The Department of Defense took 40 years to get where it got.

We now have capabilities in science and technology that raise the very realistic possibility that a small group of terrorists could kill not only thousands of people, as they did on September 11th, but hundreds of thousands of people. And that has changed the dimension of the threat we face.

The second thing we did was said, OK, we've now identified the risk, but what do you want to do with the money? Because it's not enough to have risk; you've got to have a meaningful use for the money we give you.

So people have to decide. Do they want to have the security? Do they want to continue to plug the gap [in border security] that GAO has identified and recognize that there will be some costs to doing that? Or do we want to make sure that business isn't hampered and that people can move back and forth readily, and recognize that, if we don't put some barriers in place, we're going to wind up with dangerous people coming into the country?

The larger point is this: We've invested over half a billion dollars in New York since this department was stood up. We've given New York more money, by more than double, than any other city in the country.

We always monitor the flow of information, intelligence, threat streams to see whether we have any indication there's some imminent. We work hard to identify potential cells and disrupt them. This is one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on intelligence gathering.

Al Qaeda is very media-savvy and very focused on what goes on in the global media.