Homeland Security Broke

Really interesting article by Robert X. Cringley on the lack of federal funding for security technologies.

Since the attack on the Towers, the United States threw its considerable fortune (ability to sell debt to the Chinese) into the War on Terror (Don't get me started about wars on abstract nouns...the very language defies logic), of which a large component was Homeland Security. We're conducting a couple wars abroad, both of which still seem to be going on (and by all accounts will continue into the forseeable future - think War On Drugs - 35 years old and counting...), and took a vast security bureaucracy and turned it into a different and even more vast domestic security, law enforcement, infrastrucure and emergency preparedness bureaucracy.

We could argue all day about whether or not America is more secure (again, a media invention, since the math geek in me wonder's exactly what metrics we will use to quantify an essential qualitative statement) as a result of these changes, but we'd all agree that a lot of money has been spent. In fact, from a pragmatic point of view, ALL the money has been spent, and that's the point of this particular column. For a variety of reasons, there is no money left to spend on homeland security ­ none, nada, zilch.