Carol Leonnig has a long piece about the many Secret Service fuck-ups after some Idaho nutcase took shots at the White House. Line agents who were responding were told to stand down after the shots were incorrectly identified as backfires from a construction site:
It took the Secret Service four days to realize that shots had hit the White House residence, a discovery that came about only because a housekeeper noticed broken glass and a chunk of cement on the floor.
If the shooter hadn’t been a total fuckup who crashed his car a few minutes after firing the shots, who knows if he would ever have been caught. The piece also notes that there wasn’t full camera surveillance of the White House grounds, nor was the White House in range of the ShotSpotter sensors that can identify the location of shots fired. And there’s this:
[…] President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.