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Giuliani favors regionalized homeland security
By WDavidStephenson | September 5, 2007
Thanks to Pete O’Dell for this tip..
Rudy Giuliani continues to dazzle the Republican base with his tough talk on security issues to the point that they give him a pass on social issues (somehow, I can’t see Westboro Baptist Church parishioners manning phone banks for Rudy a year from now, but what the heck..).
Yesterday he made a pitch in Mississippi for reorganized, decentralized, and more flexible DHS and FEMA — and more emphasis on training for local first responders.
He swiped a page from Steve Flynn’s book, saying that “When you’re preparing for a natural disaster, you’re preparing for a terrorist attack.”
Among the specifics, Giuliani wants:
- regional offices for FEMA and DHS, including regional strike forces modeled on the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Teams.
- additional training for locals
- (again in line with Flynn’s thinking) more emphasis on infrastructure maintenance than on legislators’ pet “earmarks”
Nothing wrong with any of those proposals, although I still argue that there also has to be an ad hoc digital, “virtual regionalism” component, since Ma Nature, in her infinite wisdom, doesn’t halt a hurricane at the Potomac because Virginia is in the South Region and Md. in the Middle Atlantic one — yet another reason for my continual harping on location-based, real-time information as a critical component in determining actual — vs. planned — response strategies.
Technorati tags:
homeland security DHS FEMA Department of Homeland Security War on Terror terrorism antiterrorism Republican Party government IT government politics location-based services geo-spatial web web 2.0 homeland security 2.0 disaster management 2.0 disaster management business continuity disaster planning disaster planning 2.0 Rudy Giuliani
Topics: technology, policy and politics, e-gov transformation | |
