Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

Undocumented Teachers in Your Child’s Classroom

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So, no U.S. citizens with teaching certificates? Perhaps the mission is to lower payroll costs and meet quotas? Or join unions and teach selected history…

Is there a state left that can define what citizenship is? Is there a state that is protecting ‘the pursuit of happiness’? Apparently teaching, a noble profession, or at least used to be is no longer noble.

For reference, Tashfeen Malik, the female San Bernardino killer could have been a teacher in your child’s classroom, she came into the United States under false documents…no documents? What is the difference?

NY to let undocumented workers become teachers

ALBANY — Undocumented immigrants in New York will be able to apply for teacher certifications and professional licenses, according to the state Board of Regents.

The board that oversees education policies in New York voted Wednesday to allow people who can’t get legal residency because of their parents’ immigration status to seek teacher certifications. They also will be able to apply for a license from among the 53 professions overseen by the state Education Department, including a variety of medical professions.

“These are young people who came to the U.S. as children,” state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said in a statement. “They are American in every way but immigration status. They’ve done everything right.  They’ve worked hard in school, some have even served in the military, but when it’s time to apply for a license, they’re told ‘Stop. That’s far enough.’ We shouldn’t close the door on their dreams.”

The Board of Regents pointed to a June 2012 policy by the Obama administration called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that allows individuals who came to the U.S. as children and meet certain guidelines to request consideration of “deferred immigration action” for two years that can be renewed.

The federal policy, the board said, applies to young people who usually get their immigration status from their parents, many of whom are undocumented.

“As a result, most of these individuals have no current mechanism to obtain legal residency, even if they have lived most of their lives in the U.S.” the Board of Regents said in a statement.

But people in the system are prohibited from obtaining teaching certification and licenses in certain professions, the board said, including pharmacy, dentistry and engineering.

The regulation by the Board of Regents will be finalized after a public-comment period.

Sen. Terrence Murphy, R-Yorktown, Westchester County, ripped the policy.

“Allowing lawbreakers to teach, or practice medicine, says a lot about how backwards our priorities truly are in New York,” Murphy said in a statement. “This is another example of why rule-making by unelected bureaucrats is what is ruining New York state. Will they next unilaterally enact free college tuition for illegal immigrants?”

He said New York doesn’t allow a military spouse with an equivalent license in another state to teach in New York, so “Elia should be focusing on reciprocity and interstate licensure for those who have earned it, instead of doing further harm to our already broken immigration system and rewarding lawbreakers.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he has yet to review the new education policy to determine its legality.

“It depends on how they write the policy, as to whether or not it’s legal and constitutional, and I haven’t seen anything,” Cuomo said when asked about the policy by reporters Thursday in Albany.

Democratic lawmakers praised the action. Democrats have been pushing for the Dream Act in New York, which would allow immigrants in the country illegally to access state financial aid for college. Republicans have opposed the measure.

“This is a tremendous win for New York’s students,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx, said in a statement. “The Assembly majority has always led the charge to expand opportunities for every student, and we have championed issues like the DREAM Act and greater investment in higher education to show our commitment to all of the families who have made New York their home.”

 

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CENTCOM Probe Includes Deleted Files

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House chairman: Military files, emails deleted amid probe

WASHINGTON (AP)— Personnel at U.S. Central Command have deleted files and emails amid allegations that intelligence assessments were altered to exaggerate progress against Islamic State militants, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday.

“We have been made aware that both files and emails have been deleted by personnel at CENTCOM and we expect that the Department of Defense will provide these and all other relevant documents to the committee,” Rep. Devin Nunes said at a hearing on worldwide threats facing the United States. Central Command oversees U.S. military activities in the Middle East.

A whistleblower whose position was not disclosed told the committee that material was deleted, according to a committee staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly disclose the information.

Navy Cmdr. Kyle Raines, a spokesman for CENTCOM, said the combatant command was fully cooperating with the Defense Department inspector general’s probe into the allegations.

“While it would be inappropriate to discuss the details of that investigation, I can tell you that as a matter of CENTCOM policy, all senior leader emails are kept in storage for record-keeping purposes, so such records cannot be deleted,” Raines said. It’s unclear if emails written by lower-level staff were also maintained.

Nunes, R-Calif., also said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed the committee on a survey indicating that more than 40 percent of Central Command analysts believe there are problems with the integrity of the intelligence analyses and process.

“To me, it seems like 40 percent of analysts who are concerned at CENTCOM — that’s just something that can’t be ignored,” Nunes said.

A senior intelligence official said that each year the DNI conducts a survey at all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to gain feedback on the integrity, standards and objectivity of the process used to analyze intelligence. In the most recent survey, conducted between August and October of last year, approximately 120 employees from CENTCOM responded to the survey. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose details of the internal survey.

A report on the survey issued in December 2015 indicated that 40 percent of those who responded at CENTCOM answered “yes” to the question: “During the past year, do you believe that anyone attempted to distort or suppress analysis on which you were working in the face of persuasive evidence?”

Asked whether he considered 40 percent an unusually high number, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee that he did.

Stewart said that while it would be favorable for all to “get closure on exactly the extent of this allegation,” he cannot control the pace of the watchdog’s investigation. He said that while the investigation proceeds, intelligence officials continue to look into ways to improve the process of producing the assessments, and he noted that the DIA’s ombudsman had looked into a particular incident.

The New York Times, which first disclosed the investigation, reported that the probe began after at least one civilian DIA analyst told authorities he had evidence that officials at Central Command were improperly reworking conclusions of assessments prepared for President Barack Obama and other top policymakers.

*** So this begs the question, what is the truth today on Islamic State, on Russia, Syria, North Korea, China, Iran or the thousands of terror groups? What is the final product including today with briefings? What does the media receive other than filtered reports? Who really DID order this suppression of intelligence data? Who is going to be the fall person? What was shared with foreign intelligence through normal daily collaboration?

Chilling Details of the Sony Hack, Reported

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These Are the Cyberweapons Used to Hack Sony

MotherBoard: In late November 2014, a mysterious group of hackers calling itself “God’sApstls” sent an ominous and jumbled email to a few high-level Sony Pictures executives.

“The compensation for it, monetary compensation we want,” the hackers wrote. “Pay the damage, or Sony Pictures will be bombarded as a whole.”

The executives at the Hollywood studio, which was about to release the controversial James Franco and Seth Rogen’s comedy The Interview, ignored the email. Just three days later, the hackers’ followed through with their threat and breached the studio’s systems, displaying a message on the computer screen of every employee: “Hacked by #GOP [Guardians of Peace].”

The hackers not only defaced employee’s computers, they then wiped their hard disks, crippling Sony Pictures for weeks, and costing the company $35 million in IT damages, according to its own estimate.

Now, more than a year later, several security researchers are still hunting down the hackers behind the attack, which the FBI officially identified as North Korean government-employed hackers. And despite the fact that the group is apparently still alive and well, a coalition of security researchers believes they can now disrupt them by exposing their extensive malware arsenal.

On Wednesday, a group of companies led by Novetta released a report detailing the Sony hackers’ long history of operations, as well as its large stock of malware. It’s perhaps the most detailed and extensive look at the group behind what might be the most infamous cyberattack ever.

Andre Ludwig, the senior technical director at Novetta Research and Interdiction Group, said that the investigation started from four hashes (values that uniquely identify a file) that the Department of Homeland security published after the attack. With those few identifying strings, and after months of sleuthing, the researchers found 2,000 malware samples, both from online malware portal VirusTotal, as well as from antivirus companies. Of those, they manually reviewed and catalogued 1,000, and were able to identify 45 unique malware strains, revealing that the Sony hackers had an arsenal more sophisticated and varied than previously thought.

The researchers hope that by shedding light on the hackers’ toolkit, the group, which the researchers called “Lazarus Group,” will be forced to adapt, spending resources and time, and perhaps even lose capabilities after antivirus companies and potential targets put up new defenses.

“There is no more shadows to hide in for these tools.”

“If all of a sudden you have antivirus signatures that detect and delete all the group’s arsenal, boom!” Jaime Blasco, the chief scientist at AlienVault Labs and one of the researchers who investigated the Sony hackers, told Motherboard. “They lose access to all the victims’ they got before.”

As Ludwig put it, “there is no more shadows to hide in for these tools.”

As it turns out, the hackers’ arsenal contains not only malware capable of wiping and destroying files on a hard disk like the Sony hack, but also Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) tools, tools that allow for remotely eavesdropping on a victim’s computer, and more, according to the report. The researchers tracked some of this tools in cyberattacks and espionage operations that go as far as back as 2009, perhaps even 2007, showing the hackers that hit Sony have a long history.

While others suspected this before, Blasco said that nobody demonstrated it as conclusively until now.

Novetta researchers and their partners, which include AlienVault and Kaspersky Lab, don’t get into saying who the hackers really are, but they also don’t question the FBI’s controversial claim that North Korea was behind the attack.

The main reason, LaMontagne explained, is that the new data they found discredits the alternative theories that the hackers were actually a disgruntled former employee or just an independent hacktivist group.

A former Sony system administrator is unlikely to have built more than 45 malware tools in the span of more than seven years, LaMontagne told me. And the same time, he added, it’s also unlikely that a previously unheard of hacktivist group would pop up, claim responsibility for such a high-profile attack, and then disappear.

“They’re extremely motivated, regimented, organized, and they can definitely execute.”

“We have no reason to dispute what the US government and other governments have asserted as the threat being North Korean,” Peter LaMontagne, the CEO of Novetta, told me.

And as it turns out, those hackers have been around for longer than anyone thought—wielding sophisticated weapons. This, according to the researchers, shows the group was much more seasoned than anyone believed.

“Their motivation and operational execution, it’s impressive,” Ludwig said. “They’re extremely motivated, regimented, organized, and they can definitely execute.”

Now that their methods and tools are exposed, however, the researchers hope that they won’t be as effective.

The head-scratcher is sanctions are only for the missile test?

US to present UN sanctions resolution on North Korea

United Nations (United States) (AFP) – The United States will on Thursday present a draft UN resolution toughening sanctions on North Korea after reaching agreement with China on a joint response to Pyongyang’s fourth nuclear test and a rocket launch.

The UN Security Council will meet at 2:00 pm (1900 GMT) to discuss the draft text detailing a new package of measures to punish North Korea, but there will be no immediate vote.

US Ambassador Samantha Power “intends to submit for consideration by the Security Council a draft sanctions resolution in response to the DPRK’s recent nuclear test and subsequent proscribed ballistic missile launch,” US spokesman Kurtis Cooper said, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name.

“We look forward to working with the Council on a strong and comprehensive response to the DPRK’s latest series of tests aimed at advancing their nuclear weapons program.”

UN diplomats said a vote was expected as early as Friday.

European Union: 10 Days to Collapse, $1.4 Trillion Euros

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EU has 10 days to see progress on migrant crisis or Schengen unravels: EU commissioner

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union has 10 more days to see significantly lower inflows of migrants and refugees from Turkey “or else there is risk the whole system will completely break down”, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said on Thursday.

Avramopoulos was speaking after the bloc’s justice and home affairs ministers met in Brussels on Thursday in an effort to put a European solution to the crisis in place. A growing number of EU states are resorting to unilateral border tightening, unraveling the continent’s free-travel Schengen zone.

The study estimated that under a worst case scenario, in which the reintroduction of controls at EU borders pushed import prices up three percent, the costs to the bloc’s largest economy Germany could be as much as 235 billion euros between 2016 and 2025, and those to France up to 244 billion.

At a minimum, with import prices rising one percent, the study showed that a breakdown of Schengen would cost the EU roughly 470 billion euros over the next decade.

The cost would climb to 1.4 trillion euros, or roughly 10 percent of annual gross domestic product (GDP) in the 28-member EU bloc, under the more dire scenario.

“If border controls are reinstated within Europe, already weak growth will come under additional pressure,” said Aart De Geus, president of Bertelsmann.

Schengen was established over 30 years ago and now counts 26 members, 22 of which are EU members. But the system of passport-free travel has come under severe pressure over the past half year due to a flood of migrants entering Europe, mainly from the Middle East and Africa.

To stem the tide and to ensure they have an overview of who is entering their territory, many countries within Schengen have reintroduced border controls in recent months, leading to fears the whole system could collapse.

Underscoring the urgency of the issue, Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told public broadcaster ARD on Sunday that EU member states, which have been squabbling for months over how to tackle the migrant crisis, must agree a common approach within two weeks if they wanted to avoid such a fate.

In addition to being a devastating symbolic setback for Europe, a collapse of Schengen would increase the amount of time it takes for goods to be transported across European borders, raising costs for companies and consumers.

The Bertelsmann study, conducted by Prognos AG, estimated that the minimum costs to Germany and France would be 77 billion euros and 80.5 billion euros, respectively, over the period to 2025.

A collapse of Schengen would also increase costs for countries outside the zone, with the combined burden on the United States and China over the next decade estimated at between 91 billion and 280 billion euros, according to the study.

More here.

*** EU’s migration system close to ‘complete breakdown’

EuroNews: The EU’s migration system is on the point of complete breakdown, according to a top European Commission official.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European Commissioner for migration, issued the stark warning after a meeting between EU interior ministers on Thursday.

inRead invented by Teads

“In the next ten days, we need tangible and clear results on the ground, otherwise there is a danger, there is a risk that the whole system will completely break down. There is no time for uncoordinated actions,” he told reporters in Brussels.

A number of EU countries have introduced border checks amid disagreements over how to best handle the huge influx of refugees and migrants into Europe.

Austria irked some EU officials by calling a mini summit with Western Balkan nations – without inviting Greece or Germany

The Austrian government has also set a daily cap on how migrants per day are allowed to enter the country, ignoring a warning from European Commission lawyers

“We have to recover our ability to act – and that will only be possible when the European external border is protected,” said Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the Austrian interior minister.

“If Greece stresses over and over again that it is not possible to protect the Greek border…we have to ask the question if it’s possible that the external border of the Schengen area stays in Greece.”

The Schengen area is a passport-free travel zone including 26 countries, of which 22 are EU member states.

But the migration crisis, which saw more than a million people reach Europe last year, has left some observers to question whether the whole system may be at risk.

The influx of migrants has exposed divisions between EU governments, which are trading accusations of blame and resulting beggar-thy-neighbour policies to tighten border controls.

Belgium became the seventh Schengen member on Wednesday to introduce border checks as it became clear that a court in Lille would order the partial demolition of the infamous Calais ‘Jungle’ refugee camp.

 

U.S. Poised to Take on China Aggressions

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The Pentagon Readies Backup Island in Case of Chinese Missile Onslaught

Threat prompts the U.S. military to prepare a fallback option

WiB: The United States can no longer count on its Pacific air bases to be safe from missile attack during a war with China. On the contrary, a 2015 paper from the influential RAND Corporation noted that in the worst case scenario, “larger and accurate attacks sustained over time against a less hardened posture could be devastating, causing large losses of aircraft and prolonged airfield closures.”

Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, due to its relative proximity, would be hardest hit. To up the stakes, China in September 2015 publicly revealed its DF-26 ballistic missile, which can strike Andersen Air Force Base in Guam — nearly 3,000 miles away — from the Chinese mainland. Andersen and Kadena are among the U.S. military’s largest and most important overseas bases.

Enter Tinian. The lush, small island near Guam is emerging as one of the Air Force’s backup landing bases. On Feb. 10, the flying branch announced that it selected Tinian as a divert airfield “in the event access to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, or other western Pacific locations is limited or denied.”

In the Pentagon’s 2017 budget request, it asked for $9 million to buy 17.5 acres of land “in support of divert activities and exercise intiatives,” the Saipan Tribune reported. In peacetime, the expanded Tinian airfield will host “up to 12 tanker aircraft and associated support personnel for divert operations,” according to the Air Force.

7637127318_661f4e4d60_kAbove — Tinian’s West Field in 1945. At top — Tinian seen from the cockpit of a C-130H. U.S. Air Force photo

Tinian is now a sleepy place.

During World War II, the 4th and 2nd Marine Divisions captured the island, which later based the B-29 Superfortresses Enola Gay and Bockscar which took off from Tinian’s North Field and dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An arsenal during the war, most of its airstrips are now abandoned and unused. The island’s other former air base, West Field, is a small, neglected international airport.

The Air Force first wanted Saipan for its airfield. Very close to Tinian, Saipan has 15 times the population, a larger airport and a harbor. But this proposal met opposition from local activists due to the effect on “coral, potable water, local transportation and socioeconomic factors on surrounding communities,” Stars and Stripes reported.

The opposition even included the pro-business Saipan Chamber of Commerce, which worried that Tinian’s rusty airport would miss out on the flood of Pentagon spending. Saipan’s airport is also overcrowded — with locals not happy about the prospect of hundreds of airmen flying in for military exercises lasting up to eight weeks ever year.

In a way, its a return to the past. The United States dispersed air bases to varying degrees — and in different parts of the world — during the Cold War, but as the threat of a Soviet missile attack evaporated and post-Persian Gulf War budget cuts hit hard in the 1990s, the trend shifted toward larger mega-bases that operate on economies of scale.

But dispersed bases are more survivable, RAND’s Alan Vick noted in his 2015 paper:

Dispersing aircraft across many bases creates redundancy in operating surfaces and facilities. This enhances basic safety of flight by providing bases for weather or inflight-emergency diverts. It also increases the number of airfields that adversary forces must monitor and can greatly complicate their targeting problem (in part by raising the prospect that friendly forces might move among several bases).

 

At the least, dispersal (because it increases the ratio of runways to aircraft) forces an attacker to devote considerably more resources to runway attacks than would be the case for a concentrated force. It also greatly increases construction and operating costs to spread aircraft across many major bases. To mitigate these costs, dispersal bases tend to have more-modest facilities and, at times, might be nothing more than airstrips.