DHS

Security for Strategy, Policy and Plans. Previously, he was one of the original architects of the t s A. It was a monumental task, probably at that time, something that had never really occurred since the stand up of the Department of Defense. This is nine eleven, two decades later. I'm Steve Gregory in Los Angeles. On the morning of nine eleven, I was working on Capitol Hill in the

Russell Senate Office Building. Had arrived at work as the first plane went into the first Trade center, uh, and then saw the second plane on the television go into the second one. We were evacuated, along with other members of Congress, you know, shortly thereafter. And uh, that's kind of how I was introduced to Homeland Security. Had been working on really domestic issues prior to that, so it

hadn't really been in the national security space. But like many other people, that that day forever change sort of my professional outlook and how I went about doing my job and had a profound impact on me. And talk a little bit about how you got into the security space and and sort of how you started to learn about how nine eleven started to affect how we lead

our daily lives. I stayed on Capitol Hill for a few additional months when the Aviation and Transportation Security Act was passed by Congress, which actually created at that time the Transportation Security Administration, and a few short months later had the ability and the opportunity to go to work for the Transportation Security Administration in the Bush administration, so I had sort of a first hand seat to what it was like on building a new agency after such

a monumental event as nine eleven. Security was at the forefront of most Americans thought process at that time, and so we went about for the next several years building an apparatus that you see, you know, in use today at airports all across the country and really had become the gold standard for how security is conducted in airports all around the world. Um, and so there's probably no other aspect of Homeland Security that touches so many daily

americans lives, like the Transportation Security Administration. If you travel and go through an airport, you're going to come in contact with an employee of the Department of Homeland Security. So it was, you know, for those three or four years after nine eleven, it was a crash course on how do we protect the country from another terrorist of it? Where does one start when you're creating an agency and

we're not just talking about any agency. We're talking about an agency that's supposed to protect the lives and safety of American citizens and all citizens. But where does one start? Well for us at that time, and again just talking about t s A at that moment, we had a pretty instructive handbook from Congress. They gave us very specific deadlines to meet, whether it was federalizing checkpoints, whether it was deploying explosive detection equipment UH and everything in between.

And so we had a very specific we laid out a roadmap on how to get there, and it was a monumental task probably at that time, something that had never really occurred since the stand up of UH the Department of Defense, and so you had to go about it smartly. You had to bring in stakeholders. You had to bring in those that you were going to regulate. As I've often said, homeland security is not just done

by the department. If you don't have the buy in and support of the stakeholders and the other individuals in the private sector specifically that are involved, and you're really not going to truly have homeland security. And so we were conscious to do that from day one, and we did that at the Department of Homeland Security, and then you know, broadly speaking sorry at t s A, and then broadly speak at at DHS when we look at a variety of other threats beyond just the aviation sector.

You know, when you start talking about the t s A. I think in the beginning, we as Americans were understanding that we were going to have to adhere to all of this, and we're going to go through pat downs, We're gonna have to limit our our liquids, We're gonna have to do all these things. But after a while that became sort of cumberson to the everyday person in in in the t s A started to become sort

of the agency everyone grew to hate. Did you see that coming I think we all certainly recognize that it certainly had the potential. Again, as I indicated, there's probably no other agency within the Department of Homeland Security that it comes into contact with everyday Americans more than T s A. And you just got to think about the nature of flying. It's already sort of a stressful situation

to fly. You add that into security, and you add that, you know, a variety of different levels onto that, and it just becomes all together that much more cumberson. And then you add a workforce that you know, Congress you know, only pays them so much and so um, you have a workforce that is constantly under stressed some would say,

is constantly under resource. And you know you're going to have some some incidents that the media will love to blow out of proportion, will love too, you know, only highlight when things go bad, and that's what they do most And so I think over time T s A and some sense has been victimized by that. Really the only thing that gets publicized a lot of cases is you know, things that are perhaps things that they do bad, And what doesn't get showcased is all the things that

they do right each and every day. To keep our airways safe and secure. Use air travel safer now today because of the t s A. Oh, I would definitely say yes from it From an aviation security standpoint. The enhancements that t s A has done both at the checkpoint but check baggage, general aviation, a variety of different things that Essay has done over the last twenty or some odd years, I think has certainly increased the security of the American people flying not only here domestically, but

internationally as well. Um just the technology standards detection standards alone has increased. Now. Look, our our adversaries are also still out there at work, still trying to to figure out how they can penetrate that security network that we have put in place. But I would say absolutely when we just look at the aviation security context and what we've done over the last several years, were certainly safer

today than we were on nine eleven. You spoke a little bit about the media blowing things out of proportion and talking about how we as a media always fixate on the bad tell us some of the good tell us some of the things the public doesn't get to see on a daily basis. Wow. Uh So it's you know, look, when we talk about the Department of Promeland Security, we talk about, you know, the largest law enforce an agency,

not just in the US but in the world. So we have over or the department has over seventi five thousand law enforcement officers and those are folks. Some of those folks are at t s A, some of those folks are at the U. S. Border Patrol CBP ICE, which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement Coast Guard. And so you have a huge network of law enforcement officers that are doing their various missions, all very different, but are coming together to protect the homeland at the end of

the day. And a lot of that is not again reported on or advertised about how they do that, how they are investigating child smuggling rings, child exploitation, human trafficking on a daily basis, or how CBP is is you know, uh, detecting and seizing immense amounts of drugs and other contraband along our borders. And so some of these things I think are taken for granted, but it it actually takes a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication from the men and women of the department to do their

job every single day. And haven't even talked about our Cybersecurity Agency and what those folks do every day to try to keep federal network secure and keep the American people as safe as can be against cyber intrusions. So there's a lot of work that I think a lot of people just take for granted. Uh is. You know, it's embedded in the security of their lives every day. But it's only there because of the hard work of

the men and women of DHS. You know, some would say that if you think about bringing all these agencies under one umbrella, because all these agencies obviously existed outside of it. You know, Immigration, Customers Enforcement was you know, that's that was more of an iteration of what border patrol and customs, right, But you've got past Guard, You've

got all these agencies you spoke about. Critics have said there was really no need to to create the Homeland Security or the t s A, because, in fact, I was talking to military expert the other day they said, if we had just adopted the Israeli model, he is a Reeli security model, we wouldn't need the t s A, And then that the creation of DHS was just more bloated government. What would you say to that well. I've heard that. I've heard that as well, and I appreciate

that viewpoint. Particularly when we talk about the Israeli model of aviation security. I go back to they have one primary airport, ben Gurn International Airport that they have to protect, and so they can devote all their resources to that one airport. We have over four hundred and fifty airports to protect in the United States, and so you're gonna

need a little different approach. I've also heard about the Canadian approach right where you you regulate it instead of having it federalized, and I think that's a debate worth having.

I'm not sure it's the right approach, but I think that model is probably going to be a little bit closer if you wanted to change the the nature in which we do aviation security, a little bit closer to having it being more regulated by the federal government and actually conducted by private entities versus having it being totally federalized,

which it is today. Talk about some of the things that just absolutely surprised and or shocked you when you started to work creating the t s A and starting to see security on a global scale, and what was going on, what were some of the things that shocked you about the creation of this agency. That's a great question, I think. You know again, I think it was you have to think back to the time period after nine eleven.

I think everyone was in a very different mindset than they are today, and there was an extreme focus on are we going to be hit again? Will there be another nine eleven? I think over time, what one thing that surprised me was how quickly that faded and how quickly. You know, travelers really voice their displeasure with being inconvenienced

at the airport, and look, I can appreciate that. Um, you know, you want to make sure we're all very, very busy, and you want to make sure you get to your destination as quickly as possible, particularly for business travelers, because that's you know, time is money, which I understand. But you know, again, after that, after nine eleven, security was continues to be a priority for the department, but really at that point in time, it was the overriding factor.

We were doing everything we could to make sure that we didn't get hit again, and some would say that we overcompensated on the security front and not on the facilitation front. So I think That was one thing that surprised me pretty quickly after nine eleven was the attention span of the American people wanted to make sure that, you know, they got to their destination pretty quickly, as

quickly as possible. I would have thought that the overriding concern at that time, particularly in two thousand and two two thousand and three, would be to make sure that we didn't get hit again and to shore up that that aviation security. That's not a criticism, that's just like I said, answer your question, it's more of a surprise than anything else. I am very curious if you could go back and do anything with this over again, what

would it be. Well, I think there's always there's always a number of things that you can do better, whether that's from communicating with the American public, whether that's communicating with members of Congress. So like, there's a lot of criticism both from Congress and the American public because as a security agency at that time creating t s A, you wanted to communicate, but you didn't want to communicate too much, right, You didn't want to show your hand

your adversaries. You didn't want to detail everything that the agency was doing at that time to give them a roadmap on how to penetrate you. So there was a there was a balance there on how much we could communicate versus how much we were actually doing to help secure and protect the American people. So as I look back, I mean, there's different ways to communicate that, there's different

ways to to talk to individual stakeholders. I think one thing that the agency didn't do extremely well is I think they thought, you know, at that time, that security was everything. And I'm not sure that we brought in the airlines and the airports as quickly as we could have. Right at the end of the day, it's it's their airplanes, it's their passengers, it's their customers, and we needed to do that. We we did that pretty well. We could have done that a little bit better to really have

them be partners. But I think there's always gonna be a healthy tension there between the private sector who wants to a for profit entity and like the airlines and the airports, and an agency that is worried about securing UH their infrastructure, um and so there's always gonna be that healthy tension. I think sometimes it boiled over into the public sphere and and T s A took a hit for that, So I think you can always go back and have a little bit better relationships and communicate better.

At the end of the day, you're looking back now with DHS, T s A, and UH, you know, everything like the Patriot Act and all the things that were created following nine eleven. Are we safer today than we were on? Well, that's a that's a difficult question to answer. I think if you you have to when you look at are we safer as a country, you have to look beyond just T s A and aviation security. You have to look at cybersecurity. You have to look at

border security. You have to look at foreign terrorist organizations and their ability to strike the homeland. So there's a variety of different threats in scenarios that you have to look at. If you're trying to assess is the homeland more secure today than it was at nine eleven? Were all? I would say probably yes, although I am extremely concerned

about what I'm seeing today. When we look at border security, we look at what's going on in Afghanistan today and and creating another safe haven for terrorism because of some of the events that have occurred recently. I think all of these things give me great pause to say, are we safer today than we were two years ago, four

years ago, or six years ago. I'm not so sure at this point in time, when you have over two hundred thousand illegal individuals coming across our southern border in a given month, when you know you can't bet them all, you know you're not apprehending them all. What does that say about the sovereignty and and the security of your borders?

Not a lot in my opinion. And so to have an administration say that the border is closed and the border is secure when you know that there's criminal elements and bad people coming across that border every day, that gives me a great pausing concern. Do you have any other thoughts you want to share? No, I mean, I think you know, we didn't talk a lot about the other parts of the department. You know, we talked about

T s A, which I think is important. Obviously that's what occurred on nine eleven, But there's a lot of other elements of DHS that go into protecting the homeland, go into what how do you do that so that the American people can sleep safe at night? And one thing that I always focused on It's not just you know, how do we protect individuals from foreign terrorist organizations or

even domestic terrorists. But I think what the Department does in many cases is provide economic security to the country. And what do I mean by that, right It it's you know, if we talk about t s A, it's keeping that aviation system up and running, because if that industry goes down, the economy is going to take a significant hit if airlines can't fly. You know, the same

thing goes with the Coast Guard. Of all the goods that you you know that we see on the on the shelves of Target and Walmart come through our ports, and you know, the United States Coast Guard provides security in those ports and waterways. You know, cybersecurity and what our our SISSA agency does, you know, protecting federal networks. You know, when a pipeline goes down or or any of these other cyber attacks, it has a significant impact

on the country as a whole. So a lot of what DHS does each and every day is to make sure that you know, we are in the best position to keep this economy roaring and going, because at the end of the day, that's the security that's the sort of the might behind the United States is our economy and obviously the security that we provide not only here

in the US but around the world. I think over the last few years, there's always been this talk about whether you know, how strong is our intelligence infrastructure and how does that play into the homeland security. Well, it plays in significantly a lot of the information that we acted on, right, So, you know, when you look at DHS, there's a lot of different threats that come in, a lot of different scenarios that that the Apartment could be

acting on. But like any other department, there's limited resources. So you focus those resources on the on the most you know, logical threats out there, and we rely on

our intelligence community to provide that information to us. Uh, there's a great amount of information that they collect overseas that goes into that decision making process, and so we are completely you know, the department, I would say, is you know, really really reliant on on a lot of the intel collection that different parts of the intel community provide to the Department so that we can make informed decisions that we can say, look, we we believe that

the foreign terrorist threat is more you know, severe and dire today than it was. I'm not you know, this is just an example, but we we base that assessment off of information that we're getting from the intelligence community. So the Department gets fed from the IC, the intelligence community, and then we make educated assessments based off of that information.

So it's absolutely critical that the information that they pick up that's relevant to protecting the homeland gets shared with the Department UM so that we can make informed decisions, we can make resource allocation decisions to go about and doing our job every day. Talk about baggage screening because that that is become a huge part of security. This is something that you know, the entire airports had to be reconfigured to accommodate all of this bag screening. Talk

about how that came into play. Well, I think it's a great question, and I think you have to think about, you know, the Department of a lot of people think about Homeland Security and they think about the Department. You think about you know, Border Patrol, you think about Coast Guard, you think a lot of different agencies. A lot of those, you know, we're pulled from other departments to create the Department of Homeland Security. T SA was unique and that

it was created out of whole cloth. Right. It didn't exist prior to other than an office or two within the Federal Aviation Administration that did some civil aviation stuff, but nothing to the extent that we see today at t s A. And but again, Congress was very explicit in the Aviation and Transportation Security Act ats A and gave the department very specific deadlines to meet UH. And that started with making sure that we federalized every checkpoint.

And what does that mean. You know, prior to nine eleven, it was you know, it was contracted out by the airlines and airports, and so you had a couple of you know, private contractors there at a at a checkpoint doing some you know, magnetometer work, and that was about it. And so all the infrastructure that you see at a checkpoint when you arrived there to get on a plane, it didn't exist prior to nine eleven. And Congress gave us a year or so to get that out UH

and into into play. And so that meant hiring fifty screeners, making sure they were trained, making sure they were resourced is a significant hurdle. The next year, you know, making sure that we had explosive detection system, So every bag that goes into the hole of an aircraft is screened for explode SIPs, matching those bags with passengers that get on the airplane, which you didn't have to do prior

to nine eleven. So all these different things that I think a lot of people take for granted over the last twenty years, it just occur because of the security system that we have been put in place didn't occur prior to nine eleven. And within a two year period, the folks at t s A and all the screeners and all the officers that were hired and are very rapid fashion, you know, got to work and created not

only an agency. You're standing up an agency in the infrastructure of that agency, but you're also standing up the security apparatus, which is largely still intact that we see today. I mean, there's been improvements of technology over time, but a lot of that infrastructure still exists today. And just let me you know, mentioned the technology again. Prior to nine eleven, it was non existent. It was an X ray machine and a magnetometer, which was very very basic.

You could see that at basically any public building anywhere. Today you have some very advanced technology at that checkpoint scanning your bags for very small amounts of the explosives. A lot of that research and development was in a nascent stage. It had to be accelerated, and it's you know, and it has been over the last decade or so. And so again, the the amount of time and attention and energy to stand up an agency after a crisis like nine eleven, I don't think can really be underestimated.

It was a huge amount of work, with a lot of specific deadlines written, you know, given to us by Congress um, and it took a sort of a whole of government approach to get it done. You know what, I just happen to think about chance, What role did you guys play in cockpit security? Was that all F A A Or was that you as well? No, that was T S A. And so when we look at at, you know, the security of the cockpit of aircraft, there's

a couple of things that come to mind. One was making sure that we reinforced those cockpit doors which were not reinforced prior to nine eleven. So we worked with the airlines and we worked with others to make sure that those doors were reinforced. That we're more difficult to breach.

We also put in place, or I should say Congress told us to put in place what we called the Federal Flight Deck Officer Program or the f f DO program, which allowed pilots and those that sit in the cockpit of commercial aircraft to carry a firearm if they wanted to. It was sort of a voluntary program, but t. S A trained them, you know are usually our federal air marshals probably trained them on how to do that. UM and so yes, there was a lot of work that

went into the to the security of the aircraft. There's many what we what we called at the time, and I believe T. S A still talks about layers of security, right.

And the layers start as you book your ticket. You know, your name is run, the name check is done, and you go through you know, some complex algorithms to see if you're a bad person or have travel patterns like a bad person, things of that nature, to security checks that occur as you arrive at the airport, to security checks that occur as you arrive at the checkpoint, to security checks that occur as you arrive at the gate. And if all that fails and a bad person gets

through all of that. Then it becomes the the security of what's on that aircraft and whether it's the flight attendants being trained a certain way, whether that's an air marshal being on board, or whether that's a cockpit door that's been reinforced, or a pilot who has been enrolled in that program that carries a firearm. There's a variety of different layers that we sought to put in place so that if anyone layer was breached, it wasn't you know, the last layer of defense. We made sure we had

redundant layers set up. Coming up. In episode five, we tried to put air marshals in suits on those lights. A lot of my flights went to Hawaii, we had haw Wine shirts on, so we tried to blend in what it's like to be a cop in the sky. Nine eleven Two Decades Later is produced by Steve Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez and is a production of the KFIE News department for I heeart Media Los Angeles and the

iHeart podcast network. The views expressed are strictly those of the guests and not necessarily the hosts or employees of I Heart Media. H