WTF is going on with the Secret Service:
The man who jumped the White House fence this month and sprinted through the front door made it much farther into the building than previously known, overpowering one Secret Service officer and running through much of the main floor, according to three people familiar with the incident.
An alarm box near the front entrance of the White House designed to alert guards to an intruder had been muted at what officers believed was a request of the usher’s office, said a Secret Service official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The officer posted inside the front door appeared to be delayed in learning that the intruder, Omar Gonzalez, was about to burst through. Officers are trained that, upon learning of an intruder on the grounds, often through the alarm boxes posted around the property, they must immediately lock the front door.
After barreling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters. He then ran into the 80-foot-long East Room, an ornate space often used for receptions or presidential addresses.
Are they underfunded? Understaffed? Or are they just plain bad at their jobs?
Suffern ACE
Happens in any security fortress. Someone will inevitably get tired of having to unlock three locks to use the bathroom, and your walls slowly begin to be open porches. Sounds like there’s lots of false alarms for intruders, so the alarm got turned off.
Barbara
I have no idea but the retired SSA who lives in my subdivision is a Tea-Partier and a jerk, though he comes off at first as pretty affable. Whatever mystique the SS had for me evaporated upon meeting him.
Iowa Old Lady
This is a different set of clown shoes, but OMG, I just got back from a long weekend in DC (flying through Chicago each way) and it looks like Ernst is beating Braley and pulling away. I’m sick.
Rathskeller
The professional Obama Sucks wurlitzer is going to go crazy. Still, I am honestly shocked by the multiple levels of failure here.
No president should ever be exposed like this.
Certainly, folks in ISIL and like-minded groups will see the advantages of going with a fast, blitz-like attack. They won’t be able to take out the president, but they could cause an amazing amount of casualties in civilians.
jl
My verdict: SOP for any organization public or private large enough to require a complex and disjointed bureaucracy to run. Who ever thought a crazy person could dash all the way INTO the front door of the WH? So, the usher’s office had requirements for decorum and calm that demanded that an alarm (that probably often sounded false alarms) had a lot of weight.
And who said the answer was to let crazy uncle Joe prowl the place with his shotgun? That was me. Heh indeedy. Case closed.
NCSteve
From what I’ve heard, since it was moved to DHS, command has moved into a “go along to get along, get along with what you get and don’t make waves demanding more resources” mentality and its failed to make much noise about the increasing demands put on it by a presidency that’s drawn three times the normal number of threats.
I have yet to hear of any other agency that works better for having been moved to DHS. The whole fucking monstrosity ought to be abolished and all the agencies aggregated in it put back where they belong.
Schlemazel
Stunning. There should be many layers of security between the fence & the door so that a failure of of them still leaves safeguards in place. I am sort of surprised to learn there is a lock on the door but since it is why not just lock it? Its not like the 7th Day’s are going to drop off a copy of The Watchtower.
My guess is they just got complacent. They probably assumed nobody would try this as there must be a lot of security. But that still leaves you main question unanswered.
aimai
The original WaPo article on the poor handling of the shooting incident was bad enough–because it also made the President and Mrs. Obama out to be the bad guys for being so mean to the SS over one teeny tiny error. But this? I’d be livid if I were the President and Mrs. Obama–and they shouldn’t be in the position of being the only people to give a good god-damn whether the first family is safe in their own house.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suffern ACE: I’ve never been to the White House, but I always assumed just in terms of numbers there would be enough bodies on the ground to prevent something like this, someone getting to the door much less in it.
srv
Not enough drones.
jl
Some assassins were well within gun shot of the WH back in the day during the Truman administration. Truman wandered around gawking out of windows during the incident wondering what was up. It is really difficult to prepare for every contingency.
IIRC Truman told his security staff to eff-off and resumed his scheduled travel asap. I will look for the Fox News Special Round Table on that irresponsible DemocRat unpresidentin’.
jl
@aimai: Glad I don’t read the WaPo rag. I don’t think this is a scandal like agents getting shit faced and cleaned out during security assignments, but if the guy was able to run through the front door and down the hall, not minor either. I would be pissed if I lived in the place. But everything has to be reality show now, I guess, and nice wheel for partisan ax grinding of a particularly cheap vulgar and stupid sort. Glad I don’t read the WaPo rag.
SiubhanDuinne
I can’t remember where I saw this, but somewhere in the earlier reporting it was alleged that once the President and First Lady were out of the WH, the SS went into “weekend casual” mode. I do not like the sound of “weekend casual” when it comes to the protection of the First Family, WH staff, or the physical People’s House. Don’t know what it will take to bring the Secret Service back to their former high level of preparedness and performance, but it sure ain’t happening right now.
Botsplainer
Meh. Secret Service has always been a human run organization, which means there have always been a few fuckups.
Whitesplaination demanded exceptionalism, so we get the legendary and ruthless efficiency myth, Same as Hoover’s FBI, same as your valiant local cops. Always perfect, always trustworthy.
Kennedy died. Ford got approached by gun wielders. Reagan got shot.
People fuck up. The mature organizations adapt through failure and recognize their mistakes. The immature organizations whitesplain the facade of brilliance, and are dumbfounded that anything could go wrong.
SiubhanDuinne
@aimai:
Speaking of WaPo, this is off topic, but I just saw a report that Ben Bradlee is under hospice care and, by accounts I’ve heard, not expected to live much longer. Yes, he has terrible taste in wives, but back in the 1973-’74 day, he was a journalistic-editorial force to be reckoned with. I hope he has an easy transition, whenever it occurs.
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: Botspainer explains it well.
Botsplainer
BTW – The culture of Whitesplaination as it applied to Hoover’s FBI involved pretending the Mafia wasn’t a real thing until the Apalachin meeting in 1957.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover#Response_to_Mafia_and_civil_rights_groups
From Wiki:
“While Hoover had fought bank-robbing gangsters in the 1930s, anti-communism was a bigger focus for him after World War II, as the cold war developed. During the 1940s through mid-1950s, he seemed to ignore organized crime of the type that ran vice rackets such as drugs, prostitution, and extortion. He denied that any mafia operated in the U.S. In the 1950s evidence of Hoover’s unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors. The Apalachin Meeting of late 1957 changed this; it embarrassed the FBI by proving on newspaper front pages that a nationwide mafia syndicate thrived unimpeded by the nation’s “top cops”. Hoover immediately changed tack, and during the next five years, the FBI investigated organized crime heavily. Its concentration on the topic fluctuated in subsequent decades, but it never again merely ignored this category of crime.”
Corner Stone
@Iowa Old Lady:
What the hell is going on in Iowa?
KG
@NCSteve: I thought DHS was a terrible idea in 2002… let’s take all these agencies that are in various department because they do things related to that department into one giant department, it’s just moving pieces around and adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to the mess, but at least it’ll look like we’re doing something and are oh so very serious.
ThresherK
We will find that the SecSvc is understaffed because of some anonymous hold in the Senate.
? Martin
@Suffern ACE:
This, plus 3x as many threats as previous Presidents, more guns in the general population, and a President that doesn’t seem to be afraid of everything that moves and doesn’t want to feel like he’s in a prison.
Throwing manpower at these problems doesn’t necessarily improve it. Throwing technology doesn’t either. You’ve got some fraction of 7 billion people trying to get in the door and only so many square feet to dedicate to people trying to keep them out. The only sure security solution is to shoot first and ask questions later, which is effective, but not exactly media-friendly. Either than or reduce the percentage of that 7 billion trying to get in. ‘course that’s a good argument to elect Donald Trump, though we’ll have to live down a gold-plated Marine One.
Botsplainer
@Corner Stone:
I’m a white guy who knows the language of wingnuts. I can always claim to be born again in wingnut inanity, and may even get to claim that my librulism was really just a cynical manipulation for gain.
Wingers are suckers for that kind of story. I could be back in the fold in no time.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
When I was in my early and late teens, my mother was on the board of directors of the American Booksellers’ Association and served on the committee which quadrennially selected books for the permanent White House library. I was lucky enough to accompany her to the 1957 presentation. Met President Eisenhower, AG Herbert Brownell (why?), and probably some long-forgotten WH staff. There must have been some kind of security protocol, even in those pre-JFK-assassination times, but I certainly don’t remember anything onerous.
(Even more OT: In 1961, my mom helped make the presentation to President Kennedy. She happened (yeah, “happened”) to be standing right next to the President, so the photo that showed up in well over 100+ newspapers around the country has just the two of them — although there were three other members of the presentation committee right there. Photo cropping, how does it work?
Iowa Old Lady
@Corner Stone: I don’t know. Braley has apparently not been willing to run negative ads and show how extreme she is, the way Harry Reid did against Sharon Angle.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
Some fraction of some fraction of some fraction of some fraction of some…
It’s not like Genghis is massing his peeps outside.
There’s no excuse for this. I didn’t want the guy shot just because he can jump a fence. But fudge me, after he “overpowers” one SS guy that’s about the damn limit. There are quite a bit of just normal people all over the area near where this guy reached.
Corner Stone
@Botsplainer:
Friend, honestly, you’re about 95% of the way there at any given comment here.
delk
Ushers are calling the shots in regards to White House security?
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Yup.
Corner Stone
@delk:
Probably just the choreographed dance routines, if I had to guess.
Richard Bottoms
Since the war isn’t worth a congressional hearing, maybe this is.
Botsplainer
@Corner Stone:
True, I don’t share the reflexive 1940 Wendell Willkie campaign aversion to international conflict that some of the posters here seem to claim, but I have this whole commitment to racial, social, economic, environmental and sexual justice thing going (along with a substantial streak of libertine license lurking).
Can’t you claim a brother?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Iowa Old Lady: I heard this race discussed on the car radio (MSNBC), and an Iowa reporter said the “farmer controversy” (Braley said Grassley isn’t qualified to be chair of the Judiciary cttee because he’s a farmer) and the chicken lawsuit (I can’t even…) are helping her paint Braley as an elitist. Pierce blames Braley for not painting Ernst as an extremist based on personhood and Agenda 21– this assumes that a majority of voters in an off-year Iowa race think personhood and Agenda 21 are crazy.
I don’t blame Harkin for retiring given his tenure, age and the general suckitude of our politics, but damn I wish he hadn’t.
Corner Stone
I wonder how many details about the WH breaches and SS in general is actually verifiable, or are some number of assholes trying to slip the shiv in?
This story is shifting rapidly and none of it makes a whole bunch of sense, taken with context.
D58826
Also OT but SCOTUS has re-instated the Ohio voting restrictions by a (drum roil please) 5-4 vote. If Roberts could figure out a way he and the other 4 reactionaries would bring back Jim Crow. And yes I know that would mean Clarence would have to ride in the back of the SCOTUS bus; a seat he richly deserves.
That and the news from Iowa, Arkansas, the GOP leading in the Mass. gubernatorial race makes for a very depressing political landscape. For a political party that is despised by 70% of the electorate they seem to be doing quite well thank you
jl
@delk: If there were lots of false alarms, and no one around now who remembers anything similar happening, and lots of bureaucratic and public officious bloated egos to calm, yeah, I would bet the ushers were able to get the alarm muted. They are always there, carping. Guy jumping the fence and getting so far as to run down the entrance hall, not (thank goodness) always there. Edit: and something like that within no one’s memory, so could not happen.
slag
All true. And Jason Chaffetz is still an idiot:
If a box intended to go off only in times of danger is going off unnecessarily, then that is not a “superficial” concern. That is a real problem. Of course, the answer to that problem is to fix it, but then, doing so takes money, time, and effort. Apparently, Chaffetz’s solution is to just live with it and then decry “failures of leadership”, which is, of course, no solution at all.
Luckily, Utah is an entirely superfluous state, because no one should be making that man responsible for any critical system.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
OT, but Supreme Court stopped early voting in Ohio less than a day than it was going to start. This includes Sunday voting and extended evening hours. This remains in effect until the Court can hear an appeal by Ohio state officials.
In other words, they’re stopping any extra hours of early voting so they can wait on Ohio to say why they shouldn’t have any extra hours of early voting. They just gave Ohio GOP a win without them having to make an actual case, especially since I don’t think they gave them a deadline for said appeal before saying ‘screw it, you didn’t want to defend your case, the lower court ruling goes back into effect’.
EDIT: Beaten to the punch I suppose.
@D58826:
For all that the electorate says they hate the GOP and like liberal policies, the way they vote makes it clear they forgive the GOP for being crazy more than Dems for simply being Dem. Our country is hard-wired for the GOP at this point and it’s depressing.
Corner Stone
@D58826:
Issuing no opinion as they merrily cackle away on their brooms.
How does a SCOTUS decide that less voter participation is the rewarding outcome? Oh wait…
Botsplainer
@D58826:
A query – cellphone usage has gotten even more universal since 2012, and landline terminations have escalated.
I get no polling questions by cellphone.
Who are they polling? How do the pollsters know they have a valid sample among cellphone users?
Or are they pulling numbers from their asses?
? Martin
@Corner Stone: It doesn’t take a very large fraction of 7 billion to become impossible to manage.
I’m not defending the state of SS protection by any means, just that I can see the circumstances that can lead to this. It’s not good, it needs to be fixed, but it’s not easy to fix. The more people you need to protect against, the more inconvenient it becomes for the people you are protecting. WH is a busy place – a balance needs to be maintained. Having a mass of people tour through daily doesn’t help.
Or it could just be the curse of being in DHS. Being that close to the CIA can’t be good for you.
Mike in NC
Having lived in the DC area for 20 years, I can recall that the uniformed division of the Secret Service didn’t have a stellar reputation. Nor did the Capitol Police.
jl
@? Martin: Berlin Wall around every public building, provide complementary body armor and helmets for the tourists, free fire zones, automatic shot-gun and booby traps, moat + ravenous crocodiles….
Or, Biden with shotgun doing WH duty.
What’ll it be?
Corner Stone
@Mike in NC:
Seeing as Chris Matthews is an ex-CP…
D58826
@Botsplainer: The Iowa poll was by the local newspaper and didn’t have crosstabs so the article wasn’t sure of the real impact. Mass. may just be an anomaly.
The depressing point is that it is even close in so many of these states. People continue to vote against their interests.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
7 billion is quite a number to start from, alright. Better start digging that moat.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@D58826: pretty rapid response from the NYT opinion board
Corner Stone
@jl: I swear I didn’t see this “moat” part a minute ago.
But I like it.
PhoenixRising
@Corner Stone:
Obama appointed an agent who was experienced, had great 360 evals & was highly qualified in terms of training to manage, to run the Service back in Feb.
Since then insiders have been looking for opportunities to make the agency suffer from ‘incompetent management’.
That new director is the first-ever who cannot write her name in the snow (unless she is significantly more agile than the dude in her employ who got tagged by a whacko with a knife last week).
Coincidence?
D58826
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: lets be even clearer – it is about race period full stop. If the GOP was getting a big chuck of those African American votes, they would be driving the urban voters to the polls in stretch limos.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I suppose Chief Justice Roberts agrees. Probably thinks that since racism is over, such extra hours aren’t necessary since if you can’t vote in normal hours, you must not care enough, and not because things could ever be stacked against you.
Christ all.
Rathskeller
@Botsplainer: I’ve gotten 2-3 polls on my cell phone in the last year. We have a land line that we don’t answer, unless a relative is calling. (It’s for 911 and people who cannot remember my cell phone number, basically.)
Two of those (maybe three) were push polls, which might be significant.
? Martin
@Botsplainer:
Some are pulling numbers from their asses.
Building a valid sample isn’t easy. My guess is that they have a heuristic approach – where they monitor the sample as they get participants and use that to shift where the next calling focus should be. My understanding is that survey participation for political polls is now in the single digits. So a sample of 1000 respondents involves 10K-20K calls, and you need more than that to have a large enough pool in the event that you can’t get 18-25s to respond, etc That’s why crosstabs are so important to look at – they’ll tell you how shit the poll is.
I’m pretty sympathetic to polls, but I’m now getting them almost daily and they’re getting longer. My limit was one per week and now it’s probably one every other week. I just don’t have half an hour to give you every day. We get a lot of local polls here, not many national because there’s nothing to glean – we’re going to elect Democrats.
jl
@Corner Stone: The damn edit function is just too tempting for thoughts that ramble through my head just as I punch ‘Submit’. You a fancy pants lawyer ain’t you? So, sue me. See ya in court. Ha ha ha…
OK, maybe time for my meds.
Violet
It sounds like the thing to do for people who want to get into the White House to have a bunch of people climb the fence all at the same time. Not enough agents to deal with that. Too many intruders running around at the same time. They could wear the same clothes like in ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ to really throw off the Secret Service.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: also, too, the idea of “contorting” our bullshit voting process that is based on harvest schedules, church attendance and pre-railroad means of transportation.
I shall now bite my virtual tongue and not make any cheap jokes about Iowa
JPL
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Yup.. Only the wealthy should be allowed to vote. That is a true democracy. Scotusblog said that Sunday vote is in doubt too.
jl
@? Martin: The difficult issue is getting a reasonable sample frame, and then a random sample. How to do that when no way to get a census, even if you can contract with some vendors to obtain real live cell-phone numbers. There will be various issues of self-selection unless you can access a wide variety of cell phone numbers from different companies and different plans through a vendor. Complicated by who is willing/able to opt in or out of privacy policies.
One method is to get something close to a census of parts of cell phone numbers that are known for the sample frame, usually area code and prefix. Then use software to randomly generate and validate cell phone numbers in the population, validate and calibrate with comparable surveys using other sample frames, such as residential address or landline. Vendors exist who do this stuff for marketing people, so it is a fairly standardized service a person can get research funds to buy. In the Free Market, no less.
aimai
@SiubhanDuinne: Death comes to everyone. Aside from old age nostalgia I don’t feel much of anything for Ben Bradlee.
Hawes
The real question is: Where was Channing Tatum during all this?
Corner Stone
@jl:
I guess I could sue you, but I’ll settle for an out of court settlement for part of your meds.
Corner Stone
@PhoenixRising:
You sure? Maybe her name is Dorothy, and they all call her Dot.
ruemara
they are underfunded & understaffed.
jl
@ruemara: But ‘they’ (even the Secret Service) are the help, the lesser people who are suckers enough to actually do things, though in this case often useful props for propaganda when things look nice and go well. So ‘underfunded & understaffed’ is never an excuse. Even if more budget cuts reduce the Service to an old duffer named Floyd, with heart failure, who is trying to hang in there until he can qualify for Medicare, or whatever retirement benefits they have.
‘underfunded & understaffed’ is certainly seldom, perhaps never, a fit topic of discussion for the rich fogs who infest the corporate news media.
SiubhanDuinne
@aimai:
True dat.
My lament is more for the WaPo that was. Bradlee was an important part of that.
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Truman was at Blair House, the White House was undergoing renovations. (Renovations as in gutting the place and rebuilding it using a steel frame building structure).
jonas
Secret Service: about as good as the CIA at estimating potential threats.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Iowa Old Lady: Formula to lose. We have a local school board member who may well tank the current sane majority on the board because she retreats to the fainting couch at the first mention of “dirty politics”. I frankly hope she’s the only one who loses. Politics is acted-out conflict. It will be mean, cruel, and dirty. Pretending it’s some genteel method of working out compromises is crap.
drkrick
Especially when the Obama’s children and the First MiL were still in residence. If the words “weekend casual” reached Mrs. Obama’s ears, I can imagine just how sharp that conversation was when they got home.
Tone In DC
Another commenter mentioned the recent hire of a woman to lead the Service.
I don’t think it’s that involved. I think the budget is an issue, but also maybe this… maybe we have a few oath keepers in there.
Honorable mention to the “DHS is horrible” idea.
gwangung
@aimai:
Um, say what????
SS has their lives AND their two daughters in their hands.
One teeny tiny error could mean blood—you bet your ass they should be mean.
Mnemosyne
@gwangung:
Not to mention that the very same article revealed that Mrs. Robinson and Sasha were in the residence when the shooting occurred, and Malia was expected home any minute.
Those Secret Service guys are lucky if all they got was some nasty language for missing an attack that happened while the family was inside the White House.
JGabriel
WaPo via John Cole @ Top:
This never happened on The West Wing.
? Martin
@Tone In DC: Interesting observation on Maddow – SS wasn’t previously headed by a political appointee, but now is under DHS, and has new sensitivity to beltway bullshit. There’s a reason why we insulate the military from politics as much as we do – their job isn’t to make the visitors comfortable – its to get the fucking job done right.
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks for the correction. I forgot about that.
The Sailor
I can’t believe anyone is taking the WaPo seriously when they have nothing but three of their unnamed friends to quote.
Dave
Perhaps they are just attempting to assist in executing the wishes of the right wing nut jobs to kill the whole First Family.
If we’re doing what if’s, what if it was some guy a little smarter and/or more deranged, and he had an automatic weapon, and the family was in the residence. They’d all be dead before they discovered the breach, apparently.
billb
So shoot everyone that comes over the fence, it is like 9ft tall, it is no prank to climb that thing. unless they are really rethuglicans in the SS, in that case let the Dem Party provide security.
mclaren
@Suffern ACE:
Bingo. It’s exactly the same situation as with Matthias Rust landing his cessna in Red Square at the height of the Cold War. When the security bureaucracy gets so overloaded, so slow, so labyrinthine, so complex, some guy just strolling in gets past the whole shebang because the entire security complex gets totally bogged down and snarled and snafu’d in any attempt at a response.
This kind of incident shows me that America is well on its well toward a Soviet-Union-style collapse. As we bulid more and more layers of surveillance, less and less of all those recorded phone calls and emails and camera footage can be viewed. As we create more and more complex and intimidating security blockades and roadblocks and intrusive muggers with badges hassling everyone in the performance of everyday chores, eventually all of society will just bog down and grind to a halt.
This is how Shithole America will end: with a slow-motion bureaucratic society-wide drowning in red tape. A kafkaesque world-‘o-crap-dämmerung in which American society snarls up and gets tangled and bollixed with military/police/prison/surveillance-torture-complex nitpicky rules and procedures and security protocols that eventually prevent anyone from doing anything.