I was unable to stay awake over here in Germany long enough to hear the live capture of the second Boston bomber suspect. I had spent most of Friday listening in on the live feed of the Boston police department (thru a link on Twitter that led to a live UStream police scanner feed). I hit the sack about the time the Boston police were shutting down their city wide dragnet.
There were so many reports of suspicious vehicles that I began to wonder if I was really listening to a live feed from the police in Boston, or if they had just put previously recorded conversations from troops stationed at Iraqi Checkpoints on continuous loop.
But I digress.
As I listened to the stream and followed Twitter hashtage #bostonscanner, it was obvious that the authorities were busy trying to disable the live feed. I started seeing tweets from people watching the UStream via mobile phone apps that were finding their scanner apps shut-down. There were tweets from the authorities imploring citizens not to retweet the very same information they were BROADCASTING all over the city (as if the suspect would read a Twitter feed instead of just listening directly to the cops themselves if so inclined?) The direct http feed from UStream that I was listening to on my computer never suffered from such blocking.
So let’s do a quick recap here. Homeland Security has spent billions of US taxpayer dollars in an attempt to “make us safe(r)’. We’ve seen countless stories and photos from every Podunk county sheriffs office in the US sporting military grade machinery and weapons.
Buying at all those fancy weapons, and seeing all those highly polished black boots obviously helped loosen the constricted sphincter muscles of a decidedly nervous nation, (while simultaneously enriching the military industrial arms dealers). But as the incident with the Grand Theft Auto/Boston Bombers scanner feed on UStream shows, our intrepid terrorist warriors overlooked at least one MAJOR GAPING hole in the system.
Somewhere along the way, they forgot to upgrade the police radios of a major American city with police communications gear that can’t be intercepted by any 14 year old kid (or terrorist) with a $99 Radio Shack police scanner.
And to top it all off, this just popped into the picture : Boston Bomber Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.
The FBI and Homeland Security apparently STILL don’t have the manpower to track KNOWN targets of HIGH probability of terrorism or enough money to upgrade Boston police radios? We know they spent bazillions of dollars of Homeland Security money on tanks for the tri-county area of Tuscaloosa (and the like), but not properly following the trail of IDENTIFIED THREATS is WAY over the top. The FBI, like the town of Waco, must have been lulled into a false sense of serenity as they sat in the cool shadow of their local fertilizer plant.
In the old days (before torture was “enhanced interrogation”) there would probably have been some sort of oversight or review set up to examine these failures, but since Obama decided on a FAIL FORWARD strategy of leadership, that seems highly unlikely.
Enjoy
The Tim Channel 