Terry Gerton We had the Supreme Court justices, Justice Barrett and Justice Kagan on the Hill recently in person to make the case for millions of dollars additionally for the Supreme court budget to cover personal and building security. Let’s start with this. How unusual is it for members of the Supreme court to show up to make these kinds of statements in person on the Hill?
Isa Ulloa Highly unusual. And in fact, this was their first in-person testimony since 2019. So it’s been several years since then, obviously, but I think it’s a really, you know, stark reminder and red flag of how out of hand threats have gotten. We can talk a little bit more about how those threats have been rising since about 2013, the manner in which they are impacting every type of public servant nationwide. But the fact that we had two Supreme Court justices focus their testimony on the rising threats and the resources that are needed to contend with them is pretty unprecedented.
Terry Gerton Justice Barrett herself told a couple of really interesting stories. She talked about having to explain a bulletproof vest to her 12-year-old son. And she had another child that opened the door to a swatting incident and was stunned. So clearly, there’s a personal impact. Do you think that these are isolated experiences? Do prominent females experience this differently than prominent males? Or what’s going on here? And is this just now part of the job?
Isa Ulloa A couple things in response. So what the data does show is that women and people of color are definitely a disproportionate risk writ large. And that applies not only to very high profile public servants who happen to be women or people of color, but all the way down to the local level, whether it’s a school board official or a public school teacher. And the human costs of this are extraordinary and often tragic. You have examples of the 20-year-old son of a judge in New Jersey being murdered by someone who was seeking out the judge. You have, of course, the tragic example of Melissa Hortman and her husband last year, and then you have several swatting incidents that have impacted not only judges, but former public servants like Pete Buttigieg, who recently came out to speak about this. And what we’re hearing is that parents are having to have really tough conversations that they shouldn’t have to have with their kids around not only why they need protective details, why they might need to wear a bulletproof vest, but to train their children, oftentimes at ages where there’s a strong desire for obvious reasons to protect their innocence, to have to think critically like an adult, around whether to answer the front door, whether to talk to a stranger. And it’s very sad in terms of how the children of public servants have been targeted in ways that not only create material risk for them, but that are yielding some really significant emotional impacts.
Terry Gerton Let’s bring this back to the justices for a moment. At what point did threats like these against judges become more than a security problem and really start being a justice system problem? Are there implications for judicial independence and public confidence in the courts?
Isa Ulloa It’s a big question. What we know is that violent threats against public servants, to include judges, at every level have been skyrocketing for more than 10 years at this point. And those threats manifested in several different ways, death threats, intimidating messages, cybersecurity attacks, doxing incidents, swatting incidents, and things of the like. On the one hand, there’s an important conversation, I think to be had around the role of government in responsibly creating deterrence and maintaining accountability, right? So there are dozens of civil and criminal statutes that can be used to charge people who commit certain crimes against public servants. It’s important to do that in a way that is responsible, meaning that it is not in violation of constitutionally protected rights as an example. But bringing the charges and if convicted is still not enough. People need to hear about it, right? And so you’ll recall at the height of the mask mandate at COVID, there were unprecedented attacks against flight attendants on several different airlines. A material driver around driving down the rate of those attacks was amplifying the fact that in many cases those attacks constituted a felony and there were real consequences for attacking folks in that manner. And so to the extent that the press in particular is able to amplify the consequences of what happens, it creates an important deterrent effect. That’s number one. Number two is there is a broader kind of government-wide multi-branch conversation to be had around how to right-size security resources relative to this threat environment because they have not been appropriately right-sized in a long time and they certainly have not been right-sized in a way that accounts for how dynamic the current environment is, where the proliferation of threats on social media through AI is novel, right? And so the good news is that the frameworks for how to solve this problem exist. The tougher news is that I think as a country, we’ve been pretty slow to the jump and we have a lot of work to do.
Terry Gerton Isa Ulloa is the founder and chief executive officer of the Public Service Alliance. So let’s come back to that question about right-sizing because we’ve heard similar concerns to what Justice Kagan and Justice Barrett raised from members of Congress themselves and efforts to increase the Congressional budget for protection. When Congress looks at the Supreme Court’s budget request, how should they think about the return on that investment?
Isa Ulloa So look, the request in the grand scheme of things and comparatively speaking is not that massive, right? I mean, it’s a 10%, almost 10% total increase from last year. It’s under $20 million just for the additional security needs and their important security needs, right. It’s an expansion of personal protection of the justices, not only at work, but also at home. It’s around an expanded capacity for residential security. And importantly, it also includes dollars to be able to level up the cybersecurity posture of the court system nationwide. And so there’s a lot of parallels between what the justices are requesting and what lawmakers have requested themselves. The important thing here is, I think, to not just appropriate more money for the sake of it. There has to be a well-informed way to or plan rather to implement it. And so that means, for example, ensuring that those resources are being leveraged to build in-house capacity that can more sustainably protect these officials than consistently having to outsource this expertise, which tends to be more expensive. It requires those dollars to be, or, should require those dollars to be leveraged in a manner that is aligned with the expertise of actual operators. Because not everybody needs necessarily to be spending $5 million a year on a security detail. Oftentimes the threats are cyclical and very kind of unique to certain individuals. But at a high level, both the judicial and the legislative branch are facing unprecedented threats and the people responsible for keeping those folks safe need more resources to do their jobs well.
Terry Gerton Is there a common set of actions that we could take that would help to address the root of these problems and maybe not just the symptoms?
Isa Ulloa Absolutely. And I’m really glad that you asked that question because this problem is not new. We are glad to see that it is getting a lot more attention and that that attention is humanizing folks and is raising awareness, not only of the problem, but also solutions. And as it relates to those solutions at PSA, there are about six that we feel very strongly about. And that we would characterize as pretty common sense and non-partisan solutions. So the first is obviously to approve this request and to take it a step further and assess where else government resources need to be right-sized to deal with the current environment. And look, government has a lot of money appropriated every year. These requests are not, you know, trillion dollar requests. There is a way to responsibly be able to efficiently allocate, in many cases, existing resources to better protect folks so that they’re not having to figure this out themselves and spend out of pocket. The second is there are decades of research around what’s called a public health approach to violence prevention. We know that preventing a crisis is way less expensive for lack of a better term than responding to a crisis. And the public health approach to violence prevention advocates for a couple of things. First are what are called behavioral threat assessment and management teams. The Secret Service actually has been documenting evidence around why these teams, the shorthand for them are BTAMs, are incredibly effective at preventing violence. And the primary reason is that most people on a pathway to violence, basically, there are predictable patterns that they tend to follow that then can by definition be identified in advance and prevent a tragedy before it occurs. And there are not enough BTAM teams across the country. There should be one in every major jurisdiction and they should follow the best practices that have been documented not only by the Secret Service, but by many others. Another example of a strong public health approach to violence prevention includes funding off-ramps. So there’s a group called Moonshot for example, that has done some really interesting research about the fact that a lot of people, when they’re searching for extremist content online, are more likely and more predisposed to then click on a mental health resource if it’s put in front of them. And so there’s an opportunity there for the technology to adapt accordingly. Similarly, with respect to social media platforms more broadly, About six years ago, X started testing cognitive interrupt design as a concept. And basically what they found is that when they prompted people with a question like, are you sure you want to post this, depending on the content of the draft, over 30% of people revised or chose not to send what they originally wrote, whereas from the perspective of the major LLMs and the AI chatbots and platforms, we’re already seeing some really interesting integrations around things like suicide prevention. That should be extended to violence prevention. And that means that, you know, we’re not advocating in any way for these LLMs to become therapists, but if we know that people, as they are radicalizing, are predisposed to also seek out mental health support, there are ways to at least amplify awareness of resources that might be available to these individuals before they commit the crime. The third major kind of category of solutions is relevant to data privacy. It is way too easy and way too cheap to figure out where people live without their consent. And so we are very strong advocates of an expansion of New Jersey’s Daniel’s law nationwide. We’d like that law ultimately to be broader in scope in terms of the categories of public servants that it can cover. But importantly, it’s around ensuring that not only data brokers, but public records are required to remove personal information if the individual has not provided their consent, that personal information includes things like home addresses. Hopefully it can also include things like a private right of action so that if a data broker or a government doesn’t comply, individuals have a real recourse that will make a difference. And this can be done in a way that doesn’t jeopardize First Amendment principles. Those things are not mutually exclusive. The next thing that we’re really focused on is just really sounding the alarm on how important it is for bipartisan leaders to come together and issue very high profile condemnations of violence and issue very high-profile calls for civility and peaceful disagreement, because we know that this materially decreases the temperature and sets the right example. And then lastly, there are a number of organizations that are values-aligned in the sense that they believe that the safety of people who serve should transcend politics. Many of those organizations are commercial companies that offer tools that are very relevant to keeping folks safe and reducing their risk. And through PSA, what we have done is build a marketplace that not only vets those tools and negotiates discounted rates to them so that they are more affordable, but enables any current or public servant to access that in a more affordable and in a faster manner. And we’d like to be able to scale this nationwide in partnership with government agencies, quite frankly, because it shouldn’t be on the individual to have to figure this out themselves. This has become basically a cost of doing business. And so there is a need for the employer to step up.
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