Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Govt Employees Concerned About Cyber Intrusions, Hillary?

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Not nearly enough when every government employee is not fretting over cyber espionage most of all those at the State Department.

Nearly 9 in 10 Government Employees Concerned about Cyber Breaches in Their Organization

 

The public sector experienced nearly 50 times more cyber incidents than any other industry in 2014, and government agencies consistently cite implementing robust, agile cybersecurity measures as a top priority. As threats continue to evolve in both scale and capacity, it is increasingly essential that organizations devise and implement robust, agile measures to continuously detect, monitor, and address both external and internal vulnerabilities.

In an effort to learn more about the perspective of public sector employees on cybersecurity, Government Business Council conducted a flash poll on the following question:

GBC received responses from 160 federal, state, and local government employees. Nearly 90% stated that they were concerned or very concerned about the impact of cyber attacks; only 5% were not very concerned or not at all concerned about potential breaches. The results also reveal cybersecurity to be a more pressing concern for state and local organizations than for their federal counterparts: 96% of state and local respondents were concerned or very concerned about breaches, a 13-point difference from the percentage of federal employees expressing a similar level of concern.

Lack of resources might make cybersecurity a more pressing issue for state organizations — according to a 2015 survey of state CIOs, 64% cited insufficient funding as a major barrier against addressing cyber threats, and 62% cited inadequate availability of security professionals. There is also a disconnect between perception of state cybersecurity capabilities and reality: while 60% of state officials had a high level of confidence in the ability of states to defend against attacks, only a quarter of state CISOs responded likewise.

Moving forward, state and federal agencies should continue to invest in developing a cohesive cybersecurity strategy, recruiting and retaining personnel with the relevant skill set, and sharing threat information and best practices across organization. As federal CIO Tony Scott puts it, “Cyber threats cannot be eliminated entirely, but they can be managed much more effectively. And we can best do this by aligning and focusing our efforts, by properly funding necessary cyber investments, by building strong partnerships across government and industry, and by drawing on the best ideas and talent from across the country to tackle this quintessential problem of the 21st century.” GBC will revisit this topic in future research posts.

‘This was all planned’: Former IG says Hillary, State Dept. are lying

NYPost: The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal emails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency email address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says.

“This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008.

The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov email address like previous secretaries.

“That’s a change in the standard. It tells me that this was premeditated. And this eliminates claims by the State Department that they were unaware of her private email server until later,” Krongard said in an exclusive interview. “How else was she supposed to do business without email?”

He also points to the unusual absence of a permanent inspector general during Clinton’s entire 2009-2013 term at the department. He said the 5½-year vacancy was unprecedented. Much more to Sperry’s summary is here.

What do the former military special forces have to say on the matter of Hillary and even some betrayal within their own ranks?

Sofrep: A source within the State Department confirmed with SOFREP back in 2012 that Hillary’s top aid within the department pre-interviewed people regarding Benghazi before they were interviewed by the State Department’s own internal Benghazi Accountability Review Board.

The problem with the State Department investigating itself is that the investigation produced no significant change in the dysfunctional leadership, nor did it hold people accountable for clear negligence (the top three at fault being Hillary Clinton, Charlene Lamb, and Patrick Kennedy). The organization continues to rot from the top down.

Hillary, in particular, shares something in common with former Navy SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonette: They both potentially disclosed top secret government information, a clear violation of her non-disclosure agreement and oath. They also share pending legal problems with the feds.

The federal government continues to aggressively pursue Bissonette and anyone associated with him for disclosures in his book “No Easy Day” and for new information found on his personal computer that Bissonette turned over to federal investigators. SOFREP knows of at least one additional active-duty member forced to retire early as a result of information found on Bissonette’s laptop. Will the same measure of justice and accountability be applied to the political celebrity and former Secretary of State Clinton?

In a recent New York Times article, the editorial board endorsed Hillary Clinton as an experienced presidential candidate.

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton worked tirelessly, and with important successes, for the nation’s benefit. She was the secretary President Obama needed and wanted: someone who knew leaders around the world, who brought star power as well as expertise to the table. The combination of a new president who talked about inclusiveness and a chief diplomat who had been his rival but shared his vision allowed the United States to repair relations around the world that had been completely trashed by the previous administration. -NY Times editorial board 

Hillary leveraged her political star power to secure her position as secretary of state, a clear Democrat concession prize for losing to Obama last time around. It was likely her strategic plan to further build her resume, and wait things out until 2016. She did little to promote American diplomacy or secure global stability abroad (two pillars of the department’s mission statement).

This is a woman that will do and say anything to get what she wants. I have very little respect for her. I know what she said to me and she can say all day long that she didn’t say it. That’s her cross to bear. She knows that she knew what happened that day, and she wasn’t truthful, and that has come out in the last hearings — that she told her family one thing and was telling the public another thing. —Sister of fallen hero Glen Doherty, Kate Quigley  Full article and video is here.

 

DHS Fleecing and Iffy Bookkeeping

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DHS Reports Spending Only 1 Percent of its $1.4B Training Budget

Though Congress provides more than $1 billion in funds to train personnel at the Department of Homeland Security, DHS spends a small fraction of that on workforce training—at least according to its bookkeepers.

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As an example of the iffy bookkeeping, auditors found that in fiscal 2014, Congress provided $1.4 billion for training, but the department reported spending only $1.9 million to the Office of Personnel Management. And as of August 2015, the DHS Office of the Chief Financial Officer could account for only $267 million in training expenditures in the prior year. Such lack of oversight on data quality, the Homeland Security inspector general found, meant the department reported only 1 percent of its training expenditures that year.

“DHS lacks reliable training cost information and data needed to make effective and efficient management decisions,” the IG concluded in a report released Wednesday. “It does not have an effective governance structure for its training oversight, including clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and delegated authorities” to oversee training programs, the watchdog wrote.

The difficulty the massive department would have in tracking training funds was predicted as far back as 2003, when the Government Accountability Office named human capital management as a high-risk area for the fledgling new department merging 22 agencies.

But DHS has failed to fully implement as many as 29 recommendations for improving training efficiencies made by several working groups, the new report said.

Among other problems, the IG found that the Transportation Security Administration did not report any training costs for January 2015, but after being questioned by IG staff, that agency reported $23 million in training expenditures.

DHS also lacks an oversight structure to monitor training after it transferred authority in 2012 to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and to departmental components. Such oversight is supposed to be supervised by the undersecretary for management, through the chief financial officer.

Inspector General John Roth recommended that DHS establish a better process for tracking training funds, set up an oversight structure and implement the remaining past efficiency recommendations.

Departmental managers agreed with the recommendations, with corrective actions underway for completion this year.

The actual Inspector General report is here.

Here is a previous interview with DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, where he gives clues that he is in way above his head.

Hillary’s Email Contained Operational Intel/Detail

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Official: Withheld Clinton emails contain ‘operational’ intel, put lives at risk

Herridge/FNC: EXCLUSIVE: Highly classified Hillary Clinton emails that the intelligence community and State Department recently deemed too damaging to national security to release contain “operational intelligence” – and their presence on the unsecure, personal email system jeopardized “sources, methods and lives,” a U.S. government official who has reviewed the documents told Fox News.

 From Observer: (  CIA Officers names (including NOCs) in Hillary emails. Discussions with Intelligence Community officials have revealed that Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included Holy Grail items of American espionage such as the true names of Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers serving overseas under cover. Worse, some of those exposed are serving under non-official cover. NOCs (see this for an explanation of their important role in espionage) are the pointy end of the CIA spear and they are always at risk of exposure – which is what Ms. Clinton’s emails have done.Not only have these spies had their lives put in serious risk by this, it’s a clear violation of Federal law. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, enacted due to the murder of the CIA’s station chief in Athens after his cover was blown by the left-wing media, makes it a Federal crime to divulge the true identity of any covert operative serving U.S. intelligence if that person has not previous been publicly acknowledged to be working for our spy agencies.)

The official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and was limited in discussing the contents because of their highly classified nature, was referring to the 22 “TOP SECRET” emails that the State Department announced Friday it could not release in any form, even with entire sections redacted.

The announcement fueled criticism of Clinton’s handling of highly sensitive information while secretary of state, even as the Clinton campaign continued to downplay the matter as the product of an interagency dispute over classification. But the U.S. government official’s description provides confirmation that the emails contained closely held government secrets. “Operational intelligence” can be real-time information about intelligence collection, sources and the movement of assets.

The official emphasized that the “TOP SECRET” documents were sent over an extended period of time — from shortly after the server’s 2009 installation until early 2013 when Clinton stepped down as secretary of state.

Separately, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., who sits on the House intelligence committee, said the former secretary of state, senator, and Yale-trained lawyer had to know what she was dealing with.

“There is no way that someone, a senior government official who has been handling classified information for a good chunk of their adult life, could not have known that this information ought to be classified, whether it was marked or not,” he said. “Anyone with the capacity to read and an understanding of American national security, an 8th grade reading level or above, would understand that the release of this information or the potential breach of a non-secure system presented risk to American national security.”

Pompeo also suggested the military and intelligence communities have had to change operations, because the Clinton server could have been compromised by a third party.

“Anytime our national security team determines that there’s a potential breach, that is information that might potentially have fallen into the hands of the Iranians, or the Russians, or the Chinese, or just hackers, that they begin to operate in a manner that assumes that information has in fact gotten out,” Pompeo said.

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, one day before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton claimed ignorance on the sensitivity of the materials and stressed that they weren’t marked.

“There is no classified marked information on those emails sent or received by me,” she said.

Clinton was pressed in the same ABC interview on her signed 2009 non-disclosure agreement which acknowledged that markings are irrelevant, undercutting her central explanation. The agreement states “classified information is marked or unmarked … including oral communications.”

Clinton pointed to her aides, saying: “When you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain had thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”

But according to national security legal experts, security clearance holders are required to speak up when classified information is not in secure channels.

“Everybody who has a security clearance has an individual obligation to protect the information,” said national security attorney Edward MacMahon Jr., who represented former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling in the high-profile leak investigation regarding a New York Times reporter. “Just because somebody sends it to you … you can’t just turn a blind eye and pretend it never happened and pretend it’s unclassified information.”

These rules, known as the Code of Federal Regulations, apply to U.S. government employees with security clearances and state there is an obligation to report any possible breach by both the sender and the receiver of the information. The rules state: “Any person who has knowledge that classified information has been or may have been lost, possibly compromised or disclosed to an unauthorized person shall immediately report the circumstances to an official designated for this purpose.”

The Clinton campaign is now calling for the 22 “TOP SECRET” emails to be released, but this is not entirely the State Department’s call since the intelligence came from other agencies, which have final say on classification and handling.

“The State Department has no authority to release those emails and I do think that Secretary Clinton most assuredly knows that,” Pompeo said.

Meanwhile, the release of other emails has revealed more about the high-level exchange of classified information on personal accounts. Among the latest batch of emails released by the State Department is an exchange between Clinton and then-Sen. John Kerry, now secretary of state. Sections are fully redacted, citing classified information – and both Kerry and Clinton were using unsecured, personal accounts.

Further, a 2009 email released to Judicial Watch after a federal lawsuit — and first reported by Fox News — suggests the State Department ‘s senior manager Patrick Kennedy was trying to make it easier for Clinton to check her personal email at work, writing to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills a “stand-alone separate network PC is … [one] great idea.”

“The emails show that the top administrator at the State Department, Patrick Kennedy, who is still there overseeing the response to all the inquiries about Hillary Clinton, was in on Hillary Clinton’s separate email network and system from the get-go,”  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.

Kennedy is expected to testify this month before the Republican-led Benghazi Select Committee.

*** What is additionally terrifying is John Kerry not only emailed Hillary on his unprotected iPad but Kerry further admits that foreign espionage and intelligence services also likely hack and or found a way to intrude on Hillary’s server and emails along with any of those inside the State Department. Even Germany tapped John Kerry’s cell phone.

Where Have all the Refugee Children Gone

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Government does not do anything well, that includes Europe as well as America. In Italy there is the mafia, in the United States there is the mafia…not in the historical sense but quite the same disgusting operational crimes.

Both nations lie, make terrifying decisions and people suffer.

10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol

It’s another tragic aspect of the migrants’ crisis: at least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared over the past two years after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency.

Many of these children are feared to have fallen into the hands of criminal groups.

In an interview with the Observer, the sister publication of the Guardian, Europol’s chief of staff, Brian Donald, said half of the missing children disappeared in Italy.

According to the agency, minors accounted for 27 percent of the refugees who arrived in Europe last year.

Europol warns that unaccompanied children are especially vulnerable to traffickers who exploit them for sex work and slavery.

Obama administration placed children with human traffickers, report says 

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.


“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said in a written statement. “What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”

The report concluded that administration “policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”

HHS spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement that the agency would “review the committee’s findings carefully and continue to work to ensure the best care for the children we serve.”

The report was released ahead of a hearing Thursday before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Portman co-chairs with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). It detailed nearly 30 cases where unaccompanied children had been trafficked after federal officials released them to sponsors or where there were “serious trafficking indicators.”
“HHS places children with individuals about whom it knows relatively little and without verifying the limited information provided by sponsors about their alleged relationship with the child,” the report said.

For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.

The Senate investigation began in July after federal prosecutors indicted six people in connection with the Marion labor-trafficking scheme, which involved at least eight minors and two adults from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.

One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay. Castillo-Serrano has pleaded guilty to labor-trafficking charges and awaits sentencing in the Northern District of Ohio in Toledo.

The FBI raided the trailer park in December 2014, rescuing the boys, but the Senate investigation says federal officials could have discovered the scheme far sooner.

In August 2014, a child-welfare caseworker attempted to visit one of the children, who had been approved for post-release services because of reported mental-health problems, according to the report.

The caseworker went to the address listed for the child, but the person who answered the door said the child didn’t live there, the report added. When the caseworker finally found the child’s sponsor, the sponsor blocked the caseworker from talking to the child.
Instead of investigating further, the caseworker closed the child’s case file, the report said, citing “ORR policy which states that the Post Release Services are voluntary and sponsor refused services.”

That child was found months later, living 50 miles away from the sponsor’s home and working at the egg farm, according to the report. The child’s sponsor was later indicted.

***

EU officials find that most of the ‘refugees’ are not refugees. What a mess

Even EU officials are now finally admitting that a lot – or, rather, most – of the people we have been calling ‘refugees’ are not refugees. They are economic migrants with no more right to be called European citizens than anybody else in the world. Even Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, made this point this week. In his accounting, at least 60pc of the people who are here are economic migrants who should not be here –  are from North African states such as Morocco and Tunisia. As he told Dutch television:-

“These are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status.”
Swedish officials are coming to a similar conclusion, saying that as many as 80,000 of the mainly young men who have gone to Sweden as ‘refugees’ in the past year alone are no such thing.

Now there are the usual attempts to crowd-please from certain politicians and officials who are talking about how they might have to deport these people. But they won’t, will they? Does anybody honestly believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?

Or let us assume that the 60pc figure is correct for Germany and that 60pc of the people who have arrived in Germany in the past year alone should not be there. Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe knows that.

Everybody on earth now knows that Europe’s present leaders lack either the will or the means to enforce their own laws. So more people will come next year, and the year after that and the year after that. All in the knowledge that once you’re in, you’re in. If the facts were otherwise then Sweden, Germany and other countries across the continent would currently be preparing to ship hundreds of thousands of people out of Europe and back to their countries of origin. But they’re not.

And so the numbers coming in will increase, and the politicians will keep posing, and the European peoples will rightly get more and more enraged at the fact that their continent is being taken away from them. Eventually perhaps even the constant bogeyman warnings about the ‘far-right’ will lose their capacity to scare. Not good times ahead, I’d say.

Still, at least we all listened to Benedict Cumberbatch.

 

CNN: Hillary, Republicans are not her Problem, the FBI is

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NYT Reporter: Clinton’s Problem is the FBI, Not Republicans

FreeBeacon: New York Times reporter Peter Baker rebuked Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric over the weekend about Republicans politicizing her private email scandal, suggesting on CNN Sunday that it was the FBI that should be really on Clinton’s mind.

The Obama administration announced Friday it could not release 22 of Clinton’s emails from her private server because they were top-secret, while Clinton maintained her line that those emails were not marked classified when they were sent or received, a statement columnist Ron Fournier remarked was “irrelevant.” The Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton signed a non-disclosure agreement laying out criminal penalties for any mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

“I take classified information really seriously,” Clinton said on Saturday. “I just think that if the Republicans want to use this for political purposes, that’s their decision.”

King pointed out this was an Obama administration decision, and MSNBC legal correspondent Ari Melber noted on Friday that the administration has prosecuted people for mishandling classified material. Also, the Inspector General of the intelligence community is not a Republican appointee.

“Her problem at this point is not the Republicans,” Baker said. “Her problem is the FBI and the Obama Justice Department. What Democrats are quietly, absolutely petrified about is that come summer, you find an indictment of people around her, of her, a request for a special prosecutor, something that just basically turns this into a complete disaster for the Democrats in which it’s too late to change horses.”

***

Those who came before Hillary and her willful decisions on classified material and lying about it, in part from the WashingtonTimes:

JOHN DEUTCH

Deutch was CIA director from May 1995 until December 1996. He came under Justice Department investigation after his resignation when classified material was found on his home computer in Maryland.

An internal CIA investigation found that he stored and processed hundreds of files of highly classified material on unprotected home computers that he and family members also used to connect to the Internet, making the information potentially vulnerable to hackers.

A report by the Defense Department inspector general found that Deutch had failed to follow “the most basic security precautions” and faulted him for rejecting Pentagon requests that security systems be installed on his home computers.

Deutch apologized for his actions and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton before the Justice Department could file a misdemeanor plea deal for mishandling government secrets.

SANDY BERGER

Berger was the national security adviser during Bill Clinton’s second term. After leaving office, he found himself in trouble for destroying classified documents.

Berger, who died in December at age 70, pleaded guilty in 2005 to illegally sneaking classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing papers in his suit. He later destroyed some of them in his office and lied about it. The materials related to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, and though he avoided prison time, he lost access to classified material for three years.

A judge fined him $50,000, higher than the amount recommended by prosecutors.

Berger called his actions a lapse in judgment that came as he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission that examined the events leading up to the 2001 attacks.

“I let considerations of personal convenience override clear rules of handling classified material,” he said at the time.

BRYAN NISHIMURA

Nishimura, a former Naval reservist in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 and a regional engineer for the U.S. military, was investigated for downloading and storing classified information on his personal electronic devices.

Prosecutors say he carried the materials with him off-base in Afghanistan and took classified Army records to his home in Folsom, California, after his deployment ended.

His lawyer, William Portanova, said Nishimura never intended to break the law but was a “pack rat” who thought nothing of warehousing Army records at home alongside personal belongings.

FBI agents who searched his home found classified military records, both in hard copy and digital form. Nishimura also admitted to investigators that he had destroyed some of the information.

Nishimura pleaded guilty in July to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. A judge fined him $7,500, and he was ordered to surrender his security clearance.

The violation was a technical and unintentional one, Portanova said, but one that the Justice Department nonetheless thought it needed to punish “to make its point.”

DAVID PETRAEUS

The best-known recent prosecution involves the former CIA director who pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanor count of unlawful removal and retention of classified materials. He was spared prison as part of his plea and was given two years’ probation by a judge who faulted him for a “serious lapse in judgment.”

The retired four-star Army general admitted that he loaned his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom he was having an affair, eight binders containing highly classified information regarding war strategy, intelligence capabilities and identities of covert officers. FBI agents seized the binders from an unlocked desk drawer at his home, instead of a secure facility that’s required for handling classified material.

One critical distinction is that while Clinton has repeatedly said she didn’t send or receive anything that was classified at the time – something the State Department now says it’s investigating – the Petraeus plea deal makes clear that he knew the information he provided was classified. He told Broadwell in a recording revealed by prosecutors that the binders had “code-word stuff in there.”

When questioned by the FBI, he denied having given Broadwell classified information, though he avoided being charged with making a false statement.