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Effects of Having a Department of Homeland Security T
he era of terrorism—threatened and real—in which we citizens live has produced the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS; www.dhs.gov/dhspublic). You know of this organization if you have taken a commercial flight recently. What does DHS really mean? Greater safety? Travel inconveniences? A huge expense ($50 billion in the coming year)? Research opportunities? Business opportunities? Political opportunities? Growth in government secrecy— sometimes just to cover competency issues? A steady storyline for news media? A loss of many personal freedoms and comforts? Yes, it’s all of those things, and others. It is an economic engine—born of government debt—that is having a serious impact on our unemployment rate. For many, it is a modern Roosevelt’s New Deal. The people in charge of DHS, namely Secretary Michael Chertoff, have laudable visions for coping with their tasks. Speaking in Europe recently, Chertoff described a “vision of a technologically based system of security envelopes . . . secure environments through which people and cargo can move rapidly, efficiently, and safely, without sacrificing liberty or privacy.” In fact, he added, such a system would “uphold the civil liberties both Europeans and Americans cherish.” Elements of this vision—we are not there yet!—include international cooperation in screening, detection technologies, and law enforcement. Many of the relevant technologies involve the analytical chemist. The scope of the DHS’s needs in detection technology and the task of meeting them are enormous. It’s akin to this: I decide that no insect, bird, spore, bacterium, vapor plume, or mammal can enter, leave, move through, or fly over my modest few acres in the country without my knowledge or permission, enforced by quantitative analysis and with guaranteed lethality. In my fictitious action and research plan, a lot of analytical specificity would be aimed at certain organisms that are high on the totem pole of toxicity and disease. A strong emphasis would be placed on extremely small samples, very rapid (
