Homeland Security Policy Research Articles

US HOMELAND SECURITY AND DEMOCRACY IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE

This paper looks into the US homeland security policy and the application of democratic principles when the nation is internally facing a situation of violence. Instead of a simple laws analysis, it is a research carried out in relation with a historical perspective. Dealing with the threats of the homeland security in the United States of America by referring to the Civil War and the September 11th Terrorist Attack, the paper shows the weaknesses and loopholes of the Constitution when it is about ensuring the national security. According to what we notice, violence makes the Executive disregard the Constitution and the international agreements when it has to protect the homeland and its people. The paper has concluded that referring to forces becomes unavoidable in some situations. Thus, the US Constitution should be amended with articles authorizing the use of military forces to overcome some threats due to rebellion or terrorism in order to preserve democracy so that to secure life within the territory of the country and, incidentally, that of the world.

Implementing the REAL ID Act: Intergovernmental Conflict and Cooperation in Homeland Security Policy

Abstract This article examines implementation of the REAL ID Act of 2005, a post-9/11 measure intended to make driver’s licenses more secure. I take the opportunity, fifteen years after the Act’s passage and approaching a key October 2020 deadline, to analyze and explain how federal officials overcame obstacles to REAL ID implementation, especially resistance from elected state officials. I conclude that the role of administrative officials within the Department of Homeland Security and their ability to work with administrative officials in state Department of Motor Vehicle offices was critical to overcoming state resistance and leading states to come into alignment with REAL ID requirements. A key lesson is that overcoming state–federal conflict in policy implementation is possible when administrative officials at the state and federal level are key actors and can collaborate and perceive common interests. This analysis demonstrates the importance of direct interaction between federal and state administrative officials in program implementation.

President Obama and US cyber security policy

ABSTRACT Advancements in Information and Communications Technology have had an enormous impact on modern societies. As a consequence, an increased number of governments has developed national cyber security policies. This article specifically focuses on the contribution of President Barack Obama to the development of cyber security policy in the United States. In particular, this is a study of the policy measures that directly affected US national security in the core areas of homeland security, defence and foreign policy. These measures include strategic documents, organisational initiatives, and additional measures originating from the US federal government, mostly from the White House. The main argument of the article is that, although having been discussed by US policymakers at least since the 1960s, US cyber security policy only took off and became a national security priority during the Obama years, when the administration decided to move from ad-hoc and sector-specific measures to a more structured and holistic approach. Tellingly, Obama’s record shows a notable number of ‘firsts’, that is of measures which tackled aspects of cyber security which had not been addressed before. Finally, the article also develops and discusses a new working definition of cyber security policy.

Contemporary Policy Challenges in Protecting the Homeland

The terrorist attacks of 2001 served as a triggering event for the inception of a policy domain focused on homeland security, and with it came a body of research substantively concentrated on public policy addressing the unique challenges presented in the emerging policy domain. Since naissance, policy issues addressing homeland security have been both disparate and highly salient creating a literature that covers topics ranging from measuring vulnerability of populations to denial of service attacks on medical facilities. This article reviews the literature for a description of what Homeland Security policy is (or is not), where the research in public policy broadly defined has improved knowledge or practice, aspects of the policy domain that require development, and the challenges associated with research in this area. We find that broadly speaking, the most productive areas of inquiry in this domain are those that have the least uncertainty—those that migrated as a mature area of research, those based on objective measures, and those with identifiable origins.

OIG: Inadequate mental health services hurting detained children

Children crossing the southern border are traumatized and in need of mental health services under conditions that were only exacerbated by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy last year, according to an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report evaluating the performance of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in caring for these children.

Considerations of Resilience in the Homeland Security Literature: Towards Conceptual Convergence?

Abstract Scholars and policy makers argue that communities that increase their resilience are better positioned to protect themselves from disruptive events. The popularity of the resilience concept has created challenges for scholars and public policy makers. The most substantial challenge relates to whether there exists sufficient common understanding of resilience to enable the concept to be applied in research and public policy contexts. This article presents the findings of an analysis of resilience discussions in the homeland security literature. The analysis included the 56 articles that reference resilience terminology and are published in the journals: Homeland Security Affairs and the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Our findings indicate that resilience discussions in the homeland security literature seem to be converging towards a hybrid conceptualization of resilience, which suggests that a resilient system would have the capacity to both resist a disturbance and to quickly restore services if a disturbance could not be prevented. Despite this possible movement towards conceptual convergence, additional steps must be taken if resilience is to become a concept that can be used to guide the development and implementation of homeland security policy.

OIG criticizes HHS on services for detained children

Children crossing the southern border are traumatized and in need of mental health services under conditions that were only exacerbated by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy last year, according to an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report evaluating the performance of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in caring for these children.

Rediscovering Defense Policy: A Public Policy Call to Arms

Since 9/11, policy scholars have made significant inroads with tremendous insights into U.S. homeland security policy, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and disaster relief. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raged on, the public policy field largely ceded questions of traditional defense policy to international relations and security scholars. This was a mistake. The time has come for policy scholars to rediscover defense policy and rejoin America's national security conversation. With defense spending in decline, the All‐Volunteer Force in transition, and emerging threats on the rise, research on defense budgeting and management, military social policy, and cyber bureaucracy are all ripe for scholarly examination. This research note reviews the latest work in the field, reinvigorates national security research agendas for the twenty‐first century, and explores several ideas for the way ahead in defense policy scholarship.

Stigmergy at the edge: Adversarial stigmergy in the war on drugs

As a consequence of the stigmergic coordination that occurs among criminal and government agents, resilience has been built into the system that supplies illegal drugs to American consumers. Criminal agents create technology responses that are simple and cost-effective, and consistently defeat the actions of government agents. Those responses to stigmergic stimulus improve iteratively the resilience and sophistication of the clandestine supply chains. In what the author calls a “homeland security Chaos Monkey model” a constant but predictable governmental escalation in the war on drugs plays the role of a failure signal to build resilience in the narcotics system: Any success by governmental agents sends stigmergic signals to criminal agents. These signals communicate a failure in the supply chain that requires an adversarial innovation to defeat the updated shape of the interdiction. The result is a more resilient system. This cycle of adversarial stigmergy has encouraged the emergence of a well-coordinated system of clandestine innovation in the territory of the US–Mexico borderlands that takes advantage of the border switch to solve in an iterative form one particular problem: to identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of a complicated enforcement architecture to build resilient narcotics systems. For homeland security policies to be more effective, interdiction policies and technologies should be built with a better understanding of the stigmergic forces that shape adaptation in the war on drugs system.

U.S. homeland security and risk assessment

Risk is constitutive of homeland security policy in the United States, and the risk apparatus supports growing concentration of executive power, increased surveillance, and secrecy. For example, the Transportation Security Administration in the Department of Homeland Security employs risk assessment particularly against groups considered “other.” Using the work of mostly European scholars, especially the literatures about Foucault's governmentality and Beck's risk society, the paper combines theory with empirical work by governmental agencies on transparency, secrecy, and risk assessment methods used in the Department of Homeland Security, providing insight into the securitization of the American state. Risk is a means to futurize threats to the polity, to create the security imaginary, a fictionalization that creates a moral panic and a climate of fear in seeking to cope with uncertainty. With those limitations of risk in mind, we can question four important elements of risk in U.S. security practice: “connecting the dots”; the quantitative bases of risk assessment algorithms; how risk assessment tends to ignore the important if circular intentionality of terror; and the difficulties inherent in controlling populations by classification, especially other-ed populations. The paper concludes with suggestions about unmasking the uncertainty of risk assessment and enabling oversight of its practice by legislative, judicial, and public actors.

Promoting the spiritual well-being of the healthcare team

Risk is constitutive of homeland security policy in the United States, and the risk apparatus supports growing concentration of executive power, increased surveillance, and secrecy. For example, the Transportation Security Administration in the Department of Homeland Security employs risk assessment particularly against groups considered “other.” Using the work of mostly European scholars, especially the literatures about Foucault's governmentality and Beck's risk society, the paper combines theory with empirical work by governmental agencies on transparency, secrecy, and risk assessment methods used in the Department of Homeland Security, providing insight into the securitization of the American state. Risk is a means to futurize threats to the polity, to create the security imaginary, a fictionalization that creates a moral panic and a climate of fear in seeking to cope with uncertainty. With those limitations of risk in mind, we can question four important elements of risk in U.S. security practice: “connecting the dots”; the quantitative bases of risk assessment algorithms; how risk assessment tends to ignore the important if circular intentionality of terror; and the difficulties inherent in controlling populations by classification, especially other-ed populations. The paper concludes with suggestions about unmasking the uncertainty of risk assessment and enabling oversight of its practice by legislative, judicial, and public actors.

The difference homeland security makes: Comparing municipal corporate security in Canada and the United States

We explore what we refer to as municipal corporate security (MCS) units, a new form of security organization that differs significantly from public police and private contract security. Based on 36 interviews with MCS managers in 16 cities across Canada and in the United States, we examine how in-house security practices developed in private corporations are being transferred to municipal governments. We draw from the sociology of security governance to demonstrate how the Department of Homeland Security funding and policy has shaped MCS in the USA since 2001. The absence of similar centralized funding and policy for MCS in Canada has led to more piecemeal policy transfer, fewer links to federal government or national security, and more focus on nuisance policing than anti-terrorism. We also engage with the sociology of security consumption to argue that governments should be conceived as major buyers of security goods.

Assessing the Attractiveness and Vulnerability of Eco-Terrorism Targets: A Situational Crime Prevention Approach

This study assesses the vulnerability and attractiveness of eco-terrorism targets in the United States based on a Situational Crime Prevention approach. Data from the American Terrorism Study are extracted for eight different attributes of terrorism targets, including exposed, vital, iconic, legitimate, destructible, occupied, near, and easy. Descriptive findings generally support expectations that eco-terrorists select targets based on their vulnerability and attractiveness. The study concludes with several implications for homeland security policy and a call for further exploration into new and alternative operationalizations of eco-terrorism target attributes.

Coerced Confusion? Local Emergency Policy Implementation After September 11

AbstractThis study examines what motivates local emergency management officials to implement federal emergency management and homeland security policies within their own departments since the September 11 attacks. Pre-existing research claims there is confusion among local governments about potential changes to the role local emergency management services play before, during, and after natural, accidental, or terror related incidents. Meanwhile, additional research claims the federal disaster management policies (The National Response Plan, National Incident Management System, and Incident Command System) lack flexibility in implementation expectations, and there is limited cohesion among the layers of government, actors, and interests involved. This study asserts that something must spur local actors to comply with federal policy demands in their daily operations given how the post-September 11 policies change the field. The study specifically examines the effects of coercion, defined as actions taken by the federal government to force state and local implementers to comply with federal policy demands. Available federal grant dollars for emergency management and homeland security practices could make a dramatic difference to local emergency management operations, forcing these actors to comply with federal policy demands, even if it is in a begrudging fashion that deviates from traditional Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM) principles.

Post-9/11 U.S. Homeland Security Policy Changes and Challenges: A Policy Impact Assessment of the Mexican Front

This article assesses U.S. security policy on U.S.-Mexico land ports of entry, before and after 9/11. It tracks U.S. security policy’s impact over time by using multiple interrupted time-series (mit) and yearly time-series of border activity measures from 1994 to 2009. The results demonstrate that, other things being equal, post-9/11 U.S. security policy changes had marginal effects; in other words, policy responses make no difference when their performance is compared on, before, and after 9/11; thus, U.S.-Mexico economic integration may be a stronger determinant of security at U.S.-Mexico land ports of entry.

Post-9/11 U.S. Homeland Security Policy Changes and Challenges: A Policy Impact Assessment of the Mexican Front

This article assesses U.S. security policy on U.S.-Mexico land ports of entry, before and after 9/11. It tracks U.S. security policy's impact over time by using multiple interrupted time-series (MIT) and yearly time-series of border activity measures from 1994 to 2009. The results demonstrate that, other things being equal, post-9/11 U.S. security policy changes had marginal effects; in other words, policy responses make no difference when their performance is compared on, before, and after 9/11; thus, U.S.-Mexico economic integration may be a stronger determinant of security at U.S.-Mexico land ports of entry.

Reading 9/11 from the American Revolution to US Annexation of the Moon: M. T. Anderson’s Feed and Octavian Nothing

Reading 9/11 from the American Revolution to US Annexation of the Moon:M. T. Anderson’s Feed and Octavian Nothing Sara L. Schwebel (bio) In early September 2001, M. T. Anderson had a partially completed young adult novel on his hard drive. The story was set in a fairly distant future—with technological advances allowing the installation of sophisticated Internet capabilities directly into the human body—but the setting was eminently recognizable. American teenagers tracked trends in entertainment and fashion, fell in and out of love, and alternately displayed apathy toward and alienation from the local and global politics that shaped their world. The novel’s opening line captures the tenor of its economically privileged but selfishly provincial characters: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck" (3). In the period between that early draft and the novel’s October 2002 publication, the World Trade Center collapsed. The after-effects of September 11 became Feed’s backdrop, making the teenagers inhabiting Anderson’s setting—the United States in its "final days" (297)—a means to focalize the trauma of the 9/11 moment. Four years later, Anderson published The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party. In 2006, the War on Terror raged and homeland security policies were in full effect. In many minds, the United States now figured as perpetrator rather than prey.1 For Anderson, this prompted a shift in setting and genre: instead of writing a dystopian novel set in the future, he wrote a historical novel set in the American past. Octavian Nothing features an African boy who lives with his mother amid a community of academicians in Revolutionary Boston. Unbeknownst to him, Octavian—who has been told that he is an African prince—is both a slave and the subject of a scientific experiment to determine the intellectual capacity of Homo afri. As the nation’s founding documents are penned, Octavian discovers first-hand the contradictions of a battle cry for "liberty and property." Ostensibly a novel about the American Revolution, Octavian Nothing and its desecrated protagonist document the trauma induced by the War on Terror. Together, Feed and Octavian Nothing alternately anticipate and mourn the state of US affairs today, articulating a politically progressive [End Page 197] nostalgia in the process. Even as they recognize that the national past—the United States at both its birth and its late twentieth-century apex—was far from utopian, they point to its utopian aspirations. Teenage protagonists are central to this task. In literature written for adults, the sentimental child often serves as a means to focalize society’s collective effort to process trauma; as the most vulnerable and innocent member of society, the child enables readers to see the full extent of the damage enacted. The role of the teenage protagonist, however, is more complex; citing classics ranging from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Little Women, Roberta Trites has argued that "American adolescent literature is replete with adolescents whose rebellions are linked to social critique" (Twain ix).2 Unlike child protagonists who are subjected to societal tragedy, teenage protagonists are not passive vessels evoking sympathy. Instead, they are citizens-in-the-making whose response to catastrophe—whether displays of apathy, anger, or political action—is understood to have real import. The state of youthful idealism, particularly in the United States, a nation mythically defined by its youth, doubles as a measure of the nation’s resiliency and health in moments of crisis. Neither Feed nor Octavian Nothing is set in New York during the first decade of the twenty-first century, but they are unquestionably 9/11 novels, and the fate of their teenage protagonists speaks to the state of the Union in 9/11’s aftermath. The books’ central characters, Octavian and his young mother Cassiopeia and Titus and his girlfriend Violet, experience trauma bodily. The narrators, moreover, suffer regular co-option of their tales; again and again, foreign voices intrude on the teenage protagonists’ storytelling, rendering Octavian and Titus either mute or a mouthpiece. In using first-person narration and linking teenage rebellion to social change, the novels...

Concerted Systems for Increasing the Survivability of the Aircraft against Terrorist Threats

The paper explores the threat posed by terrorism in aviation domain, especially surface-to-air missile attacks against transport aircraft. While the focus of this paper is the mitigation of security risks in the aviation domain, the proposed solution based on concerted countermeasure systems discussed here may be developed in the context of homeland security policy promoting the principle of flight safety. The reception and the processing of data through the detection of signals emitted by various sources are proceeding in the absence of users interest about the form of the wave of the message. The detection of the presence / absence of the signal or the identification of its value is proceed by identifying the signal associated to each value of the message, considered a discrete variable, hence triggering of the adequate defence mechanism.

So near yet so far: the public and hidden worlds of Canada-US relations

1 Introduction: The Elephant and the Beaver - Proximity and Distance in Perspective Part 1: Three Dimensions of Canada-US Relations 2 Guns, Globes, and Gardening: The Political-Strategic Dimension 3 Multi-Level Games: The Trade-Commercial Dimension 4 Neighbo(u)rs, Friends, and Strangers: The Psychological-Cultural Dimension Part 2: Tactics and Strategies - Political and Procedural Dimensions 5 Governing from the Centre? Political and Policy Coordination in the Management of Canada-US Relations 6 Network Diplomacy: Engaging the Executive Branch 7 Canada and Congress 8 Canadian Public Diplomacy in the United States: Promoting Canadian Interests, Fostering Networks of Interest 9 Beyond the Beltway: Federalism, Regionalism, and Cross-Border Relations Part 3: Specific Policy Fields 10 Smart Borders or Thicker Borders? Homeland Security and Public Safety Policies 11 Security, Facilitation, and the Border: Strategic Drift, Operational Segmentation 12 Just a Trade Dispute? Proximity and Distance from Different Perspectives 13 Shared Energy, Shared Energies? Engaging American Energy Policies in a North American Context 14 Conclusion: Managing Bilateral Relations in an Evolving North America Notes Bibliography Index

Tuning approximate dynamic programming policies for ambulance redeployment via direct search

Open AccessOpen Access licenseAboutSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Go to SectionOpen AccessOpen Access license HomeStochastic SystemsVol. 3, No. 2 Tuning Approximate Dynamic Programming Policies for Ambulance Redeployment via Direct SearchMatthew S. Maxwell, Shane G. Henderson, Huseyin TopalogluMatthew S. Maxwell, Shane G. Henderson, Huseyin TopalogluPublished Online:15 Nov 2013https://doi.org/10.1287/10-SSY020AbstractIn this paper we consider approximate dynamic programming methods for ambulance redeployment. We first demonstrate through simple examples how typical value function fitting techniques, such as approximate policy iteration and linear programming, may not be able to locate a high-quality policy even when the value function approximation architecture is rich enough to provide the optimal policy. To make up for this potential shortcoming, we show how to use direct search methods to tune the parameters in a value function approximation architecture so as to obtain high-quality policies. Direct search is computationally intensive. We therefore use a post-decision state dynamic programming formulation of ambulance redeployment that, together with direct search, requires far less computation with no noticeable performance loss. We provide further theoretical support for the post-decision state formulation of the ambulance-deployment problem by showing that this formulation can be obtained through a limiting argument on the original dynamic programming formulation. Back to Top Next FiguresReferencesRelatedInformationCited byInpatient Overflow: An Approximate Dynamic Programming ApproachJ. G. Dai, Pengyi Shi16 May 2019 | Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Vol. 21, No. 4A Unified Framework for Optimization Under UncertaintyWarren B. Powell4 November 2016The Minimum Expected Penalty Relocation Problem for the Computation of Compliance Tables for Ambulance VehiclesThije van Barneveld21 April 2016 | INFORMS Journal on Computing, Vol. 28, No. 2Discrete Optimization Models for Homeland Security and Disaster ManagementLaura Albert McLay26 October 2015Simulation-Based Approximate Policy Iteration with Generalized Logistic FunctionsAntoine Sauré, Jonathan Patrick, Martin L. Puterman28 September 2015 | INFORMS Journal on Computing, Vol. 27, No. 3Technical Note—Trading Off Quick versus Slow Actions in Optimal SearchSteven M. Shechter, Farhad Ghassemi, Yasin Gocgun, Martin L. Puterman6 March 2015 | Operations Research, Vol. 63, No. 2A Bound on the Performance of an Optimal Ambulance Redeployment PolicyMatthew S. Maxwell, Eric Cao Ni, Chaoxu Tong, Shane G. Henderson, Huseyin Topaloglu, Susan R. Hunter16 July 2014 | Operations Research, Vol. 62, No. 5 Volume 3, Issue 2December 2013Pages 322-633 Article Information Metrics Information Received:November 01, 2010Published Online:November 15, 2013 Copyright © 2013, The author(s)Cite asMatthew S. Maxwell, Shane G. Henderson, Huseyin Topaloglu (2013) Tuning Approximate Dynamic Programming Policies for Ambulance Redeployment via Direct Search. Stochastic Systems 3(2):322-361. https://doi.org/10.1287/10-SSY020 PDF download