Pretty much. Their carefully cultivated air of competence probably deterred some nuts tho'. That ephemeral protection is gone now.
Obviously this person got through because the SS guys were too busy searching for counterfeit money to pay attention.
It's like you can't throw on a suit, sunglasses and a hearing aid and get any respect anymore.
Yeah, 4: . Things will tighten up nicely for a while and then slide again. It's impossible for humans to maintain a super-high level of vigilance when nothing much is happening. This was well documented in WW2 with radar operators.
Perhaps the thing to do is have the eager rookies guarding the prez. There would be lots of dead grandmas around then tho'. Bad publicity.
The worst part about all this is the bullshit Republican handwringing over the grave danger to President Obama's life, resulting from President Obama's inability to competently run the executive branch.
The worst part about all of this is the earth really is being run by the idiots. The really smart people were out in Silicon Valley working on IOS/Windows 8.
I knew a dude in the Secret Service named Cy/rus. He was dating my friend Ly/dia. We made sacking jokes.
Or you get to go after counterfeiters, which seems like it would be more glamorous than the general run of police (or even federal law enforcement) work.
Since they're dealing with 3x as many attempts, their fuck-up rate may be in line with historical averages.
I don't know if the Secret Service having been folded into the Dept. of Homeland Security in 2003 has anything to do with it, but word is that DHS is a mess.
I have a hard time caring about this. I mean, they caught the guy, right? Some crazies are going to get deeper into the defenses than others, its just the nature of the thing. That's why you do security in layers.
You might be qualified to head the Secret Service!
They used to say "any well-dressed man who is willing to give his own life can kill the President."
Sexism, I calls it.
I have a hard time caring about this.
I know what you mean, but: the front door of the White House wasn't locked (??) because apparently it's not ordinarily locked unless an alarm sounds.
From the link in the OP:
Crash Boxes and Front Door
When any officer spots an intruder -- which should have been the plainclothes team -- agents should hit the red button in the "crash boxes" posted throughout the White House and grounds. That alarm would lock the door to the White House, but since the never went off, the doors were left unlocked.
It is just really weird that the front door isn't locked ordinarily. Is that normal, and has been the practice forever? Maybe! But I don't know why. I heard on some radio program that the alarm didn't go off because some White House staff had complained about its being annoying and distracting ... because it goes off all the time? Dunno. I also don't know if that's even true that some people complained, such that it was turned off -- that sounds kind of unbelievable. And anyway if that is the plan, to leave the door unlocked unless the alarm goes off, you kind of have to accept the alarm.
It's just too nutty by far to think that the White House is ordinarily left with an unlocked front door, and people might turn off the alarm the way you'd take the batteries out of a smoke alarm.
Shorter me: It's the President of the United States, and his family. Lock the freaking door in the first place.
It's the compounding incompetence. Same thing about my link at 4: I'm kind of amazing that they let security for some other institution ride with the president, yet alone that they didn't background check him, yet alone that they didn't know that he had a a gun on him. (And they only found out because he had been annoying trying to take a picture of the president!)
It's the Secret Service reminding Obama that he got a little out-of-line when he criticized the foreign intelligence services.
The issue with the thing linked in 4 strikes me as having to do with private government contractors, particularly in the security arena. I think we already know this is an issue, and not just with the Secret Service.
It's been a while since I've reviewed the news on this, but just how much of the federal government is actually privately contracted? A huge amount, as I recall. It'll differ from agency to agency, but in some sectors as much as 80%?
Maybe the culture around protecting the White House leads them to put alarms on a hair trigger for emotional reasons, which in practice means they get used to silencing them all the time because of false alarm. I think a big factor in how that rando made it into Buckingham Palace to chat with the Queen in her bedroom back when.
Lock the freaking door in the first place.
I don't lock my door if I don't have to. Locks are a pain in the ass. I would hate for the President to be late for a teleconference with Putin or something because he was busy fumbling around trying to find his keys.
2: Even in this context, when seeing "SS" it takes me a second to not think of Germans being bad.
That's a really unfortunate connotation. They should change their name to something more descriptive like Protection Squadron.
Or you get to go after counterfeiters, which seems like it would be more glamorous than the general run of police (or even federal law enforcement) work.
Apparently, Isaac Newton took his job to catch counterfeiters very seriously.
It doesn't sound that bad. They were chasing him before he got into the building, they clearly just need to be faster runners.
There's probably at least one locked door, or a door with a big bloke outside it, before you get into the Obamas' actual home.