and I said, boy, I had an opportunity to stop it, but I didn’t have the willpower.  I mean, you can’t be perfect; but at least you ought to have the willpower to try to do what you can do during your time.  That’s my point of view.

Thanks a lot.

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This page was last reviewed/modified on February 27, 2008.