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9/11 + 7: Taking stock
Since its creation more than five years ago, DHS has made significant progress — uneven progress — in protecting the United States from dangerous people and goods, protecting the U.S. critical infrastructure, strengthen emergency response, and unifying department operations
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Immigration matters / David B. Palinsky
Any required labor-market test must facilitate extraordinary alacrity; delays of years, months, or even weeks are unacceptable; similarly, H-1B workers should be paid the same wage as their U.S. counterparts: The H-1B program should not be a means by which “cheap foreign labor” is imported
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Cameron County’s, Texas, proposed to build miles of combined border wall and levee along the border’s southernmost point; DHS rejects proposal, saying it is not feasible
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TSA suspended company from the Registered Traveler program after one of its computer, containing the personal details of 33,000 customers who had registered for the program, was lost; lap top was recovered and handed over to TSA for forensic review; company now allowed to register passengers
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Colombian drug smugglers now use “semi-submersibles” to smuggle drugs into the United States; counterterrorism officials fear that what drug runners now use to deliver cocaine, terrorists could one day use to sneak personnel or massive weapons into the United States
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TSA began storing the information in late June, tracking many people who said they had forgotten their driver’s license or passport at home; the database has 16,500 records; agency says it is changing its policy on the list
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Dutch researcher uses his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader, and two £10 RFID chips to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a point at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports; the altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports; the researcher took less than an hour to alter the chips
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Part of the U.S.-Mexico border fence would have cut across the campus of the University of Texas-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College; the university and DHS reached a compromise — but the university must finish building its proposed border protection solution by the end of the year
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The ACLU says there are one million names on the DHS terrorist watch list, while TSA says there are only 400,000; whatever the exact figure is, TSA wants to make sure that the airlines do not misidentify innocent passengers as terrorists, and threatens to sue airlines which do so
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Technology will allow border control staff to conduct biometric checks on inbound and outbound passengers
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Today the first Border Patrol RFID readers go into use at El Paso, Texas, border crossing; during the next two months many more RFID readers will be installed in order to speed up traffic across borders
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The terrorist watch list debate
The Transportation Security Administration refutes the facts and figures used by the ACLU in the latter’s claim that the list is now 1-million strong
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The terrorist watch list debate
ACLU claims terrorist watch list reached one million names; launches online watch list complaint form
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The San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area is part of the U.S.-Mexico border, and all agree that the area’s ecosystem is particularly delicate; DHS wants to build a fence there, but environmentalists object
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Even advocates admit that E-Verify — the electronic matching of employees’ Social Security Numbers to the data base at the Social Security Administration — is only 94 percent accurate, but they argue that the benefits outweigh any imperfections—
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New report says terrorist threats will pose a challenge to U.K. security for three more decades; key vulnerabilities; inadequate border control, lack of monitoring of small airports and landing strips, lack of security for cargo planes, inadequate scaning of foreign mail
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DHS proposes nearly five dozen towers, ranging from 80 feet to 200 feet tall, to be erected in rural areas in Arizona
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Border line
DHS waived 19 federal laws so a fence could be built on the Arizona-Mexico border; two environmentalist groups challenged the ruling, but the U.S. Supreme Court rejected challenge
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Border line
UT systems files motions in court last week asking that the court demand that DHS comply with a March settlement detailing how the fence would be built on part of the UT-Brownsville campus
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The long view
CBP IA Operation Hometown reduces violence and corruption: Tomsheck shuts it down -- Pt. 5
Operation Hometown appears to be yet another example in a series of programs at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) demonstrating blatant dysfunctionality and mismanagement within the Department of Homeland Security. Meticulously designed to target border violence and corruption among CBP employees, Operation Hometown was labeled a success in reaching its stated objectives. CBP Internal Affair’s (IA) James F. Tomsheck,however, shut the program down. As Congress and President Obama debate various aspects of a new federal immigration policy,few politicians are willing to acknowledge the serious problems at CBP Internal Affairs – but they should, as these problems may directly impact the success of any or all new immigration reforms.
More money, different approach offer opportunities to border security tech companies
The number of border agents has reached roughly 21,000, up from 5,000 two decades ago. In fiscal year 2012, spending for border and immigration enforcement totaled almost $18 billion — 24 percent more than the combined budgets of the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (total: $14.4 billion). One major trend driving the border security industry is the government’s shift from large-scale border security infrastructure projects to small unit security systems.
Lawmakers want more attention to be paid to security along the northern border
Over the years, concerns over U.S. border security have largely focused on the southern border, where hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants have been apprehended and millions of dollars in illegal drugs have been seized by border patrol agents. One reason for the inattention to the northern border is that it is not associated with highly charged issues such as immigration, day laborers, and violent drug traffickers.Scotty Greenwood, a senior adviser to the Canadian-American Business Council, is not surprised that the southern border gets more attention than the northern border. “The political theater isn’t as intense when you’re talking about what a good job we do.”