Maddie and I were too old to go to the elementary and middle schooler's party, so mom made us be chaperones. The rest you can guess, the only thing we really did was tell the kids to be quite, and that in-its-self was a lost cause. Though, not all of it was little kids jabbering to their friends as we waltzed through the United States Embassy, even I did learn a few new things.
Each of the major sectors of the embassy put on a demonstration/slide show to inform the children on what happens in this embassy. One in particular, the Secret Service. What does the Secret Service do? Just protect the President right? Actually there is a bit more than meets the eye. Yes, the Secret Service is responsible for “the protection of national and visiting foreign leaders”, but “the Secret Service was established in 1865, solely to suppress the counterfeiting of U.S. Currency”. Today the Secret Service has two goals, to exploit counterfeiting and to protect “national and visiting foreign leaders”. They thought it was a good idea since a number of the Presidents that were getting assassinated/killed was far too high.
The protection the Secret Service has to offer is a rare one, protection to the President and his family for life, Although President George W. Bush and later presidents do not receive protection for life because the previous President changed the law. People in the Secret Service receive vigorous training in which they learn in extreme depth everything there is to know on protection.
The other “half” of the Secret Service is investigations on counterfeiting. The man who was giving the demonstration is in the Secret Service and displayed uncut counterfeit money for us to examine. He gave us a few ways to tell if money is counterfeit.
The paper: the paper used to make real money is too expensive for the counterfeiters to use, so when you feel the counterfeit it does not feel the same as real money. The bill: it has a letter and the number according to the mint it was manufactured from. The same letter always goes with the same number, A1, B2, C3... etc. Watermark: if you hold a real bill up to a light another image in the paper becomes visible that you otherwise could not see. If the water mark is visible without holding it up to the light or if it is not visible when held up to the light then it is a counterfeit. Although there may be other ways of determining whether or not a bill is counterfeit these are a few of the simplest ways.
Since the Secret Service has started protecting the Presidents, although there has been attempts, only one has been successfully assassinated. R.I.P. JFK.
~Damon A. Faber~
Works Cited
http://www.secretservice.gov/whoweare.shtml
So interesting!
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