Review: The Myth of Homeland Security

I just finished to read The myth of Homeland Security. This is a good book about homeland security; mostly concentrated on United-States homeland security post 9/11. This is an apolitical essay on the subject. He bases his thoughts mostly on the analysis of the PATRIOT acts and other governmental writings. A thing that I really don’t like is that he didn’t do a bibliography; he justified this by:

“I had to write whole sections of this book based on partial information. But this book is not intended to be a history text or a reference. I’m making some inflammatory observations; I don’t want you, the reader, to ignore the substance of what I have to say by getting bogged down in the details of my research. So I didn’t quo sources.”

This is a good introduction book on the subject of homeland security. He ask the general questions of the subject and explain his point of view on them. I think that this is an honest writing from the part of the author. Some times, he lacks some deepening of his subject but this is excusable.

There is a good quote that resumes the general mood of the book: “Last week a friend forwarded me one of those “quotable quotes” emails that circle endlessly on the internet. At the bottom, it read: “You read about all these terrorists – most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10 to 15 years. Now, compare that to Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and those people are all over you. Let’s put Blockbuster in charge of immigration”.

By moment I had doubts on his researches for this book. For example, at the page 111 he says in a You should know section: “The National Security Agency (NSA) is a completely separate “turf” that focuses on cryptography, communication security, and signals intelligence.” The problem is that if you read “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century” you’ll see that the fall of CIA was mainly caused by the NSA who win the bureaucratic game for founds. The FBI probably not helped but to say that the NSA is completely separate turf this is two worlds. It’s possible that he is right, but I put a bémol here.

There is his home page: Marcus J. Ranum

This is my personal little review of the book, but you can have access to a full and complete review of the book by reading Robert M. Slade’s

Have a good read!