No wonder we don't feel safe. The DHS Secretary says, "the system works"—a notion you can only embrace if you accept that the first (and seemingly only) line of defense in the system is the inclination of every citizen to spot and pounce on the next passenger seeking to ignite their underwear. Then the incident is dismissed as "isolated" by Obama while Secretary Clinton warns omminously of the instability of Yemen. The "terrorism czar" (I am still thumbing through the Constitution seeking to find that office) declares that there is no smoking gun, just a day before Obama declares a clear link between our U.S. visa-approved visitor from Yemen and Al-Qaeda. Meantime, I trudge through the airport on Monday to the sonorous tone of the TSA announcement that the threat level has been determined to be "orange" — a color key on which it has been stuck for years since anyone lost any sense of its meaning anyway. While all this is going on, they confiscate some kid's Christmas gift of Play-Doh at security. Underneath all of this, we insist on zero-tolerance for error, amassing a list of 500,000 "watch list" names, which cripples our ability to focus at all on the real patterns of behavior that lead to terrorism attacks.
Flaming underpants, shoes, box cutters and Play-Doh don't kill people. Terrorists do. The reason we don't "connect the dots" of someone with terrorist ties, who has been reported as unstable by his own father to two embassies, who buys a one-way ticket with cash and has no luggage, is because we have created two many dots.
As well, we badly under-serve the criticality of public safety when we send such muddy signals about our intent, our policy, and the real threats we face. Communications is more than a public statement or a speech -- for it to any any effect, it needs to be a closely-knit, consistent and authentic process that matches words to actions, and experience to expectations.
