Thanks, gocomics.org
Tag: DHS
Trump’s lying ways spread throughout the administration
Trump promised that information from DACA applications would not be sent to deportation agents. But internal emails show that ICE can access databases where that information is kept — and DHS decided not to tell Congress…
The pledge was first made by the Obama administration, when it created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, eight years ago…Even after Trump announced that he was ending DACA, his administration assured immigrants that the information on their applications generally wouldn’t be sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
He lied.
The Trump administration left out the fact that immigration enforcement agencies already had access to databases containing detailed information, such as home addresses, about DACA recipients and millions of other immigrants.
Two weeks later, the communications show, the agency decided to leave that fact out of congressional testimony…
ICE declined to comment on its use of DACA data.
Trump has his own special virus. It feeds on his bigotry as much as his ignorance. And the thread that connects every instance of his corruption is his reliance, his willingness, to lie to anyone regardless of circumstances.
Trump DHS Flunkies Building Database of Journalists, Bloggers
So, what would you call this color? Brown-nose Green? – Click to enlarge
❝ The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”
It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.
The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed…
❝ The DHS wants to track more than 290,000 global news sources, including online, print, broadcast, cable, and radio, as well as trade and industry publications, local, national and international outlets, and social media, according to the documents. It also wants the ability to track media coverage in more than 100 languages including Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, with instant translation of articles into English…
❝ DHS Press Secretary Tyler Houlton issued a response on Friday to verify its legitimacy and allege that the data project’s aims will be “standard practice.”
What’s more, Houlton added, “Any suggestion otherwise is fit for tinfoil hat-wearing, black-helicopter conspiracy theorists.”
Houlton previously worked as the director of federal affairs at Americans for Prosperity – the Koch brothers’ primary political front – before being appointed to the DHS by the Fake President.
What Was Trump’s Pick for Air Force Secretary Doing for $20K a Month?
Wilson with her last presidential employer — Getty Images/Paul J. Richards
❝ Donald Trump famously promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington—to rein in lobbyists, shut the revolving door and curb the influence of well-heeled special interests. But so far, he’s had a hard time keeping this promise, with Wall Street veterans headed to the Treasury Department, coal industry advocates appointed to safeguard the environment, and now a former nuclear weapons industry consultant named to a job overseeing the purchase of such weapons…
❝ …He’s designated as the new Air Force secretary a former New Mexico Congresswoman, Heather Wilson, who’s a veteran of wheeling and dealing in Washington on behalf of private defense industry clients that paid her lucrative consulting fees.
Just a day after she left Congress in 2009, Wilson went to work as a “strategic adviser” for Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque, which runs a laboratory that helps design and manufacture America’s nuclear weapons and is a subsidiary of defense giant Lockheed Martin. The contract to run Sandia was coming to an end, and Wilson’s assignment was to convince the government to extend it without competition. Soon after, she took on a similar advising role for contractors running Los Alamos National Lab, another designer and maker of nuclear bombs.
❝ But federal auditors at the Energy Department and one of its subsidiary agencies quickly grew alarmed because Wilson refused to account for how she was spending any of her time, even while accepting $20,000 monthly from the national labs. That prompted one auditor to call a fraud hotline operated by the Justice Department, which then kicked off an investigation of its own.
The Justice probe concluded that the payments to Wilson were part of an improper effort by the Lockheed subsidiary to bill the government for money spent lobbying the government for more business. The Lockheed Martin subsidiary settled those allegations in 2015 by paying the government $4.7 million, but denied any wrongdoing. So did Wilson.
❝ …Now…she’ll be responsible for overseeing the Air Force’s voluminous interactions with Lockheed — the same firm that paid her $226,378 for two years of “strategic advising.” And Lockheed is not just another contractor. As of 2015, the latest year available, Lockheed had 3,982 outstanding Air Force contracts worth $7.4 billion — making it the largest single contractor to the Air Force…
❝ Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear watchdog group in Wilson’s home state, was even more skeptical.
Wilson’s work for Lockheed Martin and other nuclear contractors “obviously raises very serious ethical questions,” Coghlan said. Coghlan conceded that the recent presidential election represented a vote for change, but added that “part of that change should be appointing ethical people to senior positions. And [Wilson has] failed that test.”
RTFA for all the juice. No cynics will be surprised. At either her resume or work/political history. She fits the Trumpkin opportunist mold perfectly.
Flight delayed, plane replaced, because a couple took their seats too soon!
Authorities say a flight from Philadelphia to Boston was delayed and ultimately a different aircraft was used after a couple gained unauthorized access to the plane.
Officials said American Airlines Flight 1655 was slated to depart 8 a.m. Sunday, but two hours earlier, a man and woman walked on board through the doorway to the jet bridge and took their seats. The door should have been locked prior to the formal boarding process.
American Airlines officials said the couple was discovered during boarding. They determined the pair was on the correct flight, but the plane was de-boarded, searched and another aircraft was used “out of caution.”
WCVB-TV reports the couple didn’t speak English.
Well, there you go. Can’t be too careful about furriners, eh?
Supreme Court asked to rule on secret plan to cut cell service?
The Supreme Court was asked in a petition to force the government to disclose the US clandestine plan to disable cell service during emergencies.
The case concerns Standard Operating Procedure 303. A federal appeals court in May said the government did not have to release its full contents because the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows the authorities to withhold records if they would “endanger” public safety.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center told the high court’s justices Tuesday that the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s decision created a new “catchall provision that can be used in any case involving records related to domestic and national security programs.”
The privacy group had demanded the documents from the Department of Homeland Security in 2011 following the shuttering of cell service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system to quell a protest. The Department of Homeland Security refused to divulge the documents associated with SOP 303, which the appeals court described as a “unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices.”
Under the direction of the so-called National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, SOP 303 allows for the shuttering of wireless networks “within a localized area, such as a tunnel or bridge, and within an entire metropolitan area.”
So, what are the specifics of this regulation? Demonstrations for peace and justice or riots and anarchy in the streets? And who ultimately gets to make the determination to invoke SOP 303? Some New York City precinct commander or a bureaucrat in DHS, faceless or otherwise?
#BlackLivesMatter? — unless you’re Homeland Security
Click to enlarge — Peter Marshall
The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York.
They also show the department watching over gatherings that seem benign and even mundane. For example, DHS circulated information on a nationwide series of silent vigils and a DHS-funded agency planned to monitor a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer in the nation’s capital.
The tracking of domestic protest groups and peaceful gatherings raises questions over whether DHS is chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights, and over whether the department, created in large part to combat terrorism, has allowed its mission to creep beyond the bounds of useful security activities as its annual budget has grown beyond $60 billion.
Our government thinks anyone who stands up for equal rights is a potential terrorist.
The surveillance cataloged in the DHS documents goes back to August of last year, when protests and riots broke out in Ferguson the day after the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. According to two August 11th, 2014 reports, a DHS FEMA “WatchOps officer” used information from Twitter and Vine to monitor the riots and reproduced a map, originally created by a Reddit user, of conflict zones…
An April 2015 FEMA memo also shows that the DHS appears to have gathered information on anti-police-brutality protests in Philadelphia “organized by members of the Philly Coalition for Real Justice” and in New York on May Day at “Foley Square, start time 1700… Independent factions are being solicited to join in on a full day of demonstration through various open source social media sites, fliers, posters.”…
Baher Azmy, a legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, however, argues that this “providing situational awareness” is just another word for surveillance and that creating this body of knowledge about perfectly legal events is a problem in and of itself. “What they call situational awareness is Orwellian speak for watching and intimidation,” said Azmy. “Over time there’s a serious harm to the associational rights of the protesters and it’s an effective way to chill protest movements. The average person would be less likely to go to a Black Lives Matter protest if the government is monitoring social media, Facebook, and their movements.”
Although DHS spokesman S.Y.Lee says…that the department “does not provide resources to monitor any specific planned or spontaneous protest, rally or public gathering,” some of the documents show that the DHS has produced minute-by-minute reports on protesters’ movements in demonstrations…
The documents also elaborate on DHS’s response to riots and militant protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who in April died from injuries sustained while in police custody…the DHS’ Federal Protective Service placed more than 400 officers on duty in Baltimore after Gray’s death…
Raven Rakia, a journalist who investigates state surveillance and policing, said that the DHS’ decision to monitor Black Lives Matter is hardly surprising, given the federal government’s well documented history of spying on and suppressing black social movements and groups like the Black Panthers. “There’s a long history of the federal agencies, especially the FBI, seeing black resistance organizations as a threat to national security,” says Rakia…
Same as it ever was. A government that isn’t serious about equal rights for all Americans, a Congress afraid of attempts to guarantee voting rights, civil rights, expected in a democratic nation – sets the stage for activists to be an automatic target for suppression.
Malicious virus shuttered power plant – introduced by employee
Duh!
A computer virus attacked a turbine control system at a U.S. power company last fall when a technician unknowingly inserted an infected USB computer drive into the network, keeping a plant off line for three weeks, according to a report posted on a U.S. government website.
The Department of Homeland Security report did not identify the plant but said criminal software, which is used to conduct financial crimes such as identity theft, was behind the incident.
It was introduced by an employee of a third-party contractor that does business with the utility…
In addition to not identifying the plants, a DHS spokesman declined to say where they are located.
Justin W. Clarke, a security researcher…noted that experts believe Stuxnet was delivered to its target in Iran via a USB drive. Attackers use that technique to place malicious software on computer systems that are “air gapped,” or cut off from the public Internet.
“This is yet another stark reminder that even if a true ‘air gap’ is in place on a control network, there are still ways that malicious targeted or unintentional random infection can occur,” he said.
Yes, you can rely on human beings to do something dumb!
Many critical infrastructure control systems run on Windows XP and Windows 2000, operating systems that were designed more than a decade ago. They have “auto run” features enabled by default, which makes them an easy target for infection because malicious software loads as soon as a USB is plugged into the system unless operators change that setting, Clarke said…
A DHS spokesman could not immediately be reached to comment on the report.
The largest single category of so-called hacking attacks – which had nothing to do with hacking, of course – was spearphishing emails sent to specific employees of public utilities. The emails including a suggestion to “click here” for more information. They did.
TSA screeners fired for putting inspection notices in bags they didn’t inspect
Simplified Homeland Security luggage handling system
Which would bother you more?
1) Finding a notice in your luggage saying it was searched by federal authorities? Or, 2) Finding an inspection notice, but learning that no one had actually bothered to search it?
It was the second scenario that led to last year’s firing of 36 Transportation Security Administration screeners at Honolulu International Airport.
The Department of Homeland Security’s independent inspector general announced Tuesday that a whistle-blower triggered investigations when he came forward with video showing some TSA officers skirting procedures.
“Among other things, the (video showed screeners) opening bags, placing notices of inspection inside and transporting them back to the airline without screening them,” read a report from the inspector general.
Thousands of bags went on commercial jets unscreened, risking the safety of the traveling public, the report said…
How much of the world spends as much money as we do on federally-mandated paranoia – and do they get results as mediocre?
I don’t doubt in the least we pay top dollar for bureaucrats to oversee the process. Then, we seem to use the funds for staff that handles required tasks – to peform make-work solutions for school dropouts.
Cyberattack on water plant in Illinois – doesn’t hold water!
Federal officials said Wednesday they have found no evidence to support an initial state report that foreign hackers caused a water pump at an Illinois water plant to fail this month.
The preliminary report, collected by a statewide terrorist intelligence center in Illinois, had said that a Russian hacker had taken control of the operating system at the water plant in Springfield. The pump turned on and off repeatedly, burning out the motor, the report said…
But the Department of Homeland Security and FBI said they failed to confirm reports of a cyberattack. DHS spokesman Chris Ortman called the Illinois state report nothing more than “raw, unconfirmed data.”
He said that the federal investigation also failed to confirm the report’s claim that hackers broke into a software company’s database and retrieved user names and passwords, which enabled access to the water plant system.
“In addition,” Ortman said, “DHS and FBI have concluded that there was no malicious traffic from Russia or any foreign entities, as previously reported.”
Officials from the state intelligence center did not return phone calls seeking comment…
Please, let’s don’t start letting reality, verifiable conclusions or facts stand in the way of Cold Warriors who are required by that alien implant in their brain to transform every possible SNAFU into an assault upon God, Apple Pie and the American Way of Life.
Eideard 