US airport employees had ties to terror, report says
FNC: A dozen employees at three U.S. airports were identified as having potential ties to terrorists, according to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by FOX 25’s Washington Bureau.
But those 12 workers are just a fraction of 73 private employees at nearly 40 airports across the nation flagged for ties to terror in a June 2015 report from the Homeland Security Inspector General’s Office.
FOIA requests identified two employees at Logan International Airport in Boston, Mass., four employees at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia and six employees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington.
The 2015 report did not reveal where the 73 workers were employed.
The Transportation Security Administration did not have access to the terrorism-related database during the vetting process for those employees, according to the report.
The TSA pushed back on the report as a whole, however, in a statement to FOX25.
“There is no evidence to support the suggestion by some that 73 DHS employees are on the U.S. government’s consolidated terrorist watch list,” national spokesman Michael England wrote in a statement.
*****
Meanwhile, perhaps ‘some’ of the items in the Senate Gang of 8 Immigration Reform Bill should have been passed…..
Outmoded U.S. immigration system poses security risk: study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. immigration authorities’ lack of progress in automating their systems is compromising border security, making it more difficult to process people seeking to get into the country, a report said on Tuesday.
“We may be admitting individuals who wish to do us harm, or who do not meet the requirements for a visa,” John Roth, the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, told a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.
The report from Roth’s office, released on Tuesday, said immigration officials expect it will take $1 billion and another three years, 11 years into the effort, to move from a paper-based system to automated benefit processing.
U.S. lawmakers have been calling for a tighter visa system since the November Paris attacks and December San Bernardino shootings. In Paris, some of the militants were Europeans radicalized after visiting Syria, and a California attacker had been admitted on a fiance visa.
They want to ensure that potential militants cannot enter the United States under programs, such as the “visa waiver” granted citizens of most western countries.
Roth told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that workers processing millions of applications for immigrant benefits work with a system “more suited to an office environment from 1950 rather than 2016.”
He said some green cards and other immigration documents had been mailed to wrong addresses, or printed with incorrect names, which meant they could have fallen into the wrong hands.
The poor quality of electronic data that is kept makes it more difficult to engage in data matching, to root out fraud and identify security risks, Roth said.
Shipping, storing and handling over 20 million immigrant files costs more than $300 million a year, he added.
The report also said the EB-5 visa program, which admits investors who spend $500,000 or $1 million in the United States, depending on the area, may not be subject to close enough scrutiny to ensure Americans’ safety.
The current system also allows “known human traffickers” to use work and fiance visas to bring victims into the country, the report said.
Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the committee’s chairman, said the modernization was too slow and expensive. “It should not take years and years and billions and billions of dollars,” he said.
