Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Mexican Drug Cartels Embedded with Terrorists

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Motorist With ISIS Flag Makes Bomb Threat Against Police

Emad Karakrah (Chicago Police Department)

A man who had an ISIS flag waving from his vehicle is facing several charges after he threatened police with a bomb Wednesday morning when he was pulled over on the Southwest Side.

Emad Karakrah, 49, was charged with felony counts of disorderly conduct and aggravated fleeing; and a misdemeanor count of driving on a never-issued license, according to Chicago police. He was also issued three traffic citations.

Someone called police after seeing a “suspicious person” driving a silver Pontiac southbound in the 7700 block of South Kedzie at 9:18 a.m. with an ISIS flag waving out the window, according to a police report.

Officers attempted to pull over the vehicle, but the driver took off, according to the report. The officers called for assistance, and another officer pulled the vehicle over after it went through several red lights.

The man told police during his arrest that there was a bomb in the car and he would detonate it if they searched the vehicle, according to the report.

A bomb squad, the FBI and Homeland Security responded to the scene and searched the vehicle, but no bomb was found, authorities said.

Judge Laura Sullivan ordered Karakrah held on a $55,000 bond Thursday. He is next scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 3.

Investigation: Collusion Between Terrorists and Mexican Cartels is a Threat to U.S.

Lead investigator says Obama administration has a responsibility to stop it

Muslim terrorists are using Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. southern border to plan attacks on the United States from within, according to Sun City Cell, a documentary produced in collaboration between Judicial Watch and TheBlaze TV.

“Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso and they’re using remote farm roads—rather than interstates—to elude the Border Patrol and other law enforcement barriers,” states Judicial Watch. “Our nation’s unsecured border with Mexico is an existential threat to our nation.”

Chris Farrell, the director of research and investigations at Judicial Watch, says the cartel’s ability to completely control the El Paso region paved the way for a sophisticated narcoterrorism partnership.

“If you want to move something from point A to point B, a contraband item, you need their assistance, there’s a price tag with it, its all about making money,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of public corruption. There are cartels and those criminal enterprises do billions and billions of dollars worth of elicit business. Their corruption runs deep and it runs high and so there are people that are afraid frankly for this story to come out.”

Jonathan Gilliam, retired Navy Seal and former FBI special agent, says it’s always been his fear that high-level terrorist leaders would try to get into the United States and plan things here.

“For them to send out orders from overseas is one thing, but to see them come into the United States and actually start helping plan and give orders, that just shows another level of commitment and it shows a drastic shift in their mindset and where there dedication is,” says Gilliam. “I mean you don’t just go embed yourself into where you want to start a war, unless you’re serious about starting a war.”

“It probably means that’s not the first time they’ve gotten people in this way. And it’s really scary when you think about it,” said Gilliam.

Despite the alleged collusion between the Mexican cartels and Muslim terrorists, many tout El Paso, Texas, as a safe city to live.

“The cartel wants El Paso to be the shiny penny where everything is good, don’t look behind the curtain over here,” says an anonymous source in the documentary. “Everything is wonderful. And so, it’s known by the gang members and the criminals in all the area, if you draw attention, you hurt a police officer, you do anything that interferes with their business, they’ll melt you in a bucket of acid and not think twice about it.”

“The law enforcement for the most part is bought and paid for,” the source continues. “Not a lot of people have respect for police. The criminals certainly don’t, but what they have fear of is an organization that doesn’t have Fourth Amendment and doesn’t use jail cells, and that’s the cartel.”

Farrell says the Obama administration has a responsibility in putting an end to the alleged narcoterrorism ring.

“The principal functions of the administration, certainly of a president, is to provide for the security of the country and this is an issue that goes to terrorism, it goes to narcotics trafficking, human smuggling all sorts of areas of security and criminality, preventing crime,” he said. “And so of course it’s the administration’s responsibility.”

A former military intelligence officer specializing in counterintelligence and human intelligence, Farrell spent four years on the investigation and has traveled to El Paso many times to meet with dozens of sources for this story.

He says the investigation will continue.

“This is probably one-third of the whole story about what’s going on in El Paso right now,” he said. “Two-thirds of the story we have not even reported on. There is so much more and our investigation continues.”

“It only gets worse, frankly,” he said. “If people were disturbed or concerned about what they saw in this portion of the story, it is a fragment of the overall story.”

The First Lie About the IRS Hack Gets Some Truth?

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Social security numbers are the basis and entry point to hack when it comes to the cyber intrusion into the IRS. Given the software platform the IRS uses, which is outdated completely, there are warnings there could be more intrusions.

IRS Hack Far Worse Than First Thought

USAToday:

SAN FRANCISCO — A hack of the Internal Revenue service first reported in May was nearly three times as large as previously stated, the agency said Monday.

Thieves have accessed as many as 334,000 taxpayer accounts, the IRS said.

In May, the IRS reported that identity thieves were able to use the agency’s Get Transcript program to get personal information about as many as 114,000 taxpayers.

On Monday, the IRS said an additional 220,000 accounts had also been hacked. In all, 334,000 accounts were accessed, though whether information was stolen from every one of them is not known.

The hackers made use of an IRS application called Get Transcript, which allows users to view their tax account transactions, line-by-line tax return information or wage and income reported to the IRS for a specific tax year.

To enter the Get Transcript system, the user must correctly answer multiple identity verification question.

The hackers took information about taxpayers acquired from other sources and used it to correctly answer the questions, allowing them to gain access to a plethora of data about individual taxpayers.

The Get Transcript service was shut down in May.

Hackers love authentication-based systems because it’s very difficult to distinguish between “the good guys and the bad guys” when someone is trying to get in, said Jeff Hill of STEALTHbits Technologies, a cyber security company.

“Here we have a case where a successful authentication-based attack was discovered in May, and yet the IRS is still unclear of the extent of the breach’s damage months later. Even now, how confident is the IRS they fully understand the extent of the attack completely, or should we expect yet another shoe to drop in the coming weeks?” Hill said.

Notification of the increased number of hacked accounts came Monday.

In a statement the agency said, “as part of the IRS’s continued efforts to protect taxpayer data, the IRS conducted a deeper analysis over a wider time period covering the 2015 filing season, analyzing more than 23 million uses of the Get Transcript system.”

That analysis revealed an additional 220,000 accounts had also potentially been accessed.

In addition to accounts the hackers were successfully able to access, the IRS disclosed hack attempts that didn’t succeed. There were 111,000 attempts on accounts disclosed in May and 170,000 disclosed on Monday, for a total of 281,000 of accounts where the hackers “failed to clear the authentication processes,” the agency said.

Taxpayers whose information was potentially breached will get letters in the mail from the IRS in the coming days.

They will also get access to free credit protection and Identity Protection PINs, the IRS said in a statement.

Taxpayers Fleeced

1/2 TRILLION spent on IT upgrades, but IRS, Feds still use DOS, old Windows

Examiner: President Obama’s team has spent more than a half trillion dollars on information technology but some departments, notably the IRS, still run on DOS and old Windows, which isn’t serviced anymore, according to House chairman.

“Since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has spent in excess of $525 billion dollars on IT. And it doesn’t work,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

In an address to the centrist Ripon Society, Chaffetz suggested that the slow change of the federal government’s IT led to the recent and historic hack of personal data of millions of current and former federal workers, including CIA and other clandestine employees.

“The IRS still uses the DOS operating system. You have a Patent office that just got Windows 97. They don’t even service Windows 97 anymore. And yet they just got it. So the procurement process is really, really broken in this regard,” he added.

Chaffetz also offered to praise for Obama’s pick to head the Office of Personnel Management, home to the massive computer hack.

 

State Dept Gave a Safe to Hillary as Email List Grows

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Foggy Bottom is an understatement…

No….wait it IS MUCH WORSE…Those pesky FOIA requests…Seems the State Department is about to fall completely. Obstruction too is an understatement.

Gawker: Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive defender of Hillary Clinton. Over two years ago, the department claimed that “no records responsive to your request were located”—a baffling assertion, given Reines’ well-documented correspondence with journalists. Late last week, however, the State Department came up with a very different answer: It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to Gawker’s request.

On August 13, lawyers for the U.S. Attorney General submitted a court-ordered status report to the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in which it disclosed that State employees had somehow discovered “5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length” that were sent or received by Reines during his government tenure. Of those emails, the attorneys added, “an estimated 17,855” were likely responsive to Gawker’s request:

The Department has conducted its preliminary review of the potentially responsive electronic documents in its possession, custody, and control from Mr. Reines’ state.gov email account (as opposed to records it received from his personal email account). The assemblage comprises approximately 5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length. Based on a review of a portion of these emails, the Department estimates that 22% of the 81,159 emails may be responsive. Therefore, the Department believes that it will need to conduct a line- by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions. Moreover, some of the responsive records may need to be referred to other agencies for consultation or processing.

It is not clear how the State Department managed to locate this tranche of Reines’ correspondence when it had previously asserted that the emails simply didn’t exist. These newly discovered records are from Reines’ government account, and are not related to the 20 boxes of government-business emails stored on his personal account that Reines recently handed over to the government, despite his prior claims to Gawker that his official use of non-governmental email was limited: “My personal email was the last place I wanted reporters intruding.”

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Considering the number of potentially responsive emails contained in Reines’ State.gov email account, it’s hard to see the agency’s initial denial as anything other than willful incompetence—if not the conscious effort, or the result of someone else’s conscious effort, to stonewall news outlets. Either way, the precedent it establishes is pernicious: Journalists should not have to file expensive lawsuits to force the government to comply with the basic provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the same status report, the State Department intends to produce the first set of Reines’ emails on September 30, 2015—three years and six days after Gawker filed its initial request.

We’ve asked the State Department and Reines for comment and will update this post if we hear back from either.

State Department Delivered a Safe to Hillary Clinton’s Attorney to Secure Classified Emails

Breitbart: The State Department sent a safe to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer in early July in an effort to ensure a thumb drive containing classified emails was being stored securely. The unusual move by State came to light Friday, more than a week after the drive itself was turned over to the Department of Justice.

McClatchy reports that evidence of classified information on Hillary’s personal email sever first turned up in May, earlier than previously known. A debate ensued between the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community and the State Department about whether the material, including copies of Hillary’s emails on a thumb drive kept by her attorney, were properly secured. It is not known what, if any, security precautions were taken between May and July, but in early July the State Department became concerned enough that it delivered a safe to Kendall’s office.

The State Department has previously mentioned that it had physically verified the security of the thumb drive in Kendall’s office, but never mentioned providing a safe. On July 30th, about a week after word of the thumb drive’s existence became public knowledge, a State Department spokesman told Politico, “We’ve provided the lawyers with instructions regarding appropriate measures for physically securing the documents and confirmed via a physical security expert that they are taking those measures.”

Nearly a week later, State spokesman Mark Toner again noted that State had sent a security expert to Kendall’s office. He told CBS News, “We simply cleared the site where they’re being held, made sure that it was a secure facility, and capable of holding what could be classified material.” Again, there was no mention of State providing a safe in which to keep the thumb drive.

Throughout this time the State Department has firmly denied that any material on Hillary’s server was classified at the time it was generated. But two Inspectors General–for State and for the Intelligence Community–have been equally firm in saying some of the emails were classified “when they were generated.”

State’s decision to deliver the safe to Kendall’s office in July could be seen in one of two ways: as an admission by the Agency that there is indeed classified material on the drive, despite what its spokespeople have said publicly, or as an effort by State to placate the Inspectors General.

Earlier this week, Senator Chuck Grassley published a letter from the Intelligence Community Inspector General which indicated that two emails in Hillary’s inbox had been judged to contain Top Secret information. Shortly afterwards, Hillary announced that she had agreed to turn over her email server, which had been wiped clean and was sitting in a data center in New Jersey.

McClatchy reports that the thumb drive in Kendall’s possession was actually turned over on August 6th, a day after stories indicated the FBI was seeking to verify the security of the drive. It’s not clear what prompted the decision to take the drive at that time or why the FBI waited another week to collect the server.

There is no word on whether the State Department has retrieved its safe from Kendall’s office.

*** First there were 2 emails, then 60 and now over 300?

New Clinton email count: 305 documents with potentially classified information

WashingtonTimes:

More than 300 of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — or 5.1 percent of those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret information, the State Department reported to a federal court Monday.

Officials insisted, however, that the screening process is running smoothly and they are back on track after falling behind a judge’s schedule for making all of the emails public.

The reviewers have screened about 20 percent of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton returned to the department, which means if the rate of potentially secret information remains steady, more than 1,500 messages will have to be sent to intelligence community agencies, known in government as “IC,” to screen out classified information.

“Out of a sample of approximately 20% of the Clinton emails, the IC reviewers have only recommended 305 documents — approximately 5.1% — for referral to their agencies for consultation,” the Obama administration said in new court papers.

 

Officials are trying to head off a request by the plaintiffs, who sued to get a look at Mrs. Clinton’s emails and who want the court to impose new oversight to make sure the State Department is working quickly and fairly.

Dozens of messages already released publicly have had information redacted as classified, raising questions about Mrs. Clinton’s security practices when she declined to use the regular State.gov system and instead issued herself an email account on a server she kept at her home in New York.

Mrs. Clinton has insisted she never sent any information that was classified and said she never received information from others that was marked classified at the time — though it has since been marked as such.

“I was permitted to and used a personal email and, obviously in retrospect, given all the concerns that have been raised, it would have been probably smarter not to,” she told Iowa Public Radio last week. “But I never sent nor received any classified email, nothing marked ’Classified.’ And I think this will all sort itself out.”

She also took credit for the release of the emails, which she returned to the government nearly two years after she left office, saying that “if I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of  this would have been in the public arena.”

The emails, however, are being made public by federal District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, in response to the lawsuit from Jason Leopold, a reporter at Vice.

Judge Sullivan has set a strict schedule for the State Department to meet in releasing the emails on a monthly basis. The department, however, missed the July target by more than 1,000 pages of emails, and blamed the need to screen out classified information as the reason for breaking the judge’s order.

In its new filing Monday, the State Department said it will catch up by the end of September, saying intelligence community screeners are now integrated into the process.

 

Islamists in Government Roles There and Here

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Why Are Londoners Uncomfortable with a Muslim Mayor?

by Raheem Kassam

One-third of Londoners are said to be “uncomfortable” with the idea of a Muslim mayor, according to a new YouGov poll for LBC radio. What seems to have especially excited some is the revelation that 73 percent of UK Independence Party (UKIP) voters in London feel the same way. But can they really be blamed?

The reason some of the people are “uncomfortable” is undoubtedly going to be a level of xenophobia. But the majority, I believe, are subconsciously internalising the public performances of Muslim politicians in the United Kingdom and are rightly concerned by them.

Critics might point to the fact that UKIPers, across the board according to the poll, are less “progressive,” leading the field in discomfort for the idea of a female mayor (12 percent), a homosexual mayor (26 percent) and an ethnic minority mayor (41 percent). Well, yes, UKIP is a party of traditionalists and conservatives first and libertarians second. I don’t think anyone should try to hide from that or try to explain it away. But the discomfort about a Muslim mayor (73 percent) requires some deeper thought.

Sayeeda Hussain Warsi (left) resigned from Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, calling his Israel policy “morally indefensible.” Former Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman (center) fell due to corruption charges. MEP Amjad Bashir (right) was kicked out of UKIP for “grave” financial irregularities.

Look at the shining examples we have of high profile Muslim politicians in the United Kingdom: Baroness Warsi, former Mayor Lutfur Rahman, ex-UKIPer Amjad Bashir, and of course one of the people tipped to challenge for the Labour candidacy, Labour MP Sadiq Khan.

“But wait! What about Syed Kamall? Sajid Javid? Khalid Mahmood? Rehman Chishti?” I hear you ask.

Quite. But what about Humza Yousaf, Rushanara Ali, Shabana Mahmood, and Yasmin Qureshi?

By and large, Muslim politicians in the UK tend to be far more … divisive, to be polite. There are several camps. Some, like Lutfur Rahman and Baroness Warsi, have Islamist links. Some have questionable backgrounds, such as the defence of Louis Farrakhan or Guantanamo Bay detainees (Sadiq Khan), and one let UKIP down in a big way, while being investigated for improper behaviour (Amjad Bashir).

Humza Yousaf (left), a member of the Scottish parliament, was previously media spokesman for a radical Islamist charity. Labour MPs Shabana Mahmood (center) and Yasmin Qureshi (right) are more concerned with boycotting Israel than serving their constituents.

Others engage in sectarian politics at a whim. George Galloway, though he doesn’t claim to be a Muslim (others claim he converted), divided and conquered in Bradford West and was, as a result, turfed out. Politicians like Ali, Mahmood, and Qureshi are united by their demonisation of Israel and tolerance of extremism.

And Tory-elected officials like Kamall, Javid, and Chishti are precisely why Conservative voters in London are more comfortable (39 percent against) with a Muslim mayor. One of their leading candidates is a practicing Muslim – they’d have to be.

Perhaps the argument can be made that UKIP voters are not xenophobic or anti-Muslim – although one might argue they are more likely to be anti-Islam, and that’s a discussion for another time – but rather that they have simply been paying attention.

When you couple the backgrounds of a lot of leading Muslim politicians in Britain with the more objective, black-and-white worldview that UKIP voters have, they are naturally predetermined to be more sceptical.

You might argue that UKIP voters shouldn’t see things in such a clear-cut way and shouldn’t attribute the failings of one Muslim politician to others. There are evident trends, similarities, and commonalities, but that contention would be a decent compromise approach.

Unfortunately, while there are a handful of decent Muslim politicians in Britain, I can’t help but think that the highest-profile ones have let people with my name and background down. It’s no different than UKIPers being sceptical of a Conservative mayor, or Labour being sceptical of a Tory one.

Maybe I should run for London mayor on a UKIP ticket? Or maybe not.

***

In America:

Muslims in the U.S. military

Muslim police officers

White House has approved Muslims serving in government

Government internships for Muslims on Capitol Hill

Exactly how is there a reconciliation with taking an oath?

135 Unaccompanied Children a Day

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Southwest Border Unaccompanied Alien Children

 

Beginning last year and specifically in the last few months, CBP has seen an overall increase in the apprehension of Unaccompanied Alien Children from Central America at the Southwest Border, specifically in the Rio Grande Valley. While overall border apprehensions have only slightly increased during this time period, and remain at historic lows, the apprehension and processing of these children present unique operational challenges for CBP and HHS. Addressing the rising flow of unaccompanied alien children crossing our southwest border is an important priority of this Administration and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Secretary Johnson has already taken a number of steps to address this situation.  More details here.

Southwest Border Unaccompanied Alien Children (0-17 yr old) Apprehensions

Comparisons below reflect Fiscal Year 2015 to date (October 1, 2014 – July 31, 2015) compared to the same time period for Fiscal Year 2014.

CBP: 135 Unaccompanied Children Caught At U.S. Border Per Day in July

(CNSNews.com) – About 135 unaccompanied children, on average, were caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border each day in July, according to the latest data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

That is a monthly record for unaccompanied children (UC) apprehensions so far in Fiscal Year 2015.

According to the updated numbers, 30,862 unaccompanied minors have been apprehended at the border so far in FY 2015, which began on Oct. 1. The CBP’s latest numbers run through July 31.

CNSNews.com previously reported that 26,685 unaccompanied children had been apprehended as of June 30, as CBP data showed at the time. This means another 4,177 were caught during the month of July alone, making it the month with the highest number of UC apprehensions so far in FY 2015.

On Monday, Customs and Border Protection released a statement accompanying the release of its updated numbers, which were delayed by website glitches late last week. In the statement, CBP blamed the uptick of UC apprehensions on “poverty and violence” that “continue to worsen” in Central America, as well as smugglers who “often use misinformation about current immigration policies and practices” to convince people to cross into the United States illegally

“In July, we experienced a slight increase over June in the number of unaccompanied children and family units apprehended,” CBP said.

“Conditions in Central America continue to worsen, especially the poverty and violence in these countries that are the primary push factors. We are aware that smugglers, or ‘coyotes,’ often use misinformation about current immigration policies and practices to lure illegal migrants to employ their services,” the statement continued.

Despite the increase in apprehensions in July, border apprehensions “remain at near historic lows,” CBP added, promising to “continue to monitor the situation closely.”

Before July, the month of May held the record for the highest number of UC apprehensions in FY 2015 at 128 per day.

In addition to unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally, another 4,506 family units were apprehended during the month of July, CBP reports. So far this fiscal year, 29,407 family units have been apprehended at the Southwest border. According to the data, 918 of these are from countries other than Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico.

The total number of UC apprehensions so far in FY 2015 is down about 51 percent from the same time period in FY 2014. The total number of family unit apprehensions is down by about 53 percent.