22 January 2005. Thanks to James Atkinson (www.tscm.com)

The material found in the DHS FOUO briefings appear everyday all over the law enforcement and military circles and they are no big thing. Some are great secrets, some are not so great secrets, and some are not secrets at all. In this case none of the materials found on the DOE site are secret nor even sensitive.

Someone is always trying to poison a water supply somewhere, someone is always fiddling around with power lines, aliens are always trying to sneak in or out of the U.S., and dangerous materials are found on a daily basis where they should not be, aircraft passengers are always carrying or trying to carry concealed weapons, and buses and trucks are always being stolen. But, it does not mean that such incidents are part of a major terror strike, but that everything is "normal." We call this the "noise level," and it is only when an incident or series of incidents are out of this normal "noise level" do we need to be concerned.

DHS seizes on every single incident to whip up fear in the populace, but most of what they have is just noise and rhetoric with little or no relevance to an actual terror attack. This is one of the great problems with DHS and the post-9/11 industry of fear and hysteria where more time and effort is being spent telling the public how at risk they are instead of telling the public what THEY can do to actually be more secure.

Why are the materials marked as FOUO being concealed from the public if the threats are indeed real? If these are true terror problems then the government security clowns should be broadcasting every one of these incidents on CNN, but these are not heinous problems, but just normal "noise."

The problem is that none of the incidents mentioned in the briefs actually mean anything, it's just the normal noise level.

Take a look at the following: http://www.tscm.com/TSCM101noise.html

This noise level tutorial page shows how a bugging device and wiretaps are  found by examining frequencies where the electrical noise floor is elevated, but that it is normal and even desirable to have a level at a certain known calculated level, but only when noise rises off the floor do we have a serious problem. Same thing with "noise" caused by all of these little security incidents mentioned in the DHS daily briefs -- they provide us with a known quantity, but we have to see it as such, and keep an eye on the big picture and the minutiae, but not allow the minutiae to serve as a distraction.

The real threat to our security does not come from vandals removing bolts from high tension power line towers, from buses being stolen, or from people with cameras outside of nuclear power plants; instead the greatest terrorism threat comes from inside our own government.

Consider for a moment the exact number of terrorists who have been actually captured or attacks that have been stopped as a result of DHS being formed and after the Patriot act being snuck into law -- the answer is zero. John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge have done more to terrorize the American public than Osama bin Laden and all of this followers were ever capable of.

-jma