[Infowarrior] - Guarding America, one golf course at a time

[Richard Forno]

Translation:  FEAR = PROFIT!!!   *headdesk*


After 9/11, security guard on high alert at golf course

By Marc Fisher, Published: September 4

“One,” Chris Stegherr says as he breaks his staring contest with a young doe.

He’s alone out here along the Potomac River, the only light a pure white gleam of moonshine, occasionally augmented by the flashlight he keeps on his black security belt, next to his Glock 9mm, Mace and handcuffs. His mission, as he calls it, is to watch, to be here if something bad happens, to patrol these 600 acres of manicured land with the same hypervigilance he once displayed as a Marine stationed in Iraq.

Stegherr’s battle zone now is a Loudoun County golf course that hugs an especially quiet stretch of the Potomac River. He earns $16 an hour guarding Trump National Golf Club, where members pay $75,000 just to join.

Before 9/11, Americans did not worry so much about random acts of terrorism, but now they find comfort in knowing that more than a million security guards — double the number in the nation’s workforce a decade ago — patrol shopping malls and power plants and work through the night to protect public spaces.

Falken Industries, a Manassas company that hired Stegherr, saw opportunity in the country’s new anxiety. In just eight years, it ballooned from zero to 150 guards, blanketing government buildings, embassies and corporate sites in Washington and its suburbs with guards trained for every conceivable disaster. The company protects bowling alleys and jewelry stores with the same kind of attention it gives its top-secret government customers.

But what kind of terrorist event could happen on a golf course, where the only sounds at night are crickets or a distant firecracker? Since passenger planes were turned into weapons, obscure possibilities have abounded. Stegherr’s rounds include close attention to a fenced area near the Potomac. Inside the chain-link wire is a water-filtration system — a piece of “critical infrastructure,” as it is known among homeland security types — that someone might view as a target.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/after-911-security-guard-on-high-alert-at-golf-course/2011/07/19/gIQAqhJk2J_print.html