Yeah, I’ll give you that one. I’m assuming there’s a super tough process to be selected for the secret service, like an astronaut selection process? But maybe I’m assuming wrong.
I imagine it’s just incredibly difficult to take your job super seriously when any given thing only happens like once every 5-10 years, and probably not to you. I imagine most secret service people who are doing security spend 100% of their careers just standing around and then retire with nothing having happened.
At one point, US embassy security details had this problem, and what they settled on was rotating active-duty combat troops in straight from the field so they were super alert. After about 6 months they would start to relax, and they would rotate them out and have fresh people.
I won’t claim to know what the answer is for the SS but clearly there are some issues with the way they’re doing it.
I could see something like - someone is the best of the best, gets selected for a very prestigious Secret Service posting, then nothing happens and they just have to pick up dry cleaning and watch the fanciest and most pretentious people in the world attend cocktail parties for several years, and eventually they end up visiting sex workers and drinking on duty and things like that
I am not in security, but I have worked in secure areas. The way you prevent issues is having multiple layers of security that watch each other.
Like you prevent individual employees from committing fraud by having other employees sign off on their work. Then you prevent those employees from colluding to commit fraud by having another group of employees monitor their actions. Finally a third group of employees audits everyone occasionally (at random).
This way it requires at least 4 people who don’t know each other to do anything illegal. I’m sure the Secret Service could do with some audits. Like literally have an entire team of Secret Service people test them, trying to trick them into making a mistake.
Somewhat unrelated topic, but this is why driving is so dangerous at a population level. Most of the time, nothing happens even if you take a bunch of risks. But if enough risks occur at the same time, people die (Swiss cheese model).
To get assigned to protect a president? Yes, that’s a pretty tough selection process. The Secret Service has other responsibilities, though. Presidential protection details are just one possible assignment. It just happens to be the most high profile and prestigious assignment. But they were actually chartered as a law-enforcement/intelligence branch of the Department of the Treasury, so they also investigate a range of financial crimes, including (but not limited to) forgery, counterfeiting, wire fraud, etc. At the time that it was decided the president needed constant protection (after McKinley was assassinated in 1901), the FBI didn’t exist yet, or else they might have gotten the job.
Yeah, I’ll give you that one. I’m assuming there’s a super tough process to be selected for the secret service, like an astronaut selection process? But maybe I’m assuming wrong.
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev made a really good comment here that I think starts to answer this
I could see something like - someone is the best of the best, gets selected for a very prestigious Secret Service posting, then nothing happens and they just have to pick up dry cleaning and watch the fanciest and most pretentious people in the world attend cocktail parties for several years, and eventually they end up visiting sex workers and drinking on duty and things like that
That’s a really good point, it must be hard keeping them on top of their game.
I am not in security, but I have worked in secure areas. The way you prevent issues is having multiple layers of security that watch each other.
Like you prevent individual employees from committing fraud by having other employees sign off on their work. Then you prevent those employees from colluding to commit fraud by having another group of employees monitor their actions. Finally a third group of employees audits everyone occasionally (at random).
This way it requires at least 4 people who don’t know each other to do anything illegal. I’m sure the Secret Service could do with some audits. Like literally have an entire team of Secret Service people test them, trying to trick them into making a mistake.
Somewhat unrelated topic, but this is why driving is so dangerous at a population level. Most of the time, nothing happens even if you take a bunch of risks. But if enough risks occur at the same time, people die (Swiss cheese model).
To get assigned to protect a president? Yes, that’s a pretty tough selection process. The Secret Service has other responsibilities, though. Presidential protection details are just one possible assignment. It just happens to be the most high profile and prestigious assignment. But they were actually chartered as a law-enforcement/intelligence branch of the Department of the Treasury, so they also investigate a range of financial crimes, including (but not limited to) forgery, counterfeiting, wire fraud, etc. At the time that it was decided the president needed constant protection (after McKinley was assassinated in 1901), the FBI didn’t exist yet, or else they might have gotten the job.