The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

J U N E 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 visas any other way. Through our rapid transforma- tion, we showed not only that we understood our role in border secu- rity as the first line of defense, but we showed other agencies that we knew what we were doing and that they could build on what we had done and use that information to perform checks at the ports of entry. So it wasn’t just within CA. Other agencies recognized very quickly that the State Department gets it done. RM: And the changes continue. How did the Dec. 25 bombing attempt affect bureau operations? A/S Jacobs: After that incident, I saw a lot of the same things that happened after 9/11. Of course, people want to rush to do something immediately to ensure this can’t happen again. The benefit of our 9/11 experience is that we have tried a lot of the things being suggested now and over time realized that they didn’t work. For example, for a while we had a very expansive list of names on the no-fly list. We wound up with so many false positives, so many people being stopped at ports of entry and so many complaints from travelers, that in 2008 the interagency community had to take another look at the standards and shorten the list. We learned it didn’t make us more secure to spend all of our time checking to see if it’s the right person. I think the good news after the Christmas Day bomb- ing has been that people are remembering what we did after 9/11. We are doing things in a smarter way this time. This time the interagency community has come together as a whole to look at our procedures in tandem. Opera- tionally, everyone has a much better understanding now of what each agency does and how we need to work together. RM: There are some who say that Consular Affairs is still struggling to find the proper balance between main- taining an adequate security posture and welcoming visitors to the United States. A/S Jacobs: Whenever there is any kind of disaster or crisis, or something happens with visas, like what hap- pened on Christmas Day, we can expect that our work will be scrutinized. We’re always in the spotlight. Our processes are never going to be static. The enemy that we are fighting is very agile, very flexible. They’re very quick to pick up on whatever screening tools we put into place. So we have to operate the same way; we’re always going to have to be looking. One thing everyone can agree on is that there’s no single machine or procedure that is going to protect us completely. And so what it really requires is a certain amount of risk management , not risk avoidance, paired with a layered ap- proach so that if one part of the process fails, another part can catch somebody. Perhaps the biggest challenge that we face is identify- ing people we don’t know about already. We do a great job of sharing data on known or suspected terrorists. We get that information into databases. We have the biomet- rics. We have any number of tools available to us on peo- ple we know about. But it’s the people with clean identities who have somehow become a threat. Those are the peo- ple that the U.S. has to figure out ways to identify. One way to do that is through more data mining of the information that we get on people who apply for visas. With our all-electronic visa form there will be a wealth of potential intelligence that the State Department and other agencies can access. That’s where I think the next step should be. All of the interested agencies could set up a fu- sion center where they could analyze our visa information and use it as a screening tool before applicants even ap- pear in our consular sections for interviews. RM: What do you see as the greatest challenges facing Consular Affairs over the next few years, and how is the bu- reau preparing to meet them? A/S Jacobs: Our operation depends mostly on the fees we collect for services, so that means that we have to pay a lot of attention to demand. When demand is up, it’s great, but when it’s down, the way it is now, it is not so good for us. We know that within the next five, 10, 15 or 20 years there’s going to be tremendous growth in demand in China, India, Brazil and Mexico. We’ve been working hard to figure out how to accommodate this demand. In China, for example, our consulate in Shanghai has already had to add more cubicles for staff, because they F O C U S “I am always proud to lead CA, but I could not have been prouder of how proactive and responsive people were [after the Haiti earthquake].”