The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the most incompetent and dysfunctional in the federal government (Katrina is one example; but only one). DHS also has a very expansive view of its role. Almost everything is a matter of homeland security. That includes epidemic disease, where there remains uncertainty as to who will do what to whom in the event of a pandemic. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), they also want to give the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) the bird:
In an effort to prepare for H5N1, the USDA rolled out a series of measures including surveillance programs, response plans to the virus and new rules that aim to prevent infected birds and products from being imported.Still, GAO investigators said there is uncertainty between USDA and the Department of Homeland Security as to what role each would take during an emergency. The lack of coordination between the two departments would slow initial responses as they work to figure out their jobs. (Business Insurance)
It's hard to see why DHS should be involved. They don't have the expertise to even get out of their parking lot. Bird flu outbreaks in poultry will also be local events and the first responses are also local. The GAO observed that most of the state response plans they examined weren't complete, often not including time frames for control. Monitoring the plans is a USDA responsibility:
The agency also vowed to more closely monitor high-pathogenic bird flu response plans to ensure they are appropriate should an outbreak occur. It noted a new rule that required states to develop low-pathogenic plans that must then be reviewed and approved by USDA. Some of the milder strains can develop into the highly pathogenic virus.
Government investigators also are worried about incomplete information on the number and location of birds in backyards, the ability of laboratories to handle a surge in testing, disposal of carcasses, and uncertainty as to the amount of antiviral medication needed for workers depopulating diseased animals and cleaning infected facilities.
There is some professed uncertainty by some about the nature and extent of the pandemic threat from H5N1. But there is no question we already have an panzootic with H5N1. HPAI H5N1 has not yet reached the Americas but any prudent veterinary agency should already be fully prepared for it to happen.
That's any prudent veterinary agency.
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Revere- I don't know about any other areas involved, and actually rather shudder to think, but CBP (of which the old Customs Service is now part)is within DHS. CBP also includes the former APHIS inspectors. As such, they look at the importations of all poultry and poultry products.
You probably do not know about the damage DHS has done to the state of information security in the United States.
Let me tell you a story. About the number one problem out there right now: botnets.
The outfit that took the lead in combating botnets on a national scale was the National Infrastructure Protection Commission. This was in early 2000, when the first botnet-enabled large scale DDoS attacks were being put in, against sites like Yahoo and eBay. NOBODY else was doing this on a national level. The NIPC put up a web site where they distributed host-based software which was designed to detect botnet client (or "attack zombie") software. The systems at risk in early 2000 were Linux and Solaris systems.
I tested the behavior of that software myself, on actual DDoS attack tool software in a sandbox environment. It detected all samples of DDoS attack tools, and produced exactly zero false positives. I was able to use this to build a kit which the team I was part of used to vet a server farm comprising 550 systems.
Long story short, the NIPC was getting some traction against the problem.
Along came the DHS, in late 2001. They absorbed the NIPC, which then simply disappeared. No part of DHS took up the functions NIPC had been performing. It and its role simply vanished into the vast DHS patronage turkey farm, never to be seen or heard from again.
There is presently NO Federal agency doing proactive mitigation work against the botnet problem. The FBI's recent Operation Bot Roast, like most law enforcement, was reactive, not proactive.
But "Bot Roast" did inform the general public about something that the security community has known for several years: the scale of the problem is now vast. Spend some quality time with that last link and wrap your mind around the concept of a minimum of a million purpose-compromised home and small business computers, in the service of organized crime. In a whole spectrum of criminal roles: extortion, identity theft, securities fraud, credit card fraud, spam propagation, ordinary "connection laundering" (the use of a cutout system to launch a network attack) ...
The sky and the breadth of the criminal imagination are the only limits on how far this has been taken over the course of the last seven years.
All thanks, in large part, to the empire building of the ignoramus patronage pols who made DHS what it is today: the laughingstock of the information security community.