Customer Reviews

Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism (HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Skating on Stilts should be required reading for anyone with a leadership role in homeland security. Baker takes policy -- ordinarily dry except to those in the field -- and turns it into compelling, thought-provoking fodder by recounting the stories of some of the hardest issues he dealt with while at DHS. These same issues remain hard, and are likely to become even more intense arenas of conflict and concern in the next 5-10-15 years.

Anyone who wonders why government is so slow, so complicated, will no longer think that the reason is lazy people in Washington. Baker points out how difficult it can be to get through the process and end up at the right policy decision -- even when the goal seems obvious.

Surprisingly, he includes quite a lot of information about his personal emotions and actions in this book, so you end up with a real feeling of rapport as you move along.

This book is fascinating from start to finish. It's also a hoot. And sometimes discouraging. Baker's account of "The Wall," that bizarre rule that prevented our left hand from telling our right hand what information it held before 9/11, is deeply engaging. I thought I knew all there was to know about that, and I was wrong. And his account of the negotiations with the E.U. privacy crowd, which essentially was trying to re-erect the same wall, is riveting. It's highly unusual to read a Washington book that is literate and written with a real voice, as Baker's is and does. As an account of the bureaucratic wars, this volume deserves a permanent place on the shelf. It should be a regular part of a national securities curriculum, for sure; but it's also a great primer on the art of negotiating and in particular on the use of the clock and the power of letting the other side know you're willing, as Nancy Reagan liked to say, to just say no.

This book is terrific, both in substance and in style. It works on about 4 levels--as a review of what has happened over the last decade on terror/counter measures, a primer on DHS and the workings of government, a discussion of good lawyering/negotiating, and a thoughtful look at the privacy/security issue. Baker's discussion of the famous Brandeis article on privacy and its implications is particularly interesting.

The book also reflects the value of having people in office who have had a chance to think long and hard about issues prior to entering senior levels of government.

This is an excellent view of post 9/11 security policy decision-making in general and the formulation of major homeland security policy during the second Bush administration in particular. Readable and fascinating, the author manages to provide an inside view of the sausage-making nature of the policy process without destroying your appetite for breakfast meats. As someone who was involved in many of the issues that Mr. Baker discusses, I can attest to the accuracy and balance of his description. This is no "kiss and tell" but a personal memoir of some of the most important negotiations and policy decisions of Secretary Chertoff's, and Stewart Baker's, Department of Homeland Security.
Just as importantly, Mr. Baker turns his eye to the future with a thought-provoking look at both bio-terrorism and cyber-crime and terrorism, drawing from his experience with the protection of international travel to suggest why we are not yet adequately prepared to face the current and coming generations of terrorists. Throughout, he crosses swords with the privacy community, blaming them where it seems appropriate for opposing or derailing measures to protect against real security threats in the name of theoretical risks to personal privacy and posing some difficult questions about the future of our discussion of personal privacy in a world where the bad guys don't play by the same rules.
I highly recommend this book to students of terrorism, government security policy and privacy issues. It's a fast read, and Mr. Baker offers a perspective and level of experience that needs to be heard.

This book provides a fascinating inside account into the early days of the Department of Homeland Security. Stewart takes what many would believe is the dry bureaucratic work of the Department and turns this into a page turner. The description of negotiating with the EU raises several salient questions about what are really US strategic interests. This narrative also accurately points out the true interests of the privacy community, and how they hold hostage many sensible security reforms. It is still remarkable that we, as a nation, are ok with Google recording our web browsing history and our neighborhoods, yet we prevent the government from sensible security procedures, that in many ways would reduce the physical security procedures one receives as they enter another country. These stories serve as a backdrop and appropriate context as Stewart describes the threats of the future. These threats - cyber and bio - require attention, and the preceding chapters regarding the inertia of the US government and the difficultly of international negotiations do not provide comfort that we will address these threats before another crisis is thrust upon us. Overall, this book is a great read that brings to life a Department at its inception, provides advance notice of future threats, and finally underscores that we need to have a more balanced discussion about privacy and the governments responsibilities before we are confronted with another crisis. In sum, I highly recommend this book and would encourage all interested in national security issues to pick up a copy. I would even say this is a book to bring to the beach - and to give to others so they are aware of the challenges ahead of us as well.

This book provides a rather narrow account of the legal issues that have impacted on what used to be known as the Global War on Terrorism. Stewart Baker is a lawyer who worked in the General Counsel Office of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the 1990's and, after the disaster of 9/11 joined the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under its second director Michael Chertoff. This book concerns the related issues of protecting the privacy of U.S. citizens and protecting their safety from terrorist attacks.
The reader learns a good deal about the workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the special court that determines if intelligence operations undertaken within the U.S. meet its criteria. The book also covers the legal issues that have become central to identifying and preventing terrorist attacks against U.S. property and citizens. These latter issues are matters not just of U.S. Law, but also of International Law. Baker provides particularly interesting discussions of his efforts to bring the European Union into line with what the DHS determined to be minimum U.S. screening procedures.
An unintended consequence of this book is that it also reveals how remarkably ill-informed the senior officials at DHS, including Baker, were of the structure and nature of terrorism. In the most egregious example Baker reviews the difficulties he had in gaining access to the records of the Society for Worldwide Inter-bank Financial Transactions (SWIFT). In point of fact it was not a problem, but SWIFT records weren't very helpful either since very few terrorists identify their accounts as "terrorist funds" like a Christmas account. Also Baker is apparently unaware for the small amounts of cash that are actually needed for terrorist operations and are easily lost among the billions of currency sent and received over the SWIFT system everyday. Also there are the use front companies and non-governmental organizations (NGO), mostly Islamic charitable organizations to conceal transfers of terrorist funds. Finally there is the traditional Islamic banking system called Hawala which is used by Islamic people the world over as a cheaper and more reliable system of international cash transfers (See IMF paper, "Informal Funds Transfer Systems: An Analysis of the Informal Hawala System, 2003).
This is a specialized book and Baker is undoubtedly a good lawyer, but the book would have been better and he would have been more effective at DHS if he had a better grasp of terrorism in the 21st Century.