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McCaul’s Homeland Terror Threat Snapshot

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McCaul Releases February Terror Threat Snapshot

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The February Terror Threat Snapshot was released today by Homeland Security Committee (HSC) Chairman Michael McCaul. The “snapshot” is a monthly Committee assessment of the growing threat America, the West, and the world face from ISIS and other Islamist terrorists.

Chairman McCaul: “The Islamist terror threat remains alarmingly high as recent arrests and terror plots demonstrate. ISIS recruits wage war in our communities, while thousands of deadly fighters trained in Syria stream back into the West – some of them infiltrating massive refugee flows. ISIS continues its global expansion on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the still-dangerous al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seizes greater territory in Yemen. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and the revitalized Iran-Assad-Hezbollah terror axis are further destabilizing the Syrian crisis in the absence of U.S. leadership. This year is on track to be as dangerous as – if not worse than – 2015 for the American homeland and our national security.”

Key takeaways in this month’s Terror Threat Snapshot include:

  • The Iranian regime gained access to $100 billion in cash from the disastrous nuclear deal and is poised for further economic relief that will fuel its global network of terror.
  • An increasing number of battle-hardened fighters from Europe are returning from jihadist training grounds. Nearly 2,000 Europeans – among an estimated 6,600 Western fighters who have traveled to Syria and Iraq – have snuck back into Europe. A French counterterrorism official recently warned, “We are moving towards a European 9/11: simultaneous attacks on the same day in several countries…We know the terrorists are working on this.”
  • Islamist terrorists are exploiting global refugee flows to infiltrate and target the West. Germany’s domestic intelligence chief recently said terrorists “have slipped in camouflaged or disguised as refugees. This is a fact that the security agencies are facing.” A suspected ISIS terror plotter arrested in Germany this week snuck into Europe posing as a refugee. The European Union also recently assessed there is a “real and imminent danger” of Syrian refugees inside Europe being radicalized and recruited by Islamist extremists.
  • ISIS and al Qaeda are expanding their sanctuaries from North Africa to South Asia. ISIS is reinforcing its foothold in Libya, where it has amassed as many as 6,500 fighters and controls coastal territory on the Mediterranean Sea. Al Qaeda is making further gains in Yemen and its key ally in Afghanistan controls more territory than it has at any point since 2001.
  • The Obama Administration has surged the release of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay despite alarming rates of recidivism. The intelligence community has assessed that 30 percent of Guantanamo detainees released are either known to have or suspected of having rejoined the fight. The potential transfer of detainees to the United States, prohibited under law, would also pose a threat to the American people.
  • The United States faces the highest Islamist terror threat environment since 9/11. ISIS is waging war here in the homeland, where there have been 21 ISIS-linked plots to launch attacks. Law enforcement authorities have arrested 81 ISIS-linked suspects, including six thus far in 2016.

TerrorThreatSnapshot_February_Social Media

The complete February Terror Threat Snapshot is available, here.

View the Committee’s interactive Terror Threat Snapshot map, here.

Obama, don’t let secrecy be your legacy

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Imagine what Congress does NOT know and then imagine what we, don’t know. Terrifying right?

Mr. Obama, don’t let secrecy be your legacy: Republican chairmen

Shrouding government action on everything from the environment to veterans health in darkness is a big step backwards.

USAToday: When President Obama took office, he vowed to run “the most transparent administration in history.” As his presidency draws to an end, those words would be laughable if the issue were not so serious.

At nearly every turn, this administration has blocked public disclosure and ignored almost every law intended to ensure open and accountable government.

Hillary Clinton’s private email server is just the latest, most public example. Numerous other incidents involve the concealment of documents, providing only partial information, slow-walking congressional requests and using private email accounts and secret meetings to avoid official records-keeping laws. These sorts of tactics have become common practice for this administration.

The most brazen examples occasionally get media attention: Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson created a fictitious email address under the alias name “Richard Windsor,” hiding official actions from public scrutiny. But more typically, the pervasive stonewalling does not make headlines.

Congress isn’t alone on the Obama administration’s enemies list. According to an analysis of federal data by the Associated Press (AP), the Obama administration set new records two years in a row for denying the media access to government files. According to the AP, “The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files.”

Moreover, in an unprecedented letter to several congressional committees, 47 inspectors general, who are the official watchdogs of federal agencies, complained that the Justice Department, EPA and others consistently obstruct their work by blocking or delaying access to critical information. Worse yet, the White House and Secretary Clinton refused to install an Inspector General during her tenure at the State Department.

It is the job of Congress and our agency watchdogs to ensure the federal government is efficient, effective and accountable to the American people. But time and time again, this administration has dismissed Americans’ right to know.

When Department of Veterans Affairs bureaucrats place themselves ahead of the veterans they are charged with serving, it’s Congress’ job to get answers. But VA’s stonewall tactics are interfering with this vital task. It’s been more than 18 months since the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs revealed VA’s delays in care crisis to the nation, yet the department is sitting on more than 140 requests for information from the committee regarding everything from patient wait times to disciplinary actions for failed employees. VA’s disregard for congressional oversight was on full display Oct. 21, when committee Democrats and Republicans voted unanimously to subpoena five bureaucrats VA had refused to make available to explain their role in a scheme that resulted in the misuse of more than $400,000 in taxpayer money. Later, at a Nov. 2 follow-up hearing, two of the subpoenaed VA employees invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

When the Internal Revenue Service improperly targets conservative organizations, it’s Congress’ job to get answers. When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives runs a failed and flawed sting operation intentionally providing hundreds of firearms to Mexican cartels, it’s Congress’ job to get answers. When events surrounding terrorist attacks in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 are hidden from the public, it’s Congress’ job to get answers.

But Congress cannot do its job when an administration refuses to turn over information. That’s why Congress has increasingly resorted to the power of the pen and has issued numerous legally-binding subpoenas to various Obama Administration agencies, including the Department of Justice, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Management and Budget, among others.

Whether it is the necessity of holding agency heads in contempt of Congress or pursuing civil litigation to gain access to clearly relevant material or the improper invocation of executive privilege or a new “confidential communications” privilege this administration made up out of whole cloth, Congress has been forced to spend far too much time and resources gaining access to documents which it is clearly entitled to.

 

But perhaps the honor of the least transparent agency in the federal government belongs to the EPA.

Everyone wants clean air and water. But Americans want environmental regulations to be based on sound science, not science  fiction or radical political manifestos. When the EPA refused to release the data it uses to justify its proposed air regulations, the historically bipartisan House Science Committee was compelled to issue its first subpoena in 21 years to retrieve the information.

Last year, the House passed the Secret Science Reform Act of 2015 to require the EPA to base its regulations on publicly-available data, not secret science. This allows independent scientists the opportunity to evaluate EPA’s claims and check their work.  Who could argue against using open and transparent science to support regulation? Answer: the Obama administration.

It’s not surprising that the non-partisan Center for Effective Government gave the EPA a grade of “D” in its most recent report for poor performance in providing access to information.

This administration has created an unprecedented culture of secrecy that starts at the top and extends into almost every agency. While Congress is being thwarted in its efforts at oversight, it is really the American people who lose when those entrusted to enforce the law believe and act as if they are above it. It’s time to come clean, Mr. President. Don’t let a lack of transparency be your legacy.

Was bin Ladin in the IRS Files for Obamacare?

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I remember very well saying a few years ago that any foreigner, including Usama bin Ladin could get Obamacare benefits. Never understood how true my conclusions were. Further, there was a movement in the House to impeach the IRS Commissioner. Then we learned that more hard drives have been destroyed, others were found in storage and billions in refunds went to a handful of same mail address locations in obscure places outside the United States.

Not only is Obamacare a failure itself, but it really does not become full law until 2017 and it is a law we can no longer begin to afford when the IRS cant recover bogus subsidies to illegals.

Fasten your seat belt.

Senate report: Illegal immigrants benefited from up to $750M in ObamaCare subsidies

FNC: Illegal immigrants and individuals with unclear legal status wrongly benefited from up to $750 million in ObamaCare subsidies and the government is struggling to recoup the money, according to a new Senate report obtained by Fox News.

The report, produced by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, examined Affordable Care Act tax credits meant to defray the cost of insurance premiums. It found that as of June 2015, “the Administration awarded approximately $750 million in tax credits on behalf of individuals who were later determined to be ineligible because they failed to verify their citizenship, status as a national, or legal presence.”

The review found the credits went to more than 500,000 people – who are either illegal immigrants or whose legal status was unclear due to insufficient records.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services confirmed to FoxNews.com on Monday that 471,000 customers with 2015 coverage failed to produce proper documentation on their citizenship or immigration status on time – but stressed that this does not necessarily mean they’re ineligible.

“Lack of verification does not mean an individual is ineligible for financial assistance, but only that a Marketplace did not receive sufficient information to verify eligibility in the time period outlined in the law,” CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said.

The Senate report also accused the administration of lacking a solid plan to get that money back – and predicted that in the end, the IRS will be “unable to fully recoup the funds.”

“The information provided to the Committee by the IRS and HHS reveals a troubling lack of coordination between the two agencies … and demonstrates that the IRS and HHS neglected to consider how they would recover these wasteful payments,” the report says.

Under the law, the feds can dole out these payments on a temporary basis if a recipient’s legal status is unclear, but are supposed to cut off funding and coverage if the recipient does not later come up with the paperwork. Up to a half-million “ineligible” people, according to the report, applied in this way — with their credits paid in advance to the insurers. The IRS, though, is supposed to get overpayments back from the individuals themselves.

The Senate report, based on a review launched by committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., derisively describes this approach as “pay and chase.”

In other words, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pays credits and subsidies to the insurance companies on behalf of the applicants – and the feds then “chase” after any overpayments to ineligible people once they are discovered.

“This ‘pay and chase’ model has potentially cost taxpayers approximately $750 million,” the report says. The 500,000 individuals in question have been removed from coverage, according to the findings, as the government seeks to get the money back.

The Senate report says the IRS and HHS initially failed to coordinate on a plan for recouping funds, and claimed that a subsequent plan from the IRS to recoup the money is still “ineffective and insufficient.”

In a July letter to Johnson, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen assured that the agency is “committed to identifying and efficiently addressing” improper payments. He reiterated that anyone “not lawfully present” who enrolls for ObamaCare coverage “must repay” the advance premium credit payments, and would be breaking the law if they don’t.

Obama Going for it All Including Moon Shot

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There are organizations out there trying to get some great bills passed. Too bad they wont affect Obama himself. But when it comes to Congress wanting a pay raise, how about a Fiscal Responsibility Act first?

Obama’s go-for-broke budget

Congress has already dismissed the proposal, sight unseen.

Politico: President Barack Obama may be a lame duck, but his aggressively liberal final budget request coming Tuesday will show he’s far from a mute one.

Even as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders quarrel over who’s a “progressive” and who’s not, the president will propose a sweepingly progressive policy agenda that includes a $10-a-barrel oil tax, an expensive Medicaid expansion, a $4 billion initiative to promote computer science in public schools and the first down payment on a “moon shot” research initiative to cure cancer led by Vice President Joe Biden.

Never mind that Congress, in a break with tradition, said it won’t even hold hearings on this year’s budget request. That’s because the request “will continue to focus on new spending proposals” instead of tackling “our $19 trillion in debt,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) said last week. Complete details on proposed total spending, projected deficits and other information will be released Tuesday morning.

Given Congress’ sight-unseen dismissal, the president’s go-for-broke strategy makes sense, said Peter Orszag, who was White House budget director during Obama’s first term and director of the Congressional Budget Office before that.

“If the document is legislatively irrelevant,” Orszag said, “you might as well use it to expand the policy dialogue and lay out sensible proposals even if they will not become law this year or next.” This year’s budget proposal “lays the groundwork for Democrats to refine and embrace a more ambitious legislative agenda over time.”

Lame-duck presidential budget requests nearly always receive catcalls from Congress, especially when it’s controlled by the opposite party.

In February 2008, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi scored President George W. Bush’s “misguided” final budget for cuts in health care and energy assistance and a too-large budget deficit. The final product was a mashup from Congress, the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration. It yielded a $1.4 trillion deficit — the largest in U.S. history, in large part because of the financial crisis. The current deficit is an estimated $544 billion.

President Bill Clinton’s final budget, submitted in February 2000, was less contentious, in part because it adhered to a 1997 agreement with the Republican-controlled Congress on debt reduction. Clinton had the opposite problem: His budget’s spending levels were judged too high, and its budget surplus — which ended up being $1.3 billion — drew sharp criticism from Republicans, including candidate Bush, who wanted to return it to the public in the form of tax cuts. The novel problem of a budget surplus proved short-lived; it vanished the following year, and hasn’t been heard from since.

Where Obama’s lame-duck policy agenda differs, suggests presidential historian Michael Beschloss, is in the scope of its ambition. “Modern presidents have tended to focus on a particular project” in their last year, Beschloss said — “for instance, Eisenhower and Reagan trying to wind down the Cold War, or Johnson trying to find peace in Vietnam.” But Obama is different. He’s “looking for ways in his final year to pursue an agenda on many fronts” in hopes not only of “getting something done” but also “nudging his successor to do certain things.”

It is the policy, perhaps, of a departing president who — given this year’s unusually chaotic GOP primary race — feels more confident than most that his party will keep the White House.

The boldest of all the budget proposals is the $10-a-barrel crude oil tax. Energy taxes are always a hard sell — nobody’s raised the federal gasoline tax, for instance, since 1993 — and although consumers may be less resistant because of low pump prices, oil companies will be more so because falling gas prices have them reducing exploration and laying off workers.

The revenues would go not toward deficit reduction, but toward more green forms of transportation such as subways, buses and light rail. House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady immediately denounced the plan as a “horrible idea” and a “waste of time,” and even some congressional Democrats will likely oppose it. But environmentalists are greeting it as an overdue down payment on reducing emissions that contribute to climate change. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said it “underscores the inevitable transition away from oil.”

The president’s proposed Medicaid expansion would extend the Affordable Care Act’s promise of three years’ full federal funding for ACA-created Medicaid coverage, which expires this year. The proposal is an inducement to the 19 states that continue not to participate in the program, which was created for families whose incomes were too low to qualify for federal subsidies to purchase private insurance plans through Obamacare exchanges.

Under the budget proposal, states would still get only three years’ full federal funding, after which they would gradually have to pick up 10 percent of program costs. The carrot is that they would no longer have to act by the end of 2016. A stick originally envisioned by the ACA’s authors — that states could not refuse the ACA Medicaid expansion without withdrawing from Medicaid entirely — was itself swatted away in the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling that otherwise upheld Obamacare. The new extension is a rebuke of sorts to House Republicans who have voted repeatedly to repeal Obamacare and who last month sent to the White House a repeal bill that for the first time passed both the House and Senate — which the president promptly vetoed.

The budget’s new K-12 computer science program isn’t intrinsically partisan — both Democrats and Republicans favor enhancing school kids’ computer skills, not to mention big tech companies like Microsoft. But its $4 billion price tag raises GOP hackles, as does the notion of attaching more strings to federal aid to schools. “Rather than calling for additional federal programs or new funding streams,” an aide to Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) complained, “the president can help students by using his bully pulpit to highlight states working in innovative ways to help their children succeed.”

The “cancer moon shot” is similarly uncontroversial in theory; after all, it was President Richard Nixon, a Republican, who proposed waging a federal “war on cancer” back in 1971. But the down payment of nearly $1 billion that the White House seeks is high, and congressional Republicans won’t like that the plan would largely bypass the appropriations process and give Vice President Joe Biden a relatively free hand in allocating some of the funds. In addition, the plan would compel medical researchers to quicken the pace at which they share data, an idea that is already receiving considerable pushback in academia. Jeffrey Dazen, editor of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine, publicly decried the use of medical research by “data parasites.”

The likelihood of legislative action on any of these agenda items is virtually nil.

Still, observes Rutgers historian David Greenberg, author of a new book about presidential spin: “No one wants to admit that the last year will be an uneventful one.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obamas-radical-final-budget-218944#ixzz3zbtYLPAO

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obamas-radical-final-budget-218944#ixzz3zbtQUHcX

 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obamas-radical-final-budget-218944#ixzz3zbtHTeC9

 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obamas-radical-final-budget-218944#ixzz3zbt9O7NB

 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obamas-radical-final-budget-218944#ixzz3zbt2eChp

The DoJ Hacked, DHS Files Compromised

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Hackers leaked DHS staff records, 200GB of files are in their hands

A hacker accessed an employee’s email account at the Department of Justice and stole 200GB of files including records of 9,000 DHS staffers and 20,000 FBI employees.

SecurityAffairs: Yesterday, the data related a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff directory were leaked online, a Twitter account shared the link to an archive containing 9,355 names.

The responsible for the data leakage first contacted Motherboard to share the precious archive.

Each record of the DHS Staff Directory includes name, title, email address, and phone number.

Going deep in the archive it is possible to note that it includes information of DHS security specialists, program analysts, InfoSec and IT and also 100 employees with a title “Intelligence”.

The same Twitter account has announced later the imminent release of an additional data dump containing 20,000 FBI employees.

DHS firewall

Are the records authentic?

Motherboard that obtained the archive reached the operations center of the FBI, and in one case the individual who pick up the phone presented himself with the same name associated with that number in the archive. A similar circumstance occurred with a DHS employee, Motherboard so confirmed that the information is legit.

Which is the source of data?

According to Motherboard, a hacker accessed an employee’s email account at the Department of Justice. As proof, the hacker sent the email message to Motherboard’s contributor Joseph Cox directly from the compromised account.

“A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.” wrote Cox in a blog post.

“The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.”

The hacker first tried to use the compromised credentials to access a DOJ staff portal, but without success, then he called the department directly and obtained the access through social engineering techniques.

The hacker accessed the DoJ intranet where the database is hosted, then he downloaded around the, out of 1TB that he had access to.

“I HAD access to it, I couldn’t take all of the 1TB,” the hacker told to MotherBoard.

The hackers confirmed his intention to release the rest of the data in the near future.Which is the motivation behind the attack?

It is not clear at the moment why the hacker released the archive, surely it’s not financially motivated. The hacker only left the following message when has leaked the data-

“This is for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza, This is for the child that is searching for an answer…” which are the verses of “Long Live Palestine”

The only certainty right now is that similar incidents are becoming too frequent, apparently the government staff is not properly trained on the main cyber threats or the hacking technique. Similar incidents show the lack of knowledge on the most basic security measures.
Whenever a hacker leaks so sensitive data, I think the number of his peers who had access to the same information with the intent to use them in other attacks or resell them, perhaps to a foreign government.

Pierluigi Paganini

*** As a reminder, in 2014 a much more dangerous hack intrusion happened at the DHS:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alerted critical infrastructure operators to recent breaches within the sector – including the hack of a U.S. public utility that was vulnerable to brute-force attacks.

This week, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT), a subgroup of DHS, revealed information about the incidents in a newsletter (PDF).

According to ICS-CERT, industrial control systems were compromised in two, new incidents: one, involving the hack of an unnamed public utility, and another scenario where a control system server was remotely accessed by a “sophisticated threat actor.”

After investigating the public utility hack, ICS-CERT found that the system’s authentication mechanism was susceptible to brute-force attacks – where saboteurs routinely run through a list of passwords or characters to gain access to targeted systems. The control system used a simple password mechanism, the newsletter revealed.

In