500_DB 5-8
Cases of disasters put Americans in danger every year. They spend a lot of money on when property has been damaged. The Federal Emergency Management Agency helps the community in reducing these risks, helping people get back to their feet and become stable and helping officials to prepare for unforeseen hazards. The department of homeland security and emergency management lead in conducting state-level emergency operations. They also help in providing state Helpance to the local government overwhelmed or hit by a disaster.
Response and Recovery
As an emergency manager, I would start by coming up with a framework that will best suit the agency’s progress which includes fixing the terms and conditions of the agency in regards to serving the people in need (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2017). I would then remunerate the agency’s employees after consulting my boss and the Federal Civil Service Commission. I would cooperate with local officials to develop a hazard mitigation program to eliminate or reduce vulnerability to hazards. Disaster affects our social, physical, and economic status. This would help in reducing the disaster impact, prepare for, recover from and respond to any disaster that could occur.
I would also manage and take over all the agency’s affairs, make rules and regulations that dictate how the agency’s affairs should be carried out, Help my boss, the local government departments and the community-based organizations in coming up or rather the construction of the emergency plans and capabilities of the agency. I would also establish an aid that is mutually agreed upon to get the necessary equipment, services, and the relevant resources regarding a disaster. I would manage all the emergency communication systems, develop a program designed for mass care, a training program for new personnel, tests, and exercises.
The use of dynamic models can help guide and improve response; for example, the wildfire community makes extensive use of real-time and near-real-time geospatial modeling of wildfire behavior for logistical support (Sylves, 2019). Display functions remain important at this time, showing the location of damage to specific infrastructure components (e.g., the transportation and energy infrastructure) as well as the severity of damage and other specific information (e.g., damage to roofs, temporary repairs, and energy grid restoration planned during the next 24 hours).
Understanding Intelligence
Children under the age of sixteen years old were being used by the intelligence agencies and police as spies in undercover investigations. Mostly these children were being used secretly even without the knowledge of their parents (Greer & South, 2019). The mission was to gather information on terrorists, drug dealers, gangs and pedophiles. This practice started when a debate about the House of Lords came up which was about allowing the police force to have more freedom in using children as informants. This was definitely risky since these kids were not only acting as informants but also collected information on behalf of intelligence agencies.
Child Human Intelligence Source is a body authorized to register these kids as juvenile informants. This helped the children to complete their spy mission without being pressured by the police since they were previously forced to get results within a month according to the regulations. The main aim of the police was to find new ways of dealing with violence which was caused by the “county lines” drug gangs. The drug gangs used children as mules to flood the towns with drugs such as heroin and cocaine. The type of information given by these juvenile CHIS was such as how young gang members communicated with each other and what they were watching out for.
There were some commendable results from the children such as, some of the ringleaders were arrested, the drug spots where identified and the police became familiar with the drug language used in those areas, but there were more negative results on using these children as spies (McPhee, 2017). These were such as, their lives were at great risk of being involved in the drug trade and as terror increased, more children got harmed. Generally, more children got recruited in the drug trade. Violence broke out in the suburbs and shires where these children were dispatched on trains to sell drugs and more children were recruited through social media, peer pressure and care homes.
Critical Infrastructure
There are several sectors of critical infrastructure which include the chemical sector, communications sector, dams sector, energy sector, information technology sector, financial services sector, emergency services sector and healthcare and public health sector among many others (Pai & Gupta, 2017). The information technology sector is the most vulnerable critical infrastructure. This is because it is central to the nation’s economy, security, public health, and safety. Private citizens, academia, businesses, and the government are increasingly dependent on this sector of information technology. The sector greatly collaborates with the communication sector through the use of the internet.
Due to the risks of cyber-attacks, there is a need to improve security in this sector. This can be done by training the personnel on different techniques hackers use. training helps in identifying vulnerabilities and threats posed to the IT sector (Olmstead & Smith, 2017). It is good to use security backups, for example, the multi-factor authentication on accounts, use of password managers or the necessary systems which aid in backing up of data and maintaining strong passwords. Also, it is good to use two-step verification in accessing accounts which involves going through another identification process after keying in the password. This helps in preventing hackers from accessing private data and information.
The construction of US borders begun for forty miles of “steel bollard walls” in California and Texas. Twenty-two miles are complete and the eighteen miles remaining should be finished in May 2019. This is according to the CBP. This means that there is progress in border security although we are not there yet. It is important to secure these borders because there is still a large number of immigrants and drug traffickers nabbed at the border in the previous years. To better our borders, I would propose a renovation of the land ports of entry and staff them properly, provide inducements to retain existing border security personnel, introduce body cameras and enhance more search-and-rescue capacity.
Homeland Security
The homeland security deals with issues of border security, cybersecurity, academic engagement, disasters, economic security, civil rights, and civil liberties, and citizenship and immigration services among many others (ORDER, 2017). The main pressing issue regarding homeland security is the rise of terrorism and new non-state adversaries such as Artificial Intelligence and technologies such as physical and cyber mass weapons of destruction. This issue can be solved by tightening the homeland security by introducing a new mechanism to fight terrorism and introducing new policies on how to create the non-state adversaries.
Homeland security is doing its best to ensure that cybersecurity and border security is enhanced (Payan, 2016). It also ensures that the civil rights and liberties are protected, citizenship and immigration services are well managed, economic security is well maintained and disaster is well managed. I have no problem with homeland security since not cases have been reported and the ones that have, are being improved. Recently, reinforcements have been made on issues of strengthening national preparedness and resilience.
Generally, the intervention regarding disasters has been addressed over time. It has grown into a complex policy subsystem. The disaster policy is implemented through a set of functions known as emergency management and response. The military intelligence has been using children in spying on crimes which have turned out to be a major failure. The information technology sector is the most vulnerable critical infrastructure. This is because it is central to the nation’s economy, security, public health and safety and the main pressing issue regarding homeland security is the rise of terrorism and new non-state adversaries.
References
Haddow, G. D., Bullock, J. A., & Coppola, D. P. (2017). Introduction to emergency management. Butterworth-Heinemann.
Sylves, R. T. (2019). Disaster policy and politics: Emergency management and homeland security. CQ Press.
Greer, S., & South, N. (2019). 2 The criminal informant: police management, supervision, and control. Invading the Private: State Accountability and New Investigative Methods in Europe, 2.
McPhee, E. (2017). Undercover Operations: Investigating Crimes from the Inside. Greenhaven Publishing LLC.
Pai, G., & Gupta, S. (2017). Information Technology Sector.
Olmstead, K., & Smith, A. (2017). Americans and cybersecurity. Pew Research Center, 26.
ORDER, E. (2017). Executive order: Border security and immigration enforcement improvements.
Payan, T. (2016). The Three US-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security. ABC-CLIO.
