Every day in cities and towns across the Nation, emergency response personnel respond to incidents of varying scope and magnitude. Their ability to communicate in real time is critical to establishing command and control at the scene of an emergency, to maintaining event situational awareness, and to operating overall within a broad range of incidents. However, as numerous after-action reports and national assessments have revealed, there are still communications deficiencies that affect the ability of responders to manage routine incidents and support responses to natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other incidents. Recognizing the need for an overarching emergency communications strategy to address these shortfalls, Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Office of Emergency Communications (OEC) to develop the first National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP). Title XVIII of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 United States Code 101 et seq.), as amended, calls for the NECP to be developed in coordination with stakeholders from all levels of government and from the private sector. In response, DHS worked with stakeholders from Federal, State, local, and tribal agencies to develop the NECP—a strategic plan that establishes a national vision for the future state of emergency communications. To realize this national vision and meet these goals, the NECP established the following seven objectives for improving emergency communications for the Nation's Federal, State, local, and tribal emergency responders: 1. Formal decision-making structures and clearly defined leadership roles coordinate emergency communications capabilities. 2. Federal emergency communications programs and initiatives are collaborative across agencies and aligned to achieve national goals. 3. Emergency responders employ common planning and operational protocols to effectively use their resources and personnel. 4. Emerging technologies are integrated with current emergency communications capabilities through standards implementation, research and development, and testing and evaluation. 5. Emergency responders have shared approaches to training and exercises, improved technical expertise, and enhanced response capabilities. 6. All levels of government drive long-term advancements in emergency communications through integrated strategic planning procedures, appropriate resource allocations, and public-private partnerships. 7. The Nation has integrated preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery capabilities to communicate during significant events. The NECP also provides recommended initiatives and milestones to guide emergency response providers and relevant government officials in making measurable improvements in emergency communications capabilities. The NECP recommendations help to guide, but do not dictate, the distribution of homeland security funds to improve emergency communications at the Federal, State, and local levels, and to support the NECP implementation. Communications investments are among the most significant, substantial, and long-lasting capital investments that agencies make; in addition, technological innovations for emergency communications are constantly evolving at a rapid pace. With these realities in mind, DHS recognizes that the emergency response community will realize this national vision in stages, as agencies invest in new communications systems and as new technologies emerge.

Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 101 provides guidelines on developing emergency operations plans (EOP). It promotes a common understanding of the fundamentals of risk-informed planning and decision making to help planners examine a hazard or threat and produce integrated, coordinated, and synchronized plans. The goal of CPG 101 is to make the planning process routine across all phases of emergency management and for all homeland security mission areas. This Guide helps planners at all levels of government in their efforts to develop and maintain viable all-hazards, all-threats EOPs. Accomplished properly, planning provides a methodical way to engage the whole community in thinking through the life cycle of a potential crisis, determining required capabilities, and establishing a framework for roles and responsibilities. It shapes how a community envisions and shares a desired outcome, selects effective ways to achieve it, and communicates expected results. Each jurisdiction's plans must reflect what that community will do to address its specific risks with the unique resources it has or can obtain.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

The official report that has shaped the international debate about NSA surveillance "We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking. Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials."—The NSA Report This is the official report that is helping shape the international debate about the unprecedented surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Commissioned by President Obama following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, and written by a preeminent group of intelligence and legal experts, the report examines the extent of NSA programs and calls for dozens of urgent and practical reforms. The result is a blueprint showing how the government can reaffirm its commitment to privacy and civil liberties—without compromising national security.

Disaster Policy and Politics combines evidence-based research with mini-case studies of recent events to demonstrate the fundamental principles of emergency management and to explore the impact that disasters have had on U.S. policy. Paying special attention to the role of key actors—decision makers at the federal, state, and local levels; scientists; engineers; civil and military personnel; and first responders—author Richard Sylves explores how researchers contribute to and engage in disaster policy development and management. The highly anticipated Third Edition explores the radical change in policy and politics after the occurrence of recent disasters such as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria; Hawaii’s false nuclear attack warning; and responses to U.S. wildfires. This book’s comprehensive “all-hazards” approach introduces students to the important public policy, organizational management, and leadership issues they may need as future practitioners and leaders in the field.