The State of U.S. Homeland Security

Transcript

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I appreciate your turning out to hear me talk about the state of Homeland Security, and I do so with the vantage point of being on the job for about a year and a quarter now but also, as Strobe said, having been at the Criminal Division, really at the inception of the modern age of Homeland Security, which was the attack on September 11th.

As you know, the Department has a broader scope than just terrorism, although terrorism is clearly a top priority. Obviously, at this particular moment, there is a very vigorous debate about the issue of immigration, and that implicates the activities of my Department very, very much. As you know, the Department has a broader scope than just terrorism, although terrorism is clearly a top priority. Obviously, at this particular moment, there is a very vigorous debate about the issue of immigration, and that implicates the activities of my Department very, very much.

We also are clearly focused on the issue of increasing the protection of our critical infrastructure. We have had a lot of discussion about courts, and I am going to spend a little bit of time telling you what we are doing in that regard.

Finally, of course, there is Mother Nature. Today is the official launching of hurricane season. It does not mean there is a hurricane on the horizon. Those tend to come a little later in the summer, but I think it has been a date that has focused us on the need to put into effect some of the lessons we learned during the course of the hurricanes last year.

Before I talk about these individual areas, I would like to stand back and look overall in a strategic way at how we conduct business at the Department. Here is the core fact of Homeland Security. We cannot protect every single person at every moment in every place against every threat. It is not possible, and if it were possible, it would be prohibitively expensive. What we have to do is manage the risk, and that means we have to evaluate consequence, vulnerability, and threat in order to determine what is the most cost-effective way of maximizing security. That means that there are going to be some elements of security that will not necessarily get full coverage. To do otherwise would be to put us in a situation in which we would sacrifice our liberty and sacrifice our prosperity.

Risk management is easy to pay homage to in the abstract, but when actual decisions get made, it tends to rub the people who come out on the short end the wrong way. Our commitment on this issue is two-fold. We are always willing to listen to criticism and discussion and facts that are brought to our attention and to recalibrate, but at the same time, what we have to do is be candid with people about what it is that our constraints are, what our task is, and how we order our priorities. I don't think telling everybody that we are going to deal with everybody's issues is a rational or particularly persuasive way of dealing with this very important issue.

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