Category Archives: NSA Spying

Impeach Jeh Johnson and Then Dis-Bar the Man

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And the 20 others including the lawyers !!!

There is even a Federal employee handbook, this matter begins on page 74. Let the Freedom of Information requests begin and call Judicial Watch, as the Inspector General refuses to comment.

Homeland Security Leaders Bent Rules on Private E-Mail

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Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, and 28 of his senior staffers have been using private Web-based e-mail from their work computers for over a year, a practice criticized by cyber security experts and advocates of government transparency.

The department banned such private e-mail on DHS computers in April 2014. Top DHS officials were granted informal waivers, according to a top DHS official who said that he saw the practice as a national security risk. The official said the exempt staffers included Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, chief of staff Christian Marrone and general counsel Stevan Bunnell.

Asked about the exceptions on Monday, the DHS press secretary, Marsha Catron, confirmed that some officials had been exempted. “Going forward,” she said, “all access to personal webmail accounts has been suspended.”

Future exceptions are to be granted only by the chief of staff. Catron said that a “recent internal review” had found the chief of staff and some others were unaware that they had had access to webmail.

The DHS rule, articulated last year after hackers first breached the Office of Personnel Management, states: “The use of Internet Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL) or other personal email accounts is not authorized over DHS furnished equipment or network connections.” Johnson and the 28 other senior officials sought and received informal waivers at different times over the past year, the official said. Catron said exceptions were decided on a case-by-case basis by the chief information officer, Luke McCormack. DHS employees are permitted to use their government e-mail accounts for limited personal use.

Erica Paulson, a spokeswoman for the DHS Office of the Inspector General, said that the office does not confirm or deny the existence of any open investigations.

It remains unclear whether Johnson and the other officials conducted DHS business on their private webmail accounts. (The DHS spokeswoman said “the use of personal email for official purposes is strictly prohibited.”) If even one work-related e-mail was sent or received, they could be in violation of regulations and laws governing the preservation of federal records, said Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

“I suppose it is remotely conceivable that in seeking a waiver, 20 or more government officials could all be wishing to talk to each other through a Web-based e-mail service about such matters as baseball games or retirement luncheons they might be attending,” he said. “But it is simply not reasonable to assume that in seeking a waiver that the officials involved were only contemplating using a commercial network for personal (that is, non-official) communications.”

In March, the New York Times reported that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton had used a private e-mail server exclusively to conduct her State Department business. Clinton said she had not violated any transparency laws because the Federal Records Act states that officials are permitted to use private e-mail, so long as they forward on any government-related communications to their government accounts so they can be archived and used to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

In November 2014, the Federal Records Act was amended to impose a 20-day limit on the time an official has to transfer records from private e-mail to government systems. Clinton transferred over 30,000 e-mails from her private server to the State Department in early 2015. She deleted another 30,000 e-mails on her private server, claiming they were all strictly personal.

It is unclear how Johnson and the other officials used their webmail accounts, and whether they forwarded any messages about government business to their official accounts.

Johnson has used his personal Gmail for government business at least once, before he was head of DHS; that was disclosed during the scandal that led to David Petraeus’s resignation as CIA director. The Justice Department is fighting to keep Johnson from having to give a video deposition in that case.

Anne Weismann, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability and a former Justice Department official dealing with FOIA litigation, said that even by seeking the waivers at DHS, Johnson and the other officials created at least an appearance and opportunity for impropriety.

“How could they possibly justify exempting the secretary and the most senior people from the policy? You are allowing the people who are most likely to create e-mails that are most worthy of preservation to bypass the system that would ensure their preservation,” she said.

The issue of top government officials using private e-mail is widespread and the rules barring such practices are rarely enforced, said Weismann. “What they really want is to have the ability to have off-the-record discussions,” she said. “It creates problems for record keeping and it puts it out of the reach of FOIA.”

Cyber security experts said that allowing the use of commercial webmail on otherwise secure computers increases the risk that those computers could be penetrated by hackers, foreign intelligence services or malware. Webmail messages are often stored without encryption, leaving them vulnerable to theft by anyone who gains access to the webmail server.

“The fundamental issue is that these commercial webmail systems were not designed with the threat in mind that is present when government officials are using consumer tools,” said Johannes B. Ullrich, dean of research for the SANS Technology Institute.

The threat is not just theoretical. In 2008, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account was hacked by someone who used a password reset function to gain access, he said.

There’s also a moral hazard.

“If there are just certain individuals being exempted here, it’s setting a bad precedent for the rest of the department. If you say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t apply to everybody over a certain pay grade,’ the idea of these controls gets diminished and people look for workarounds,” said Ullrich.

Aside from the legal risk and the national security risk, exceptions to the department’s policies reinforce the narrative that the Obama administration lets senior officials skirt the rules, including by keeping their communications secret.  The pattern was present in the previous administration as well, but after the OPM hacks and the deletion of Clinton’s e-mails, it is widely criticized and hard to defend.

UN Voted FOR the Iran Deal Before Congress

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Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter is on a 3 country tour in the Middle East, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. War gaming on some plan?

This cannot end well.

Israeli Defense Force:

The IDF is seeking government commitment to a multi-year defense spending plan – a commitment that has been absent for the past several years – as it prepares to deal with the possibility of a covert Iranian attempt to break through to nuclear weapons production, a senior defense source said on Sunday.

The source said the IDF needs to assume that its most severe “reference scenarios” regarding Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS will come true, in order to correctly use the coming years to reshape the military, improve training, and make cost cutting reforms that include the shedding of 100,000 reservists and 5000 career soldiers.

The multi-year budget commitment from the government –  absent for the past several years – will be necessary to reshape the military and improve training to meet those challenges while at the same time, implementing cutting reforms that include the shedding of 100,000 reservists and 5000 career soldiers.

Other proposed changes include military restructuring to create specialized war fighting and border security divisions that do not overlap one another.

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council on Monday unanimously endorsed the landmark nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers and authorized a series of measures leading to the end of U.N. sanctions that have hurt Iran’s economy.

But the measure also provides a mechanism for U.N. sanctions to “snap back” in place if Iran fails to meet its obligations.

The resolution had been agreed to by the five veto-wielding council members, who along with Germany negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran. It was co-sponsored by all 15 members of the Security Council.

Under the agreement, Iran’s nuclear program will be curbed for a decade in exchange for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of relief from international sanctions. Many key penalties on the Iranian economy, such as those related to the energy and financial sectors, could be lifted by the end of the year.

The document specifies that seven resolutions related to U.N. sanctions will be terminated when Iran has completed a series of major steps to curb its nuclear program and the International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded that “all nuclear material in Iran remains in peaceful activities.”

All provisions of the U.N. resolution will terminate in 10 years, including the snap back provision.

But last week the six major powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — and the European Union sent a letter, seen by The Associated Press, informing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that they have agreed to extend the snap back mechanism for an additional five years. They asked Ban to send the letter to the Security Council.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said the nuclear deal doesn’t change the United States’ “profound concern about human rights violations committed by the Iranian government or about the instability Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program, from its support for terrorist proxies to repeated threats against Israel to its other destabilizing activities in the region.”

She urged Iran to release three “unjustly imprisoned” Americans and to determine the whereabouts of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who vanished in 2007.

“But denying Iran a nuclear weapon is important not in spite of these other destabilizing actions but rather because of them,” Power said.

She quoted President Barack Obama saying the United States agreed to the deal because “an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be far more destabilizing and far more dangerous to our friends and to the world.”

Embassies Open Today, the Cuban Flag Flies in DC

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A cop killer who fled to Cuba is not part of the deal that the White House or the State Department with the normalized relations with Cuba.

Despite New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s aggravated pleas to President Obama to have Assata Shakur extradited back to the United States, Cuba’s head of North American affairs, Josefina Vidal, has denied that request.

Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA).  She became the first woman to ever be placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list for her involvement in a 1973 shootout in which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed. Shakur was eventually sentenced to life in prison in 1977; however, she managed to flee the cement walls of the penitentiary in 1979, and later fled to Cuba where she was granted political asylum.

Shakur currently remains on the FBI’s most-wanted list and has a bounty of $2 million offered for her capture.  Since President Obama has been attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, NJ Governor Chris Christie has adamantly requested that Obama demand Shakur be extradited to America as a part of Cuba and the United States’ new beginning.  However, Josefina Vidal has denied Cuba’s agreement to hand over Shakur.

“We’ve explained to the U.S. government in the past that there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted political asylum,” Vidal stated.  “There’s no extradition treaty in effect between Cuba and the U.S.  We’ve reminded the U.S. government that in its country they’ve given shelter to dozens and dozens of Cuban citizens.  Some of them accused of horrible crimes, some accused of terrorism, murder and kidnapping, and in every case the U.S. government has decided to welcome them.”

After 54 Years From Stars and Stripes:

The last time the United States and Cuba had diplomatic relations, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” topped the charts and a new dance craze, the Twist, was sweeping the country.

The past half-century of U.S.-Cuba relations has been a roller-coaster ride of high hopes for improvement at times, but low points that included mutual acts of terrorism, separation of Cuban families, CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro, the most dangerous days of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U.S.-sponsored invasion, Cuba’s alignment with the old Soviet bloc, confiscation of U.S. property, the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes by Cuban MiGs, and countless human tragedies on a smaller scale.

The US and Cuba will re-establish diplomatic relations Monday and their embassies will reopen for the first time in 54 years.

On Monday morning, the Cuban government will raise its flag over the its old limestone building on Washington’s 16th Street Northwest, which has been a Cuban Embassy, a Cuban Interests Section in the absence of diplomatic relations, and now again an embassy. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez will be the highest-ranking Cuban diplomat to visit the State Department in decades when he meets with Secretary of State John Kerry in the afternoon.

For the United States, it begins a new chapter of engagement with Cuba. Kerry plans to travel to Havana later this summer to inaugurate the U.S. Embassy. The interests section will be elevated to embassy status Monday, but US flag won’t fly until Kerry’s arrival.

The respective mission chiefs in Havana and Washington will become chargés d’affaires at the new embassies until ambassadors are named, and new rules for operations at the embassies will take effect.

Even as the Cuban flag is hoisted in Washington, a difficult relationship between the United States and Cuba is expected to remain just that — difficult — but with the difference that the two sides are now talking more freely with each other to work through the many issues that still separate them.

“That will include America’s enduring support for universal values, like freedom of speech and assembly, and the ability to access information,” President Barack Obama said on July 1 when he announced the date for restoring diplomatic ties.

“When the United States shuttered our embassy in 1961, I don’t think anyone expected that it would be more than half a century before it reopened,” Obama said. The old policy of isolation, he said, “shuts America out of Cuba’s future, and it only makes life worse for the Cuban people.”

Roberta Jacobson, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs –– who was the lead U.S. negotiator in normalization talks –– said there is an “obvious groundswell of support” among Cubans on the island for the new policy. But during an appearance at the Wilson Center in Washington in June, Jacobson said Cubans’ very high expectations “must be managed. Because let’s face it, things aren’t going to change overnight.”

The United States officially broke relations with Cuba on Jan. 3, 1961, but they had begun to turn sour within six months of New Year’s Day 1959, when the Cuban Revolution triumphed.

By August 1960, Cuba had expropriated all U.S.-owned industrial and agricultural holdings, and nationalized all U.S. banks. That fall, Eisenhower had begun to phase in the U.S. trade embargo, and in December he eliminated Cuba’s sugar quota for the next quarter. In the last months of 1960, as Cuba complained of air raids coming from the United States and, plans to invade the island were already under discussion in Washington.

Months before Eisenhower decided to break with Cuba, personnel at the U.S. Embassy had been instructed to cut down to two suitcases in case a hasty departure was necessary, said Wayne Smith, then a junior officer at the embassy and later the chief of mission in 1977 when the United States established an interests section in the old embassy building.

“Things had been going so badly; it was inevitable,” Smith said. “It was almost a relief. Relations had been so strained and so bitter and we knew it was coming. But I remember thinking, ‘Let’s hope it won’t be for too long.’”

The tipping point came on Jan. 2, 1961, when Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, charged that the United States was planning to invade, and Fidel Castro gave a speech in which he denounced the U.S. Embassy as a “nest of spies” and demanded that the staff be reduced to 11 people, including U.S. diplomats, Marine guards and local employees.

The next day the White House broke off relations with Cuba and asked the Swiss government to represent it in dealings with the island. That representation will end on Monday. Since 1977, when the United States once again sent diplomats to Havana, there hasn’t been much of a role for the Swiss. But from 1961 and 1977, the Swiss ambassador was the U.S. man in Havana.

Because the Swiss were overseeing U.S. interests in Cuba, the old U.S. Embassy building never really closed.

There was only that Swiss representation in Havana four months later during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the height of the Cold War. Those 13 days in October would be among the most perilous in the U.S.-Cuban relationship, but for most of the next five decades U.S.-Cuba relations remained rocky.

That is until Dec. 17, when Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced an opening — the fruit of 18 months of secret negotiations — that included re-establishing diplomatic relations and converting the interests sections into full-fledged embassies.

Rodriguez, who will arrive in Washington Sunday, will lead a 30-person delegation that includes former National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, National Assembly Vice President Ana Maria Mari Machado and Josefina Vidal, Jacobson’s Cuban counterpart in the normalization talks.

Other delegation members will be Havana historian Eusebio Leal, members of the Council of State, Ramon Sanchez Parodi, the first head of the Cuban Interests Section; singer Silvio Rodriguez, artist Alexis Leiva (Kcho) who provides a free public Wi-Fi hotspot at his studio, and other figures from the Cuban art and literary world.

Receiving Social Security Benefits Mentally Unfit for Guns

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There are a few databases that are mined for background checks for those applying to own a weapon, never before has the background check include being a Social Security beneficiary.

If Obama has his way and he often does, he considers receiving social security benefits as being a challenge to your mental capacity for failing to manage your own financial affairs.    LET THAT SINK IN

Obama is about attaching a new label to those who have protections under the 2nd Amendment to own a weapon, yet in his psyche, you are mentally unfit already. Next if you are receiving VA benefits, you are classified as unfit to own a weapon.  OH WAIT…

Yes, there are countless people out there that are mentally unfit and should not own a weapon and there are those that just steal weapons from others. But checking the social security database and then government makes the judgment?

Obama pushes to extend gun background checks to Social Security

LA Times:

Seeking tighter controls over firearm purchases, the Obama administration is pushing to ban Social Security beneficiaries from owning guns if they lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs, a move that could affect millions whose monthly disability payments are handled by others.

The push is intended to bring the Social Security Administration in line with laws regulating who gets reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, which is used to prevent gun sales to felons, drug addicts, immigrants in the country illegally and others.

A potentially large group within Social Security are people who, in the language of federal gun laws, are unable to manage their own affairs due to “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”

There is no simple way to identify that group, but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.

If Social Security, which has never participated in the background check system, uses the same standard as the VA, millions of its beneficiaries would be affected. About 4.2 million adults receive monthly benefits that are managed by “representative payees.”

The move is part of a concerted effort by the Obama administration after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., to strengthen gun control, including by plugging holes in the background check system.

But critics — including gun rights activists, mental health experts and advocates for the disabled — say that expanding the list of prohibited gun owners based on financial competence is wrongheaded.

Though such a ban would keep at least some people who pose a danger to themselves or others from owning guns, the strategy undoubtedly would also include numerous people who may just have a bad memory or difficulty balancing a checkbook, the critics argue.

“Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe,” said Dr. Marc Rosen, a Yale psychiatrist who has studied how veterans with mental health problems manage their money. “They are very different determinations.”

Steven Overman, a 30-year-old former Marine who lives in Virginia, said his case demonstrates the flaws of judging gun safety through financial competence.

After his Humvee hit a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury that weakened his memory and cognitive ability.

The VA eventually deemed him 100% disabled and after reviewing his case in 2012 declared him incompetent, making his wife his fiduciary.

Upon being notified that he was being reported to the background check system, he gave his guns to his mother and began working with a lawyer to get them back.

Overman grew up hunting in Wisconsin. After his return from Iraq, he found solace in target shooting. “It’s relaxing to me,” he said. “It’s a break from day-to-day life. It calms me down.”

Though his wife had managed their financial affairs since his deployment, Overman said he has never felt like he was a danger to himself or others.

“I didn’t know the VA could take away your guns,” he said.

The background check system was created in 1993 by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, named after White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was partially paralyzed after being shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan.

The law requires gun stores to run the names of prospective buyers through the computerized system before every sale.

The system’s databases contain more than 13 million records, which include the names of felons, immigrants in the U.S. illegally, fugitives, dishonorably discharged service members, drug addicts and domestic abusers.

State agencies, local police and federal agencies are required to enter names into the databases, but the system has been hampered by loopholes and inconsistent reporting since its launch.

The shortcomings became clear in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, in which Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people. Cho had been declared mentally ill by a court and ordered to undergo outpatient treatment, but at the time the law did not require that he be added to the databases.

Congress expanded the reporting requirements, but Social Security determined it was not required to submit records, according to LaVenia LaVelle, an agency spokeswoman.

After 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, 20 children and six school staffers in Newtown in 2012, President Obama vowed to make gun control a central issue of his second term.

The effort fell flat. Congress ultimately rejected his proposals for new gun control legislation.

But among 23 executive orders on the issue was one to the Department of Justice to ensure that federal agencies were complying with the existing law on reporting to the background check system.

One baseline for other agencies is the VA, which has been entering names into the system since the beginning. About 177,000 veterans and survivors of veterans are in the system, according to VA figures.

The VA reports names under a category in gun control regulations known as “adjudicated as a mental defective,” terminology that derives from decades-old laws. Its only criterion is whether somebody has been appointed a fiduciary.

More than half of the names on the VA list are of people 80 or older, often suffering from dementia, a reasonable criterion for prohibiting gun ownership.

But the category also includes anybody found by a “court, board, commission or other lawful authority” to be lacking “the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs” for a wide variety of reasons.

The agency’s efforts have been criticized by a variety of groups.

Rosen, the Yale psychiatrist, said some veterans may avoid seeking help for mental health problems out of fear that they would be required to give up their guns.

Conservative groups have denounced the policy as an excuse to strip veterans of their gun rights.

Republicans have introduced legislation in the last several sessions of Congress to change the policy. The Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, now under consideration in the House, would require a court to determine that somebody poses a danger before being reported to the background check system.

Social Security would generally report names under the same “mental defective” category. The agency is still figuring out how that definition should be applied, LaVelle said.

About 2.7 million people are now receiving disability payments from Social Security for mental health problems, a potentially higher risk category for gun ownership. An addition 1.5 million have their finances handled by others for a variety of reasons.

The agency has been drafting its policy outside of public view. Even the National Rifle Assn. was unaware of it.

Told about the initiative, the NRA issued a statement from its chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox, saying: “If the Obama administration attempts to deny millions of law-abiding citizens their constitutional rights by executive fiat, the NRA stands ready to pursue all available avenues to stop them in their tracks.”

Gun rights advocates are unlikely to be the only opponents.

Ari Ne’eman, a member of the National Council on Disability, said the independent federal agency would oppose any policy that used assignment of a representative payee as a basis to take any fundamental right from people with disabilities.

“The rep payee is an extraordinarily broad brush,” he said.

Since 2008, VA beneficiaries have been able to get off the list by filing an appeal and demonstrating that they pose no danger to themselves or others.

But as of April, just nine of 298 appeals have been granted, according to data provided by the VA. Thirteen others were pending, and 44 were withdrawn after the VA overturned its determination of financial incompetence.

Overman is one of the few who decided to appeal.

He is irritable and antisocial, he said, but not dangerous. “I’ve never been suicidal,” he said. “To me that solves nothing.”

More than a year and a half after Overman filed his challenge, the VA lifted its incompetence ruling, allowing his removal from the background check system before the VA ever had to determine whether he should be trusted with a gun.

Overman, who hasn’t worked since leaving the military, said he and a friend are now thinking of opening a gunsmith business.

WH: Census to Home Surveys to HUD to Massive Database

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In 2013, Congresswoman Maxine Waters appeared on television and spilled the secret.

Did you ever wonder exactly why the White House took control of the U.S. Census in 2010 from the Commerce Secretary? It was a multi-tracked mission that not only included future Gerrymandering efforts, but it was for data-mining housing, and to all patterns of personal life across the country.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese have hacked databases and has personal data.

It was just a few weeks ago that Housing and Urban Development announced a scheme to racially diversify neighborhoods across the country. Zipcodes appear to be racist and the White House with HUD is working to change that.

So understand these efforts, in 2013 the profiles of cities began where fact sheets have been created.

A sample of what they are tracking is found here.

Screen shot 2015-07-18 at 6.07.54 PM

 

 

 

So, when the NY Post publishes this by Paul Sperry, one must take real notice. We have a pattern here.

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.