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The comms situation sounds more and more like an absolute shitshow. Podunk or small-time operators underestimating how much impact even a small surge crowd can have on cell reliability is a pretty common sort of mistake to make -- even local femtocells/microcells often struggle badly, and you aren't going to get them in place for a one-off -- but the flip side is that it's so common that the USSS should not only consider it in planning but also have some (if jank) solution, here.
That doesn't necessarily mean indoctrinating every police officer near a USSS operation into Slack (b/c there's a few CJIS-compat other tools), but ... 900 feet is the sort of distance you can close with 150 USD in 2.4ghz links for data, and almost any radio for voice. Frequency deconflict (and since Butler County does seem to have used encryption, getting signed into the right trunk) is not trivial, but it's a minutes thing, not an hours one. There are arguments against introducing new technology in mission-critical situations, but 'train a handful of people to use new comms' is literally someone in that room's job.
All of that said, that this a) supposedly including transcripts and b) almost all of the local police leaves me more than a little skeptical its origin came from a pure-hearted interest in solving problems. There's been a lot of effort on the feds side to not-so-subtly point at the local cops, and this sorta release, especially with the pointed gaps for any comms to the USSS depot, would fit in that category very readily. Some of this is genuinely bad comm discipline -- the report's trying to highlight the Sheetz misdirection, but "we got him" is the sort of thing that should never be going over a voice channel in this sort of circumstance -- but they're the sort of problems that pop up when your swiss cheese model is down to the last bit of wax paper.
I don't know how much to trust Grassley (politician, mouth moving), but he's been claiming that the local police had a meeting that morning at 9AM, including specifically passing radios to sniper teams, which is what I'd expect, and that the feds didn't attend.
Plus, cell phone jammers aren't hard to get, I understand, and would be a pretty obvious part of any plot that was more sophisticated than "one guy with a boomstick." I can hardly believe that SS was comfortable relying on "let's swap cell numbers," that seems crazy to me.
I'm pretty certain that the USSS are used to a threat model of "one guy with a boomstick". The vast majority of people who shoot at a President are uncomplicatedly crazy.
Absolutely true, but imho they ought to be prepared for something more sophisticated than that. (It's been reported, for instance, that Iran is interested in retaliating against Trump for bombing Soleimani.)
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The new USSS director seems to have yo-yo'd a bit between taking the blame directly and shifting it to local PD, and at least in public has stressed that the USSS is taking ownership. Of course at the end of the day, "we trusted local police" is not a sufficient answer for the Secret Service, it's their responsibility, and ultimately their plan too and on some level they obviously realize that. I'd also say that it's likely a little bit easier for local police comms to leak than Secret Service stuff just due to classification type stuff and more people in the loop. It will probably make it into the final report, due in December (at least the House one will be). It's fair to suspect some PR angle. Such as, he's saying things like they'll fire someone if they find a "policy violation", but that's totally missing the point!! We get that you're short on manpower but at least one head needs to roll, there's no way the blame is that distributed. However, based on the info we have, even with its bias, it current seems that the most direct, practical kind of blame is indeed on the police, even if that responsibility ultimately lands upwards in the chain. Final judgement remains pending in most meaningful ways.
Personally I don't think the USSS have truly respected how different the MO and incentives of a county police department are from their own. And of course, Secret Service can't run purely on trust either. They need to be more intimately involved with local PD if they are going to rely that heavily on their manpower. Really, they need to take a leaf out of the book of orgs like the NTSB and NASA about how to handle both investigations as well as tighten up their way of doing things to avoid common mistakes. There's a reason both pilots and the actual military are so anal about saying things a certain way and using phrases and comms efficiently. But there's always the human question -- why fix it if it aint broke? They hadn't had such an immediate threat for a while, maybe even decades depending on the severity of the cutoff, so someone being a squeaky wheel about how the make communication better might not be listened to.
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