Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Federal Employees Stealing Gasoline, Cheating Taxpayers

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The fleecing of Americans at the hands of government employees file is getting thicker. What say you after you read the result of this investigation? Anyone else out there reading this have a matter to be investigated?

Fuel fraud: Government employees steal millions from taxpayers at the pump

As a federal employee at Arlington National Cemetery, Bobby Bennett Harris was authorized two fuel cards to maintain vehicles assigned to the nation’s most famous burial site.

But he got caught using those cards to fill up his personal SUV. What tripped him up?

One of the cards that paid for gasoline was assigned to an all-electric vehicle. Oops.

“Yes, that was an obvious sign,” Eric Radwick, special agent for the General Services Administration, deadpanned in an interview with Watchdog.org.

In April, Harris agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Virginia for theft of government property — two years of supervised probation, nine days of confinement and a $5,000 fine and restitution for the $5,354 he acknowledged stealing by using the gas cards.

Harris’ case may be noteworthy for his blunder, but, unfortunately, it’s hardly unusual.

The Office of the Inspector General at GSA has closed out 260 fleet card cases and recovered more than $2.4 million in federal taxpayer money between 2010 and 2014, but specialists in how to crack down on fraud say the real figure is probably much higher.

“It’s difficult to prove,” Allan Bachman, education manager at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, told Watchdog.org. “Unless you look at every little charge and do mileage estimates on every vehicle and how many miles per gallon they get and how many miles per gallon were actually expended, then you’re in deep weeds.”

“I don’t think we can put a definitive number on how bad the problem is,” said Radwick, a member of the Inspector General’s team for 13 years, who said he’s seen the number of fuel fraud cases increase dramatically during that time.

A review of GSA cases by Watchdog.org of government employees accused of misusing fleet cards showed 10 guilty pleas, one military discharge and one arrest in just the past 11 months.

The thefts were as low as $976 and as high as $24,000, involving a range of federal employees that included a VA hospital volunteer, a U.S. Navy recruiter, an Amtrak employee, a contract driver for the Department of Homeland Security and a former inspector with District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Services.

But one fuel fraud case GSA uncovered in 2011 was more than 10 times bigger. That’s when a then-married couple had to pay restitution of nearly $300,000 for using multiple fleet credit cards to fill up non-government vehicles in Hampton, Virginia.

The cards were assigned to Colleen White, who worked at the motor pool at Fort Monroe military installation before it was decommissioned. Lanaire White was sentenced to 84 months of incarceration and three years of supervised release after being convicted in a jury trial of conspiracy, wire fraud, theft and firearms violations.

“Everyone’s got one or two gas card cases in their portfolio,” said Radwick of his IG staff of about 65 agents, including 10 in the Washington, D.C., office. “It’s very steady.”

But it can be hard to crack down on fuel fraud because of the sheer number of cards the federal government has distributed — some 590,000.

“The more cards that are out there, the more opportunities there are to take advantage of those cards,” Bachman said in a phone interview from the ACFE headquarters in Austin, Texas.

The government fleet is huge — more than 650,000 vehicles around the world, driving more than 5 billion miles a year, consuming $400 million in gas and costing $4 billion to maintain. The fleet includes some military vehicles that are leased through the GSA.

Is the job just too big for one agency to track?

“Just by the number of government employees and the vast mission of the federal government, there’s going to be large amounts of everything — computers, cars, what have you,” Radwick said. “With the design of the program, hopefully agencies aren’t paying for cars they don’t need because it’s coming out of an agency’s line-item budget … I know the vehicles that we have, we use ’em all.”

Bachman, who believes the problem is not worse in the federal government than in the private sector, said most companies and agencies use gas card systems because they’re just easier.

“If the purchasing department had to be responsible for handing out cash every time somebody had to get gas, or even taking the vehicle themselves to fill it up or to keep a fuel farm as many places do, that becomes really burdensome,” Bachman said. “It’s much cheaper just to say, ‘Here’s your credit card for gas, it has a limit, say, of $75 a transaction and you can’t use more than four times a month.’ If those kinds of controls are built it, it’s a tremendous advantage.”

The key is to make sure controls are put in place and enforced.

“We’re looking at a lot of data,” Bachman said. “The best thing you can do is sampling — not necessarily watching every transaction, but picking transactions and saying, do these transactions really make sense?”

Radwick has heard a slew of excuses from federal employees who misuse government-issued gas cards. One of the most common? That they simply mistook the government card for their personal credit card.

But GSA recently changed the gas cards to make them more distinctive on the front and back:

Photo from GSA website

 

“Once you put (the card) in the pump it requires you to do stuff that normal credit cards don’t, so that excuse goes out the window,” Radwick said.

“People are creatures of habit,” Bachman said. “An employee who is using the card legitimately, you can pretty much track when that person is going to use their fuel card. So when they use the card outside of that pattern, that raises a potential red flag.”

Online tools and data mining help GSA inspectors track down more cheaters and the agency has made a concerted effort to publicize convictions and guilty pleas.

“When you do catch someone, if you make it very public that you’ve caught someone abusing the procurement card, that they have been dismissed and, depending on the magnitude, possibly even looking into civil or criminal prosecution, that sends a message as well,” Bachman said. “That’s a big deterrent.”

So why do people do it?

“They don’t think they’re going to get caught,” Radwick said. “And a lot of times when they do get caught it’s ‘Yeah, I knew this was coming’ … We very rarely catch someone on their first, second or third time doing it. They’ve been doing it for a little while and they’ve gotten complacent and they think, nobody’s watching this, nobody’s paying attention.”

Radwick said he expected the drop in gasoline prices in the past 10 months would encourage cheaters to back off. But despite the risk, that hasn’t happened.

Despite more arrests, more convictions and more efficient technology in the hands of GSA agents, the problem persists.

“Are we getting more cases? Yes we are,” Radwick said. “Is that because it’s getting worse or are we getting better? I really don’t know.”

“It’s hard to tell if we’re chipping away at it and making real inroads or not,” Bachman said.

OPM Hack, Lies Came First, Truth Creeps out Slowly

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We are conditioned to hearing the lies first from the administration stemming from an event affecting the homeland security and the citizens within. It takes months, sometimes years for the truth to be known, and it must be said, suspicions still remain. Stinks huh?

Such is the case with the Office of Personnel Management hack that took place several months ago. The numbers and depth of the hack are getting published that are closer to the truth….. the truth has no agenda but achieving the whole truth takes enduring tenacity.

Unconfirmed chatter but apparently during the diplomatic and business visit by China President Xi, Barack Obama will not address the hacking except perhaps is a side meeting with lower level staffers. The mission by the White House is to defer to the corporations such as Boeing and Microsoft to target the matter of hacking with China.

OPM Now Admits 5.6 Million Fed’s Fingerprints were Stolen by Hackers

Wired: by Andy Greenberg > When hackers steal your password, you change it. When hackers steal your fingerprints, they’ve got an unchangeable credential that lets them spoof your identity for life. When they steal 5.6 million of those irrevocable biometric identifiers from U.S. federal employees—many with secret clearances—well, that’s very bad.

On Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management admitted that the number of federal employees’ fingerprints compromised in the massive breach of its servers revealed over the summer has grown from 1.1 million to 5.6 million. OPM, which serves as a sort of human resources department for the federal government, didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on who exactly those fingerprints belong to within the federal government. But OPM had previously confirmed that the data of 21.5 million federal employees was potentially compromised by the hack—which likely originated in China—and that those victims included intelligence and military employees with security clearances.

The revelation comes at a particularly ironic time: During the U.S. visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping, who said at a public appearance in Seattle that the Chinese government doesn’t condone hacking of U.S. targets, and pledged to partner with the U.S. to curb cybercrime.

“As part of the government’s ongoing work to notify individuals affected by the theft of background investigation records, the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense have been analyzing impacted data to verify its quality and completeness,” reads OPM’s statement posted to its website. “During that process, OPM and [the Department of Defense] identified archived records containing additional fingerprint data not previously analyzed. Of the 21.5 million individuals whose Social Security Numbers and other sensitive information were impacted by the breach, the subset of individuals whose fingerprints have been stolen has increased from a total of approximately 1.1 million to approximately 5.6 million.”

OPM adds that it’s mailing letters to all affected victims, and notes that it’s also offering them free credit monitoring. But that identity theft protection, which cost $133 million in likely misspent tax dollars, doesn’t begin to address the national security implications of having the fingerprints of high-level federal officials in the hands of hackers who are potentially employed by a foreign government.

OPM downplayed the significance of that biometric breach in its statement, adding that “federal experts believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is limited.” When WIRED asked about those limitations, however, an OPM spokesperson wrote only that “law enforcement and intelligence communities are best positioned to give the most fulsome answer.”

The agency’s statement does admit that hackers’ ability to exploit the stolen fingerprints “could change over time as technology evolves,” perhaps as more biometric authentication features are built into federal government security systems. And it says it’s assembled an interagency working group that includes officials from the Pentagon, FBI, DHS, and intelligence agencies to review the problem. “This group will also seek to develop potential ways to prevent such misuse,” the statement reads. “If, in the future, new means are developed to misuse the fingerprint data, the government will provide additional information to individuals whose fingerprints may have been stolen in this breach.”

The increased number of stolen fingerprints represents only the latest in a series of calamitous revelations from OPM about the hacker intrusion that led to the resignation of the agency’s director Katherine Archuleta in July. Aside from the 21.5 million social security numbers taken by attackers and the newly confessed 5.6 million fingerprints, the agency has also confirmed that hackers gained access to many victims’ SF-86 forms, security clearance questionnaires that include highly personal information such as previous drug use or extramarital affairs that could be used for blackmail.

“The American people have no reason to believe that they’ve heard the full story and every reason to believe that Washington assumes they are too stupid or preoccupied to care about cyber security,” Senator Ben Sasse wrote today in an email.

For the hackers who cracked OPM’s vault of highly private information, it’s the gift to foreign intelligence that keeps on giving.

 

Honest Summary of Obama vs. Syria and Putin

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There are gratifying moments when honest assessments are written. We often think we have a handle on conditions both on domestic policy and that of foreign policy. Personally, this blogger think she has most conditions and circumstances figured out while motivations and other objectives remain in question. I want to see the world through others eyes, from those that own bona fides and the resume where omissions on my part are checked and re-checked.

When it comes to the National Security Council running operations in the Middle East with regard to Iraq and Syria, one must challenge those decisions and seek the grander realities. Even the White House has admitted the NatSec team is too big, but is firing on all cylinders. What?

In recent weeks, Russia has taken a proactive, aggressive posture as well as a military stance in Syria, a country he knows well and the reason is, Obama retreated handing Putin an alternate set of keys to access the region on his own terms.

John Schindler writes below a summary I find is in full agreement with my own conclusion, yet the big question in the elephant in the room….what now?

Obama’s Collapsing War on the Islamic State

For the Obama administration, the news from the Middle East keeps going from bad to worse. Vladimir Putin’s power play, moving significant military forces into Syria to support his ailing client, Bashar al-Assad, caught the White House flat footed and unsure how to respond.

Although the administration gave the Kremlin de facto control over American policy in Syria some two years ago when it walked away from its own “red line,” granting Russia a veto on Western action there, President Obama and his national security staff nevertheless seem befuddled by this latest Russian move.

The forces Mr. Putin has just deployed to Syria are impressive, veteran special operators backed by a wing of fighters and ground attack jets that are expected to commence air strikes on Assad’s foes soon. They are backed by air defense units, which is puzzling since the Islamic State has no air force, indicating that the Kremlin’s true intent in Syria has little to do with the stated aim of fighting terrorism and is really about propping up Russia’s longtime client in Damascus.

The White House is left planning “deconfliction” with Moscow—which is diplomatic language for entreating Russians, who now dominate Syrian airspace, not to shoot down American drones, which provide the lion’s share of our intelligence on the Islamic State. The recent meeting on Syrian developments between Mr. Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who clearly finds dealing with the Russian strongman preferable to parleying with President Obama, indicates where power is flowing in today’s Middle East.

This is about much more than merely “cherry-picking” intelligence.

To make matters worse for the administration, new revelations regarding flawed intelligence assessments of the Islamic State, which I told you about last week, paint a troubling portrait of organized lying at the Pentagon. Some of the more than 50 analysts at Central Command in Tampa who blew the whistle on politicized intelligence reported feeling “bullied” to make their assessments of the U.S.-led war on the Islamic State appear more successful than the facts warranted. This is about much more than merely “cherry-picking” intelligence.

One named whistleblower has come forward about CENTCOM’s intelligence problems, explaining that he witnessed persistent, command-mandated low-balling of terrorist threats in Iraq since the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Rising terrorism in Iraq was “off message” for the White House, eager to pronounce jihadism there as dead as its leader.

David Shedd, who until recently was the acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which supplies CENTCOM with many of its analysts, spoke for colleagues still serving with his caution that such rampant politicization of intelligence cannot be tolerated. In language sure to cause heartburn at the White House, Mr. Shedd stated, “the problem is not a stand-alone case but systemic.” In response, Congress has taken interest in the allegations and President Obama’s problems there are only now starting to take political shape.

An even greater blow to President Obama’s diffident war against the Islamic State, known to the Pentagon as Operation Inherent Resolve, came this week with the stunning news that John Allen, the White House’s “war czar,” is stepping down this fall. In that job for almost exactly a year, Mr. Allen, a retired Marine four-star general whose last uniformed position was commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, enjoyed a bumpy tenure thanks to frequent meddling by West Wing staffers.

Mr. Allen, ostensibly charged with managing the war across agencies in tandem with allies, was unable to secure the military assets he believed were needed to defeat the Islamic State, for instance meeting strong White House resistance to his plans to put air controllers on the ground to guide airstrikes by Western forces. Although Mr. Allen has portrayed his resignation as a personal matter, due to his wife’s health problems, Pentagon insiders insist this an excuse to save face—mainly President Obama’s.

The main culprit is micromanagement by White House staffers, especially on the National Security Council, which is bloated and regularly treats senior military officers and diplomats like hired help. Obscenity-laced tirades by senior NSC staff are not uncommon. To make matters worse, significant differences between the NSC and the Pentagon on how to defeat the Islamic State went unresolved for months, leading to lethargy inside the Beltway while U.S. theater commanders were close to panicking about the enemy’s rise. Mr. Allen eventually had enough.

Now the White House needs to find a replacement who’s up to the job, which looks to be no easy task. “Good luck with that,” stated a senior Pentagon official, “I doubt they’ll find another four-star eager to be the dog who catches that car.” A senior NATO official explained that Mr. Allen’s departure “is really a serious blow. We had little confidence before in President Obama’s ability to defeat Daesh,” the Arabic term for the Islamic State. “Now we have none.”

As long as Mr. Putin calibrates his strategy to realistic expectations, he may avoid the overreach disasters that plagued the American wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Allen is leaving an administration in disarray in the Middle East. President Obama’s promise to grow a “moderate” Syrian opposition force of thousands, able to serve as an alternative to Assad and the jihadists alike, is in tatters, with only a handful of fighters remaining. The resulting gap has been filled by the Russians, who have entered the Levantine fray with gusto and purpose.

Secretary of State John Kerry presented the deployment of Russian jet fighters to Syria as “basically force protection,” but Pentagon planners are less charitable in their assessments. “The only ‘force’ the Russians are protecting themselves from with Su-30s,” referring to the four modern fighters deployed to Syria, “is the U.S. Air Force,” one military officer said to me.

Some Pentagon staffers are taking comfort in hopes that the Russians will find themselves mired in a messy stalemate in Syria, whose civil war has raged for four bloody and indecisive years already. That may be optimistic, however, as Russian spies and soldiers have served in Syria for over a half-century and many of them are well acquainted with Syrian realities. As long as Mr. Putin calibrates his strategy to realistic expectations, he may avoid the overreach disasters that plagued the American wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

What happens next in Syria is the top guessing game among security experts the world over right now. Has Mr. Putin finally gone too far? Can anything be salvaged from that awful conflict that could serve Western interests while stopping the rise of the Islamic State—and perhaps even save innocent lives? What is the aim of Operation Inherent Resolve now that General Allen is leaving the stage? All that’s certain at this point is that President Obama’s flailing war against the Islamic State is looking for a strategy as well as a new czar.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a navy officer and a war college professor.

bin Ladin’s Bodyguard Transferred to SA from Gitmo

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Usama bin Ladin’s bodyguard is transferred to Saudi Arabia.

Full detainee file is here.

  1. (S//NF) Personal Information:
  • JDIMS/NDRC Reference Name: Abdul Shalabi
  • Current/True Name and Aliases: Abd al-Rahman Shalbi Isa

Uwaydah, Abdul Haq Rahman, Saqr al-Madani, Mahmud

Abd Aziz al-Mujahid

  • Place of Birth: Medina, Saudi Arabia (SA)
  • Date of Birth: 4 December 1975
  • Citizenship: Saudi Arabia
  • Internment Serial Number (ISN): US9SA-000042DP
  1. (U//FOUO) Health: Detainee is in good health.
  2. (U) JTF-GTMO Assessment:
  3. (S) Recommendation: JTF-GTMO recommends this detainee for Continued Detention

Under DoD Control (CD). JTF-GTMO previously recommended detainee for Continued

Detention Under DoD Control (CD) on 26 October 2007.

  1. (S//NF) Executive Summary: Detainee is a member of al-Qaida and a long-term bodyguard for Usama Bin Laden (UBL), serving in that position beginning in 1999.

Detainee received specialized close combat training for his role as a suicide operative in an aborted component of the 11 September 2001 al-Qaida attacks. Detainee participated in hostilities against US and Coalition forces and was captured with a group referred to as the Dirty 30, which included UBL bodyguards and an assessed 20th 11 September 2001 hijacker.

Detainee received basic militant and advanced training at al-Qaida associated training camps.

 

October 6 & 22, Benghazi Cmte, Popcorn Buttered?

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More emails surface in Hillary Clinton Benghazi probe

Politico: More previously-undisclosed State Department emails related to Benghazi have surfaced in a federal court filing, offering a public accounting of at least some of the records still being sought by congressional investigators.

The filing Monday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Citizens United describes about a dozen Benghazi-related emails that were withheld in whole or in part as State responded to one of the group’s requests seeking information about contacts between a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and officials with the Clinton Foundation.
Most of the documents also appear to have been withheld from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating State’s response to the attack. The committee is scheduled to take public testimony from Clinton on Oct. 22.

A panel spokesman said he could not immediately confirm which of the documents had been turned over to the committee, but Citizens United President David Bossie told reporters staffers at the House panel told the group State never produced the records to Congress.

“To the best of their knowledge, the do not have these documents either, even though they are under subpoena for an extended period of time,” Bossie told reporters outside U.S. District Court in Washington after a hearing on the suit.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach told POLITICO there is no effort to impede congressional probes.

“The Department has made every effort to cooperate with the Benghazi Committee, providing 32 witnesses for interviews and over 70,000 pages of documents, including over 20,000 pages in the last month alone,” Gerlach said. “We will continue to respond to the Benghazi Committee’s requests, but as they mount and modify over time, so too must we plan accordingly for the time and resources they consume.”

In the new court filing, State Department official John Hackett said nearly all the Benghazi-related emails involved in the FOIA lawsuit involve deliberations among State officials about how to respond to Benghazi-related congressional inquiries.

In several high profile cases, including the ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation, the Obama Administration has defended its right to keep confidential its internal discussions about House and Senate investigations. The administration has also sought to extend that confidentiality to cover responses to media inquiries prompted by congressional probes.

In June, while producing records to congressional committees, the State Department confirmed it was holding back some Benghazi documents.

“A small number of documents implicate important Executive Branch institutional interests and are therefore not included in this production,” Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affiairs Anna Frifield wrote in a letter to the House Benghazi panel.

However, House staffers said the diplomatic agency has repeatedly rebuffed requests for a log of documents State is withholding. The FOIA lawsuits provide a vehicle to force the agency to identify those emails, although the substance of the messages is not disclosed.

At the court hearing Tuesday, a federal judge pressed the State Department to move more quickly to process documents requested by Citizens United and others who have been demanding records relating to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state .

“I think there has to be some reallocation of resources, because these are atypical cases,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said. “This case is important to the public. The public is clamoring for information. Everyone is clamoring for information.”

After Sullivan derided State’s approach as “business as usual,” Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro insisted that State’s 63.5-member FOIA processing staff has been working long hours and weekends in “demoralizing” conditions to publish emails from Clinton’s account as well as records sought in about 100 pending FOIA lawsuits and thousands of pending FOIA requests.
“I just want to assure the court that it’s not business as usual,” Shapiro declared. “The State Department’s being crushed by obligations.”

Much of the hearing was spent discussing why the State Department failed to complete searches of emails provided by former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin by a court-ordered deadline of September 13.

Sullivan seemed to waver on how culpable State was for delays, sometimes suggesting that the agency had to wait for the cooperation of its former employees and at other points suggesting that State was being sluggish.

The judge initially attributed the delay to “foot-dragging” by Mills and Abedin in response to requests from their former agency. However, he quickly withdrew that accusation.
“So, there was foot-dragging on their part–well, there was delay. I can’t say there was foot-dragging,” Sullivan said.

Justice Department attorney Caroline Anderson insisted that the State Department was only obliged to produce records in its possession at the time the search began, so records turned over later by Mills and Abedin were not technically covered by the FOIA requests filed last year for records of contacts between top Clinton aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a private consulting firm with connections to former President Bill Clinton.

“The State Department is in compliance with every order of this court,” Anderson said.

Anderson proposed that State have until December 9 to locate and process relevant records from Mills’ and Abedin’s accounts, but eventually said it was just “the State Department’s hope” to get it done by then. That seemed to irritate Sullivan.

“How long does it take you to run a computer search?” the judge asked. “Someone pushes a button. I’m not minimizing it, but it’s a computer search.”

Citizens United attorney Matthew McGill insisted that State knew or should have known weeks ago if it was going to have trouble meeting the deadline. “They should have come to the court then….Instead, they waited,” McGill said. “That was a tactical decision on their part. It was meant to delay.”

Anderson asked that State have a month to finish the computer-based searches and then more time to review the content of the documents for sensitive national security information and other details subject to withholding. But the judge said a shorter timeline was necessary.

Sullivan ordered State to finish the searches by October 2 and set a hearing four days later.

Bossie said State’s sluggish response was part and parcel of an effort to benefit Clinton’s Democratic presidential bid by kicking the issue down the road.

“Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills have taken the specific strategy and tactics just like they did in the 90s–the same people the same strategies–to drag these efforts out, to drag out congressional committees, to frustrate justice and to frustrate the American people from getting information so that people ask questions like: ‘This has been going on for three years and don’t we know everything and isn’t this a rehash?” the conservative activist said. “That is their deliberate strategy. They’ve been doing this for 20 years…..the same Clinton playbook is played over and over and over again.”

Clinton campaign spokesmen and attorneys for Abedin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mills’s lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, called Bossie’s claim of deliberate delay “untrue.”