Once the legislation passes both houses of Congress and is signed into law, the administration plans to move rapidly to create the new department, with a target of 60 days to nominate the top officials and obtain Senate confirmation. According to some press reports, White House homeland security director Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, will be named secretary. One of the new department’s top officials will be John Gannon, a former deputy director of the CIA—an agency that was previously barred by law from conducting spy operations inside the United States.
With 170,000 employees and a presence in every part of the country, the new Department of Homeland Security will be the closest thing America has ever had to a national police force. It will combine 22 federal agencies with some relationship to internal security, including the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, the Transportation Security Administration (newly established to conduct security checks of passengers and baggage at most airports) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The new legislation gives the federal government powers that go far beyond those obtained by combining 22 separate security agencies into one. One provision in the bill will allow the federal government to track credit card purchases, medical data, travel, magazine subscriptions, library usage and web and email usage. All this information is to be centralized in a vast new database covering every citizen and visitor. Entitled the “Total Information Awareness” program, it is to be maintained by a new Security Advance Research Projects Agency (SARPA).
With 170,000 employees and a presence in every part of the country, the new Department of Homeland Security will be the closest thing America has ever had to a national police force. It will combine 22 federal agencies with some relationship to internal security, including the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, the Transportation Security Administration (newly established to conduct security checks of passengers and baggage at most airports) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The new legislation gives the federal government powers that go far beyond those obtained by combining 22 separate security agencies into one. One provision in the bill will allow the federal government to track credit card purchases, medical data, travel, magazine subscriptions, library usage and web and email usage. All this information is to be centralized in a vast new database covering every citizen and visitor. Entitled the “Total Information Awareness” program, it is to be maintained by a new Security Advance Research Projects Agency (SARPA).