http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/homeland-security-is-a-me_b_5861662.html

Ivan Eland 
Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

Homeland Security Is a Mess

Posted: 09/22/2014

After an intruder was able to jump over the fence and enter the White House, the Secret Service, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is talking about augmenting security procedures and widening the White House security perimeter to include surrounding areas in the executive mansion's neighborhood. Because I work across Lafayette Park from the White House, I experience the already oppressive security around it every day. The street in front of the president's residence is completely blocked off from traffic; uniformed secret service swarm, both on foot and in patrol cars out front; inside the fence motion and other sensors should warn of any intruders, and Lafayette Park is likely under constant surveillance. Thus, the "people's house" in the "freest nation on earth" is already a mini garrison state.
Yet security agencies regularly use any incident as a way to enhance their reach and constrict the freedom they are supposed to be protecting. Despite all of these security measures, the intruder was able to enter the White House through an unsecured door. Perhaps the Secret Service should merely lock the door, much as hundreds of millions of Americans do, and call it a day.
This is just one example of DHS's bureaucratic approach to security that often defies common sense. Another is the airport security measures of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), another agency in DHS. After the 9/11 attacks, had the government done nothing, air travel would have been much safer anyway. The old paradigm -- crew and passengers letting airline hijackers have their way, knowing that they probably would be freed eventually in Cuba or someplace else after the hijackers got the publicity they sought -- was shattered. From now on, crew and passengers would be much more surly in subduing hijackers, thinking that otherwise they would die and take many more of their fellow citizens with them in any building the hijacked plane hit. If the authorities wanted to do something, they should have hardened the cockpit doors -- essentially the equivalent of locking the White House door -- and called it a day. Instead we got ludicrous restrictions governing carry-on luggage -- a prohibition on carrying fingernail clippers, a limit on liquids of three ounces, and a requirement to remove and x-ray our shoes. To illustrate the absurdity of the last requirement, many other countries don't have it, and Fran Townsend, President George W. Bush's Homeland Security adviser, said after leaving office that she thought the shoe inspection requirement would have long been scrapped. If the requirement was so ridiculous, one might ask why she and Bush imposed it in the first place! Most of these dubious requirements are officials wanting to pretend to "do something" about a problem and security bureaucracies wanting to expand control.