During an intelligence briefing Monday at the U.S. Coast Guard's Puget Sound Joint Harbor Operations Center, which is in Seattle, Ms. Napolitano pressed officials from participating agencies to name a tangible benefit from the fusion centers in terms of disrupting a specific plot, which they were unable to do. But in an interview later, she said she believes the centers are valuable and will push plans to get intelligence professionals from Washington working at all the sites.

We need to get all this out of the news and establish a normalcy that will still be effective 5-10-15 years from now, because they're not going to go for it when we are obviously ready for them (or at least still have them in mind). One approach might be to fill line-level DHS jobs with high-school graduates that do some intense training for a few months, serve for four years while getting DHS-paid college tuition, and then resume their normal lives. Over time, we get security service from young, motivated people who then go out into the normal world, which results in a higher level of security-awareness in the general citizenry.