***BOG post****'Devastating' Failures Lead Secret Service to Consider Raising White House Fence [View all]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/devastating-failures-lead-secret-service-raising-white-house/story?id=27029124

The security failures that recently let a man with a small knife in his pocket jump the perimeter fence and make it "practically unencumbered" deep into the White House were "devastating," and now the U.S. Secret Service may make the fence taller, the new head of the agency said today in his first appearance before lawmakers at the helm.

"Without question, the agency has been severely damaged in recent years by failures," dating back to the Cartagena, Colombia, prostitution scandal in 2012, Acting Director Joseph Clancy told a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.

"The range of shortcomings” is “what hits the hardest," he said.

The chairman of the committee, Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said a recently completed internal Department of Homeland Security review of the September intrusion "uncovered a laundry list of errors," from communications systems that didn't work to a canine officer who was on a personal cell phone call -- without his radio earpiece in his ear or his tactical radio -- and realized too late what was happening in front of him.