School Bus Drivers Join the Terror Watch
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The war on terror has a new front line – the school bus line. Financed by the Homeland Security Department, school bus drivers are being trained to watch for potential terrorists, people who may be casing their routes or plotting to blow up their buses.
Designers of the School Bus Watch program want to turn 600,000 bus drivers into an army of observers, like a counterterrorism watch on wheels. Already mindful of motorists with road rage and kids with weapons, bus drivers are now being warned of far more grisly scenarios.
Like this one: terrorists monitor a punctual driver for weeks, then hijack a bus and load the friendly yellow vehicle with enough explosives to take down a building.
An alert school bus driver could foil that plan, security expert Jeffrey Beatty recently told a class of 250 of drivers in Norfolk, Va. After all, bus drivers cover millions of miles of roads. They know the towns, the kids, the parents.
“The terrorist is not going to be able to do some of their casing and rehearsal activity without being detected by one of you,” said Beatty, an anti-terrorism veteran of the CIA, FBI and the Army’s Delta Force. The more people watching, he told the drivers, the safer the community will be.
With bus drivers becoming informal intelligence gatherers, the reach of homeland security is growing – not exactly what parents think of when their kids head to the bus stop.
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This is the kind of nonsense I’m talking about that needs attention right now. I want to know how the Democrat Party approaches this issue. If anyone can find some candidates to ask, please do and get back to me on this.
This is a new part of a $50,000,000.00 program that has been in effect since 2003. If it’s needed, I want to know why and the ‘why’ should come with credible evidence. If the Democratic Party doesn’t endorse this program I would like to know what they are doing to change it.
Here it is as an example, if anyone is interested.
To focus on issues and to have as many groups focusing on the same issues at the same time will force more awareness and create a natural definition of basic principles.
An organized network of blogs-communities, special interests, associations and similar would be active individually, as they are now, and as a larger group. Each ‘entity’ would have volunteers to cover issues in the categories of their interest. The site owner would have ultimate control and establish whatever system for that community to cover hot issues and topics. The blog (and other) owners would ba a next level of leadership and these could be grouped by issue category, goals, skills, regions, party specific or whatever they decide.
The levels of leadership or committees move upward in smaller groups of fair representation to build an efficient chain of command. That way, each task is simplified and defined as it’s approved upward. This also allows plenty of individuality for differing opinions and lots of lateral movement between focused issue oriented groups across the boards.
Take the diary article for instance. It’s picked up and brought to a diary as normal. Say the education, homeland security, or other applicable category person sees an issue that needs, or might need attention. The link could be forwarded up to the next level rep for consideration or, cleared by blog-owner whatever works for each site. The same issue/link could come in on different categories and/or come in as duplicate from different site reps. This would be a good way to see what’s important and the duplication might indicate how much weight to give it. This would happen on any or all issues on a regular basis and filter upward to a defined set of content to publish in a syndicated type content format-newsletter-whatever so that all sites have the same issues to toss around on a regular basis. Most times it would self define but another benefit would be to conduct uniform site polls or voting if an issues stand, content or other is equally divided for support.
This is the beginning of many ideas that are more specific but I thought this might be enough to see if there is any interest fro this sort of idea.
A little more definition.
The participants would be from as many groups as possible especially nonpolitical blogs and community groups. This could also lead to a regular feature of issues in focus to present to various forms of media. All of the skills are already in place and in use. This method would allow those skills to be put to better prodictivity.
The issue content discussions could then be followed to get a practical measure of grassroots support and concerns. A uniform area for discussion at each site would allow candidates, incumbents or anyone to click a link to an associated site and see the same issue being discussed by a wide variety of groups. If this is issue based, it might also be eligible for financial support to help defray costs.
By the way, 4 1/2 years past 9/11 – school bus drivers should already have a workable knowledge in prevention as part of common sense or standard training.
like an extension of the terrorism safety training that’s given to public transit workers as part of their annual training program…and when you hear of Israeli buses being blown up, it’s not that hard to imagine buses here being targeted. I’m not sure that a school bus would be used as a weapon in that form, but a little extra alertness isn’t such a bad idea…
You mean we haven’t had this since 9/11? The attention to bus safety? I think this program is geared more toward turning people in as threats…an informant program.