Sen. Lieberman Holds a Hearing on Rail and Transit Security

Does TSA or do you personally support extending the law so that it isn't just confined to the transportation sector?

PISTOLE: Senator, I think it makes sense. We want to encourage people to provide the information with our concern about liability from something that would come about.

That being said, I know the lawyers at DHS are looking at -- at all -- all that and are going to provide a full more response, but yeah, I think it makes sense.

COLLINS: Thank you.

Commissioner, you have so much experience at the state level and one comment that you made that really resonated with me is when you said that their security -- the security of big cities depends on our security, that you're feeding people into those lines. It resonates with me because two of the hijackers on 9/11 started their journey of death and destruction from Portland, Maine. And I think that that's often forgotten when some of our colleagues argue that all of the Homeland Security money should go to just large or urban areas.

My colleague from Kentucky just had the case where two suspicious individuals in Bowling Green, Kentucky, were arrested. So I think that we need to understand in this country that security is everyone's business, that terrorists hide and train and plan in rural areas and not just in the areas that they are apt to strike. So thank you for making that important point.

I want to ask you about the training exercises. Like the chairman, I have been a huge proponent of having more exercises that involve federal, state, county, and local officials because if disaster strikes, you don't want people meeting each other for the first time and exchanging business cards in the middle of a disaster, which is what happened with Hurricane Katrina, and that's why we've restructured FEMA to have regional offices and it pushed and funded these training sessions.

I want to know from you, however, whether we're striking the right balance. CRS tells us that the transit security measures, including training tend to emphasize managing the consequences of an attack. In other words, they are focused on response. And I agree with Dr. Flynn that response and resiliency are important.

But to me, our focus should be on trying to detag, deter, prevent the attack in the first place. So how do you rate the effectiveness of the training sessions? Are we striking the right balance between teaching prevention techniques versus consequence management?

BOYNTON: Senator, I -- I can tell you we've had a number of exercises in Connecticut -- in Norwalk, in Old Saybrook, two other locations, and another one where we sent from Bridgeport about 40 people to the TEAKS (ph) program down in Texas -- a terrific program where they do very well simulated exercises.

And the unusual thing about this was that it included fire, police, emergency management, emergency medical -- all four disciplines, including the chiefs from each of those departments carving out essentially a week of time and moving 30 people down to Texas to do this. So it was a fully integrated training exercise. That was just within the last couple of months that we did that. And the key thing there was the fully integrated part of it.

In the case of the exercise in Old Saybrook, which is on the Northeast Corridor, that included taking a rail car off on a siding and then simulating a shooting event all phases of the response right to the point of actually taking passengers out through the windows. Normally, something like that is simulated because you might hurt somebody in the exercise.

They actually went to that level of actually moving people out of the window -- so really terrific exercises.

But I would agree with you that the focus is on response, and I think perhaps as part of this not just see something and say something but do something, that really could be a great trigger for us to then move into training and exercising not just first responders but some members of the public to help us with what specifically are we asking you to look for and how exactly are we asking you to report it, and then what do you do.