The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.…
FOURTH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION
Superstorm Sandy formed just before Halloween 2012; the Obama administration was at the ready. The “event” would be greeted by the whole of government: federal agencies, the military, state and local partners, the public-private team, all in a unity of effort, within the national response framework. The response would consist of proactive support, lean-forward incident management and assistance, life-saving; it would be integrated, layered, resilient—scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, and diced, as they say at Waffle House. Government blogs, emergency websites, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages sprang into action; New Yorkers were encouraged to download the free hurricane app.
On October 26, the White House released an official photo of President Obama, working man in shirtsleeves, talking on the phone with FEMA administrator Craig Fugate and John Brennan, who was described in the caption as assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. Obama directed Fugate to ensure that all available resources were brought to bear to support state and local responders. It wasn’t disclosed what he directed Brennan to do; and maybe the incongruity of Brennan’s counterterrorism presence struck others as odd, because he was soon ushered off the public stage and out of the photo ops, replaced by professionals with emergency management labels.
Obama had signed Presidential Policy Directive 8, National Preparedness, on March 30, 2011, reaffirming most post-Katrina Bush administration policies1 but including an unmistakable anthem of cooperation and oneness, declaring, “Our national preparedness is the shared responsibility of all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and individual citizens.”2 This was in sync with Obama’s National Security Strategy, which laid out a fundamental principle of the administration: “National security draws on the strength and resilience of our citizens, communities, and economy.”3
By the time Sandy hit, Bush’s National Response Framework had been joined by Obama’s National Preparedness Goal, the National Preparedness System, and a series of five integrated National Planning Frameworks covering the new buzzwords “prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery.”4 It had been Obama, of course, who’d chartered the Council of Governors, and his intensely political and cooperative secretaries of defense—Robert Gates and Leon Panetta—had seen that its substantial work was successfully completed. Talk of Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus and federal takeover was expunged like a bad dream. There was no Cheney or Addington; no Karl Rove or Michael Brown, no open combat; even the sometime overzealous and uncertain NORTHCOM was moving from adolescence to adulthood.5 With a respected hurricane professional at the helm, even FEMA had rehabilitated.
Thus for Sandy no one was on vacation and no one was caught unaware. With the exception of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stumble in not canceling the New York City Marathon—and the firing of a New York State Emergency Management official who directed resources to clean up his driveway—no leadership mistakes were repeated. The National Response Coordination Center, the National Infrastructure Coordinating Center, the Homeland Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center, and the National Business Emergency Operations Center—all were ready, willing, and able. So, too, were private-sector entities important for national security, mobilized by newly created protective security advisors who are responsible for critical infrastructure: volunteers mustered in from nonprofits, church-based groups, and an unprecedented number of government-sponsored civilian adjuncts.6 Without fanfare, the federal cavalry came: some 10,000 federal government civilians mobilized from outside the area, 7,700 FEMA personnel, reserves, and contractors at the peak; almost 1,000 from the Department of Homeland Security came, plus personnel from a half dozen other civil departments.7 There was a National Power Restoration Taskforce; a Surge Capacity Force; and the newly created FEMA Corps, all working hand in hand with state and local authorities. This would be no Katrina.
Then there were the men and women in uniform—at least twice as many deployed as federal civilians: 12,000 National Guard from fourteen states; 4,000 specialists supporting NORTHCOM and its subordinate commands; three amphibious ships and over 4,000 personnel from the navy and marine corps; 3,000 from the Army Corps of Engineers, including 900 from outside the region.8 For the first time in history, army reservists were activated for domestic response, implementing the Council of Governors’ agreement.9 Per the plan, Secretary Panetta quietly signed agreements with all of the region’s governors to appoint dual status commanders.10 NORTHCOM supplied active-duty deputies for each state.11 Two dozen federal generals and admirals showed up for photo ops in the first week alone; hosted by their National Guard counterparts and state officials.12 But there was no big federal military joint task force of note, no General Honoré to issue orders or steal the limelight from the politicians, in fact no overall commander at all except for the president. And of course all the men and women who were there in uniform were in their exact proper constitutional subordination to civil authorities.13 “The military has had the honor of being one of the most trusted organizations by the American public the past few decades, so we know uniformed servicemen… help bring a sense of calm and confidence during a crisis,” said Colonel Michael Miklos, defense coordinating officer for FEMA Region II.14
With a national election looming, a lot was riding on leadership and readiness and cooperation and subordination, and photos and videos of flooded tunnels and streets, ruined beachside towns and boardwalks, destroyed homes, underwater amusement park rides, and then extended blackouts and gas lines carried a certain political weight.
Sandy provoked heated arguments about the role of big government, the fate of the earth, and the perennial topic of the wisdom of using tax dollars to rebuild in storm-vulnerable areas. Across screens and pages, the coalescing message was that we are all vulnerable wherever we live. To most people, that meant the climate was changing for the worse, but for the executive agents it meant continuity, critical infrastructure, preparedness, and professionalism, and a whole nation in unison—and docilely subordinate.
The homeland security aesthetic to enforce unity has been to stress the practical matters. “Absolute confirmation of someone’s identity,” the department says, can mean the difference between life and death.15 Identification challenges increase even more when the scale of an incident increases; particularly during terrorist incidents or civil disorder, the need for positive identification is made essential. Glitches and confusion at the World Trade Center on and after 9/11 convinced the executive agents of this need; and then in the aftermath of Katrina, when repair workers had difficulty gaining access to their equipment and facilities because police and National Guard refused to let them enter the disaster area,16 everyone agreed that uniform credentialing—one card or at least one standard for one nation—made sense.
In August 2004, President Bush signed a directive mandating that all federal employees and contractors use a standard smart ID card for access to federal buildings and information systems.17 The mandate was soon expanded to first responders as well, hopefully to include volunteers from state, local, tribal, and private-sector partners, as well as nongovernmental organizations with special statuses like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.18 The law doesn’t require nonfederal workers to submit to uniform biometric requirements and a national ID card, but as a 2011 homeland security report on first responders stated, the government “strongly encourages them to do so.”19 And those credentials should be even smarter, embedded with biometric data and tied to databases where skills are recorded so that the technical knowhow of emergency workers and health care professionals and even private-sector technicians can be known and tracked.
Register everyone before an emergency; collect verified information on the identity, licensure status, and professional credentials of volunteers. That philosophy meant that by the time of Superstorm Sandy, more than 9 million credentials had been issued to military personnel, federal civilians, and government contractors.20 The Transportation Security Administration had made the greatest progress outside government, credentialing approximately 15 million individuals across the transportation sector.21 Tens of millions of other types of government credentials had been issued to federal, state, and local workers and their contractors; and their dependents; and their official retirees; and to volunteers.
Homeland Security—the unified nation—is mightily counting on those volunteers. Just since 9/11—just over one decade—the federal government has established more than 100 different public-private partnerships to enlist citizen participation in martial life: Airport Watch, Amateur Radio Disaster Services, America’s Waterway Watch, the Blue Campaign, Building Communities of Trust, the Business Emergency Operations Alliance, Citizen Corps, the College and University Security Effort, Communities Against Terrorism, Community Emergency Response Teams, the Counterintelligence Strategic Partnerships Program, Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, Deter Detect Defend, Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, the Disaster Reserve Workforce, the Domestic Security Alliance Council, the Emergency System for Advance Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals, EPA Response Support Corps, FEMA Corps, Fire Corps, First Observer, GISCorps, the Hospital Preparedness Program, Know Your Customer, Medical Reserve Corps, the Multi-state Partnership for Security in Agriculture, the National Language Service Corps, Neighborhood Watch, Operation Community Shield, Partnership for Critical Infrastructure Security, Partnership for Public Warning, the Patriot Academy, PS-Prep, Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services, Ready America, the Ready Campaign, Ready Communities Partnership, Ready Kids, See Something Say Something, the SECURE Program, Secure Communities, Securing the Cities, Stop Think Connect, Strategic Partnership Program Agroterrorism, Transit Watch, USA Freedom Corps, USA on Watch, Volunteers in Police Service, Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, and the Voluntary Private Sector Preparedness Accreditation and Certification Program.
USA Freedom Corps alone, announced by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, has grown to a conglomeration of more than 1,100 Citizen Corps councils across America, with 175,000 full-time workers; its 2,100 separate Community Emergency Response Teams provide emergency response indoctrination to some 200,000 individuals each year. The Medical Reserve Corps numbers nearly 1,000 units across America in public and private hospitals, clinics, fire stations, and ambulance companies.
So how many people are actually a part of the national security effort, a part of homeland security, first responders, custodians of critical infrastructure, providers of emergency services, or the national reserves of disaster preparedness and response? The Department of Homeland Security refers to a community of some 23.5 million first responders in the nation, more than double the number that government officials referenced just a decade ago.22 Just five million Americans wear the uniform of permanent war—the conventional arithmetic of federal troops, reserves, and National Guard—but counting military and pseudocivilian, federal and local, public and private, paid and volunteer, there are closer to 60 million Americans, about one-third of the adult population ages twenty to sixty-four, serving as a regimented conglomeration of troops and law enforcement officials, a gigantic all-hazards reserve trained in everything from storm spotting and first aid to animal rescue and crowd control, a combatant and noncombatant army, one fully enlisted in the world of what-if.
Today, if you are a pilot, ham radio operator, doctor, veterinarian, nurse, medic, emergency anything, ambulance driver, firefighter, police officer, sheriff, deputy, constable, park ranger, demolitions expert, aid worker, lifeguard, heavy equipment operator, utility lineman, trucker, bus driver, merchant mariner, port operator, stevedore, epidemiologist, biologist, agronomist, hydrologist, undertaker, community planner, civil engineer, mechanic, information technician, hacker, cybergeek, linguist, fish and wildlife specialist, dispatcher, security guard, technical climber, search and rescue expert, dog handler, dog lover, or dog, there is a place for you in “prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery.” And on virtually every inch of the political spectrum, we demand this, demand preparedness and security today. So government bureaucrats, homeland security officials, military commanders, and federal agents forge trigger-taut relationships with states, cities, counties, tribes, and local governments, all marching to the national security beat; utilities, telecommunications, the information technology industry, hospitals, the transportation sector are all deputized into government public-private partnerships; worst-case protocols are fed to corporations, universities, fraternal associations, nonprofits and faith-based organizations; tens of millions of volunteers are signed up, vetted, credentialed, and fitted out; networks of listeners, watchers, and sniffers are employed, all recording, saving, and panning for gold. Nary is a dispatch issued, nary a press release or a regulation goes out, nary an official speech is made without the new national lexicon: information sharing, unified command, unity of effort, whole of government, whole of community, whole of society.
So is anyone left who is just a civilian today?
The Program is not just about drawing millions into the XYZ web; others are in the process of a very particular withdrawal. The concept is called islanding: on the surface, it is turning military bases into “islands” with their own power and other utilities, to reduce their vulnerabilities should civilian assets be disrupted, either by system breakdown, natural disaster, cyberintrusion, or terrorist attack.23 Islanding means that over 5,000 separate installations and outposts, including reserve centers and National Guard armories, can retreat to a few hundred self-sustaining and defensible fortresses during a national calamity. There the defenders will find independent energy,24 radiation detection and WMD protection, disease surveillance, and even stockpiles of pharmaceuticals and food, all secured against an outsized vision of a looming Zombie America.25 The ultimate goal is unplugging—what one briefing calls the “Preemptive Strike”—building an independent and self-sustaining island unaffected by power outages, cyberattack, fuel shortages, pandemics, or civil breakdown.26
Crucial to successful islanding is increasing the resilience and reserve of communications for military use. Real-world events from 9/11 to Katrina and Sandy repeatedly show a high probability not just that commercial wired and wireless communications will be saturated in an emergency, but that the public networks can and will be damaged and destroyed. As a result, bases all across America are building autonomous networks to survive massive failures in the commercial system, developing “deployable” cellular systems and rapidly erectable communications to supplement or supplant domestic commercial networks in a crisis, as well as autonomous satellite links that provide the full capabilities of Internet protocol communications.27
It isn’t hyperbole, at least to those responsible for national security, to say that this is going on because there is no “over there” anymore. Military bases in the United States are no longer just preparing and shipping the operational forces to fight in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; they are also an integral part of that fight. This trend began in the 1990s, when the need to reduce the footprint of US forces stationed in Saudi Arabia to enforce Iraq no-fly zones (at the host nation’s insistence), combined with greater bandwidth and more reliable communications, allowed the military to develop “reachback” whereby important functions—such as intelligence analysis—could be performed somewhere else. In the two decades since, capabilities resident in the United States have become the “virtual back end” for all operations overseas.28 Drones flying over the Middle East and South Asia are piloted from a dozen bases in the United States; video is being scrutinized and intercepts are being translated and sorted at gigantic centers in Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, and Texas. Major wars are being commanded from headquarters in Florida and Hawaii. The role of domestic military installations, Paul Stockton told Congress in 2011, involves “direct support of war fighting missions.”29
Islanding is thus not just some survivalist plan in which military bases button up. Contingency plans are ready to protect civilian assets if remediation or mitigation is not possible, even in peacetime; that is, plans are in place for the military to move out and protect whatever needs protection if the civilian sector is to continue to operate, even doing so actively with troops moving into hostile territory beyond the “islands” if need be.30 This naturally pits the needs of such islands against the needs of civil society.
Civilian communities and military bases have been strained for decades over “encroachment” issues, fighting about nuclear and chemical weapons, power, and waste; the need for access to training lands and airspace; noise levels for nearby civilians; and the impact of light pollution or communications interference on military operations and readiness.31 Though in truth the Defense Department approaches conservation and environmental protection with the ferocity that it approaches everything else with, today it is as much focused on the islanding aspects of encroachment, acquiring adjacent lands or putting easements on private land to create more effective buffer zones around military fortresses to preserve both operations and security.32 And the military is also eyeing civilian technologies that might interfere with its operations: wind farms in particular are being looked at because of their potential to alter radar performance; wind turbines and cell phone towers can also encroach on low-flying operations.33
The mission to protect all of this—called force protection or antiterrorism—also emerged in the early 1990s when service members deployed in places like Saudi Arabia became the targets of terrorists.34 Protection against hostile actions was initially considered mostly an overseas requirement,35 but after 9/11, that mission migrated to the United States itself.36 Force protection inside the United States now even includes severe weather, accidents, domestic disturbances, and pandemic influenza, as well as unspecified “events” that might occur outside a military base and have an effect on off-base military families.37 And in 2010 the Joint Chiefs of Staff went one step further with force protection, formally redefining it to mean “preventive measures to mitigate hostile actions.”38
The islanding term of art that encompasses all of these tasks—force protection, antiterrorism, critical infrastructure protection—is “mission assurance.”39 A Pentagon Mission Assurance Asset Database (or MAAD) today includes about 1,400 so-called mission-critical assets, not just military facilities and defense industry but also civilian power plants, substations, natural gas compressor plants, wastewater treatment plants, airports, seaports, bridges, railroad yards, and communications nodes important to the Defense Department.40 Everything from air traffic control to a banking system that is needed to pay the troops—off-base private-sector infrastructure “critical to the success of DOD national security mission”41—is eyed for greater resilience or emergency alternative. A 2009 Defense Department report elaborated that the island footprint had to include areas around installations “because supporting infrastructures and personnel transcend the installation’s fence line.”42 For the first time, the phrase “outside the wire” is being applied domestically to refer to the danger zones beyond the barricades of domestic installations.43
Not since the Civil War, former NORTHCOM commander General Gene Renuart told an industry conference in 2009, have members of the American military feared for their families’ lives and safety inside the United States.44 That family is huge: almost 10 percent of the total US population, some 30 million people. That includes approximately 2.5 million servicepeople:45 some 1.3 million men and women on active duty, another 1.1 million who serve in the National Guard and the reserves, and 680,000 direct-hire civilian employees. Then there are the immediate families of members of the military and even the family members of DOD civilian employees, all of whom are covered under the Pentagon protection umbrella.46 There are also some 2 million military retirees, many people in their forties and fifties who are granted full access to the military establishment for health care, discounted food and gas, and the military way of life in exchange for the potential to be recalled to active duty.47 Then there are the hundreds of thousands of contractors and industrial workers who are a part of the defense (and consulting) industry; some on military bases, some at government-owned factories and other private “critical” sites. Add to that the 28,000 wounded in ten-plus years of sustained combat and their families48 and an additional 20 million veterans who are also loosely under the Department of Defense umbrella, an increasing number of whom require access to base hospitals and other facilities already retreating to the islands.49
Major General Jeff Mathis, head of force protection for the Joint Chiefs, has proclaimed that safety requires “much more than increased guards, guns, and bullets at the perimeter”; that insider threats are a growing problem.50 Though Washington might focus on WikiLeaks-type insider threats—an extension of traditional counterintelligence efforts to protect government secrets—garrison commanders are more focused on “internal threats,” particularly since army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, killing thirteen and injuring almost forty others.51 The ABC response is enhanced emergency planning at bases, measures to improve active shooter protocols for military police, biometric scanners for identification, physical security to protect soldiers and their families, and, of course, government style, the what-if of preparedness for “multiple incidents” at the same time.52
As part of that ABC, the army chief sent a message to all army entities after Fort Hood requiring everyone to report any indicators of potential terrorist threats53 and instituting new “business practices” to better vet certain people.54 The implementing army regulation on “Threat Awareness and Reporting,” updating a 1993 Cold War remnant that was still focused on communism, added “indicators of potential (international) terrorist-associated insider threats” as a tip-off for members of the family to consider. The specific signs, though—“hatred of American society,” “expressing a duty to engage in violence against DOD or the United States in support of an international terrorist cause,” and “evidence of terrorist training or attendance at terrorist training facilities”—are so exaggerated as to be useless.55 The regulation also treats “espionage, international terrorism, sabotage, subversion, theft or diversion of military technology, information systems intrusions, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information” as equivalent threats.
In the 101-page army regulation on personnel security—revised again in 2011 to account for the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—religion is mentioned a total of three times and only then to stress that membership in any religious institution is not to be considered derogatory and that “religious beliefs and affiliations, beliefs and opinions regarding racial matters, political beliefs and affiliations of a non-subversive nature, opinions regarding the constitutionality of legislative policies, and affiliations with labor unions and fraternal organizations are not proper subjects for inquiry.”56 Even the questionnaire appended to the enlistment application for non-US citizen linguists asks them to divulge what “political” organizations they belong to and what books they read but never mentions al Qaeda or any terrorist organization. The counterintelligence briefing that foreign-born enlistees sign cautions them merely that agents of “communist” or hostile governments might seek government secrets.57
One reason for all this elliptical avoidance is that Nidal Hasan is a US citizen born in Virginia and an officer himself, sworn to uphold the Constitution. Even when the FBI discovered that Hasan was corresponding with an al Qaeda terror guru in Yemen—now known to be the assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki—the FBI concluded, in the absence of any additional derogatory information provided, that his communications were protected and consistent with research he was doing in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. “As with any criminal investigation, all suspects are presumed innocent unless and until they are proven guilty of a crime in a court of law,” the FBI said in a statement less than a week after the shooting.58
Presupposition of guilt merely because of religious belief challenges one of the fundamental freedoms of the Constitution, the freedom of religion (“the free exercise of religion,” to be precise) and the prohibition of a national religion. Thus investigations and implications associated with “religious beliefs and affiliations” can only exist between the lines. Force protection and antiterrorism officers at military garrisons inside the United States are advised to characterize the local geography—to spy—and to look for “radical extremist groups”59 to protect the island, but the programs to do so are also highly compartmented, given their uncertain constitutional and legal status. And they are not characterized as intelligence programs, since they are performing basic protection missions for and about the military.
Suffice it to say that whatever the threats, they are ubiquitous and unrelenting. At home, the enemy is not just Muslim Americans or Arab Americans or Somalis or Palestinians or Middle Easterners or those of the Muslim faith. It is illegal Mexicans. It is drug lords and smugglers and gangs and organized crime and the sex trade. It is foreign visitors and students and overcurious tourists. It is sovereign citizens and white supremacists. It is disgruntled school kids with access to guns. There are the incarcerated, the lone wolves, and the mentally ill. There are libertarians, antiglobalizers, environmentalists, Occupy and Tea Party activists, constitutional oath-keepers and survivalists, hackers and copyright stealers, the antiwar and the antigovernment. There are those who are just evil and those who are macabre attention seekers. There are those who don’t pay taxes, who want to keep their guns, who insist on living off the grid, who won’t vaccinate their children, who don’t want their library cards scrutinized or their Internet activity tracked, or who insist on drinking unpasteurized milk. Precisely because constitutionally no one group can be targeted as such, government attention has to be equally applied to everyone, everyone potentially and equally a threat,60 a vast universe of potential dots, enemies of the state being not only those who take up arms or perform treasonous acts, but also those who insist on preserving ungoverned space in the ubiquitous martial landscape, where at home is already assumed to be over there, and over there, right here at home.