You’ve been a defense attorney, a prosecutor, a Vietnam
War infantry soldier, a congressman and a governor. Your role as
homeland-security secretary is new and less defined than your roles
in the past. Is this the toughest job you’ve ever had?
Clearly, I have been fortunate during my career to have been given
many opportunities to serve my community and my country, and I’ve
enjoyed every one of them. I thought at each level it was very important
and very meaningful work, but this is the first time that I’ve
really been given the responsibility of creating an office, actually
starting with a handful of people and an executive order and being
tasked to build an office, to develop a national strategy for securing
the homeland and develop strategic partnerships with other levels
of government and the private sector. So this is probably one of
the most complicated challenges that I’ve been confronted
with.
Well, how do you feel about the prospect of overseeing
170,000 employees?
It will certainly require a fairly lengthy period of transition,
as you basically consolidate and merge 22 departments and agencies
and nearly 170,000 people. It’s an enormously complicated
task that will undoubtedly take years to transition as completely
and as comprehensively as we want.
Bringing customs, INS, coast guard, FEMA and everything
together is going to be amazingly daunting.
There are four basic units in this legislation. There is a border
and transportation unit, a science and technology unit, a preparation
and response unit—that’s FEMA—and then there’s
an intelligence and infrastructure unit. So you’ve got four
very important, discrete missions, but you take those missions and
you tie them together with a need for the federal government to
work with state government, with local government, with the private
sector, with nonprofits. So you have a maze basically of relationships
that are absolutely critical in order for us to take advantage of
all the resources we have around the country to protect ourselves.
We will look to the experience of the private sector, the good and
bad, as well as earlier experiences within the government, to merge
departments and agencies, hopefully to develop a good, solid strategic
plan to make the consolidation as effective as possible.
Speaking of the private sector, one of my questions has
to do with your being lobbied all the time by a lot of high-tech
firms that want to provide services. It’s a whole new industry,
from face-recognition cameras to the national database of thumbprints
and iris scans. I’m sure people from these firms make them
all sound really wonderful, and they’re all wonderfully expensive!
It’s like you’re looking over my shoulder.
How do you balance the need to keep within your proposed
budget with the desire to protect the people?
I think it’s important to note that one of the reasons that
I believe we can prevail in the war against international terrorism
and terrorists is the technological edge that the private sector
and the academic research community bring to bear in protecting
the homeland. In the past several months, I’ve seen literally
hundreds of ideas that would help us do a better job on prevention,
detection, protection. There are scores of technology companies
whose genius, whose creativity, I think in the long run, will play
a vital role in protecting this country. Right now, the Homeland
Security Office is not in a position to actually purchase any of
these technological innovations. One of the units in the new department
would actually help the federal government assess the effectiveness
of this new technology before it was recommended for acquisition
by any government entity or any private-sector entity. The whole
area of life sciences and biotech gives us, again, some extraordinary
opportunities not only to combat terrorism but also to continue
to advance science and medicine as it deals with just the normal
illnesses and health challenges that America faces. So again, this
is an area where I think we have certainly, over the long run, a
superiority and an advantage that terrorists will never enjoy.
You mentioned this being a war. Do you consider this to
be a war on the level of the Civil War, WWI, WWII?
The closest war-time analogy I guess is the War of 1812, which was
the last time that we were attacked by a foreign interest and had
to bear the attack on our own soil. There are some aspects that
are similar to the traditional wars we have fought overseas. Clearly,
the most effective way to deal with terrorists is to identify and
deal with them before they get to our shores, so the military operations
in Afghanistan, the work they’re doing in Yemen, the work
they’re doing with allies in Italy and Spain and Germany in
rounding up some of these Al Qaeda cells is the best defense. I
mean, we’re playing offense over there in a military way.
We have disrupted their organization, we have disrupted their financing,
we have disrupted their communication. So to the extent that we
will involve ourselves militarily off shore, and with allies, that
is similar [to past wars]. But the dissimilarity is they’ve
chosen our hometowns and neighborhoods as their battlegrounds. The
fact is that we will always be open and diverse and welcoming and
therefore vulnerable to some terrorists’ [attempts] to make
their way into this country.
In order to fight a war like this, is it possible to keep
safeguards in place for the people and prevent restriction of civil
liberties? Or is it inevitable that some civil liberties will have
to be restricted?
First of all, the government walks that very fine line between security
and liberty, and there have been occasions when, in times of national
crisis, [Ridge cites the Civil War and the two World Wars] the scales
were tipped toward security. What has often happened after those
wars and after that crisis is that the scales tip back. But I would
say that every effort is made on a daily basis to make sure that
whatever incursion into the area of civil liberties that is considered
is done with the greatest care and caution, because at the end of
the day, as Americans, we are expected to come up with solutions
in combating this war that preserve the civil liberties that our
enemies are trying to undercut and undermine to start with.
Still on the topic of civil liberties, there have been
some measures in the Patriot Act that people have found objectionable
such as amendments to FERPA [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy
Act], so that law-enforcement officials may look at private student
information. You mentioned that for a period of time things could
be somewhat shaken up in the civil-liberties arena.
To date, I think that the administration—the attorney general
and everybody else—has walked that line very carefully, and
the ultimate goal is to protect this country with as little infringement
on civil liberties as possible. And the Patriot Act provision which
you refer to, as I understand it, simply allows the Department of
Justice, with court approval, to get access to some student information
[as part of a terrorism investigation]. All along the way, as we
combat international terrorism, judicial approval and judicial scrutiny
virtually guarantee that the government cannot and will not act
unilaterally.
I mean, at the end of the day, the extraordinary thing about the
American system, as we combat terror—and as we try to walk
that fine line between security and civil liberties—is we
do have that third branch of government that is empowered to pull
us back if we’ve gone too far. I think we respect the privacy
rights of students, and we understand the need for the federal government
in the middle of a terrorist investigation, under some circumstances,
to get access to that kind of information. We found balance by requiring
judicial intervention before the information can be accessed. And
I think that’s a very good example of how this country goes
about trying to preserve its civil liberties and at the same time
combat international terrorism. •
