"I have not yet begun to fight!"

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976?Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Unless you are in this field of investigative journalism, especially covering extremely sensitive subjects and potentially dangerous subjects as well, you simply cannot understand the complexities and difficulties involved with this work that I face every day.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

U.S. Immigrant Population Record 41.3 Million in 2013

Asian, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrant populations grew most since 2010

By Karen Zeigler, Steven A. Camarota September 2014

Download a PDF of this Backgrounder

Steven A. Camarota is the Director of Research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Census Bureau recently released some of the data from the 2013 American Community Survey (ACS). The data show that the nation’s immigrant population (legal and illegal) grew by 1.4 million from July 2010 to July 2013. The data also imply that 3.3 million new immigrants settled in the country in that same period.¹ These new arrivals were offset by return migration and deaths among the existing population. The immigrant population, referred to as the foreign-born by the Census Bureau, includes all those who were not U.S. citizens at birth, including illegal immigrants.
Among the findings from the new data:

The nation’s immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 41.3 million in July 2013, an increase of 1.4 million since July 2010. Since 2000 the immigrant population is up 10.2 million.
The 41.3 million immigrant population (legal and illegal) in 2013 was double the number in 1990, nearly triple the number in 1980, and quadruple that in 1970, when it stood at 9.6 million.
The sending regions with the largest increases from 2010 to 2013 were South Asia (up 373,000, 16 percent growth); East Asia (up 365,000, 5 percent growth); the Caribbean (up 223,000, 6 percent growth), the Middle East (up 208,000, 13 percent growth); and sub-Saharan Africa (up 177,000, 13 percent growth).
The sending countries with the largest increases 2010 to 2013 were India (up 254,000, 14 percent growth); China (up 217,000, 10 percent growth); the Dominican Republic (up 112,000, 13 percent growth); Guatemala (up 71,000, 9 percent growth); Jamaica (up 55,000, 8 percent growth); Bangladesh (up 49,000, 32 percent growth); Saudi Arabia (up 44,000, 97 percent growth); Pakistan (up 43,000, 14 percent growth); and Iraq (up 41,000, 26 percent growth).
Between 2010 and 2013, four million new immigrants settled in the United States; and since 2007, when the Great Recession began, at least 7.5 million immigrants have settled in the country.²
As a share of the population, immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.1 percent of U.S. residents (about one out of every eight), the highest percentage in 93 years. As recently as 1980, 6.2 percent of the country was comprised of immigrants.
Immigrants comprised 16 percent of the adult population (18-plus) in 2013, nearly one out of every six adults.
Mexicans accounted for the largest immigrant population in the United States by far, with 11.6 million legal and illegal immigrants living in the United States in 2013. However, the number of Mexican immigrants in the country declined 1 percent from 2010 to 2013.
The number of immigrants from Europe also declined.
States where the number of immigrants grew the most since 2010 were Texas (up 227,240); California (up 160,771); Florida (up 140,019); New York (up 85,699); New Jersey (up 81,192); Massachusetts (up 62,591); Washington (up 57,402); Pennsylvania (up 57,091); Illinois (up 47,609); Arizona (up 39,647); Maryland (up 38,555); Virginia (up 37,844); North Carolina (up 30,289); Michigan (up 29,039); and Georgia (up 28,020).
States with the largest percentage increase since 2010 were North Dakota (up 27 percent); West Virginia (up 17 percent); and Wyoming (up 14 percent). In South Dakota, Nebraska, and Idaho the immigrant population increased 10 percent. It grew 8 percent in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania and 7 percent in Iowa, Delaware, and Minnesota.

Data Source. On September 18, the Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2013 American Community Survey (ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2013. The ACS is by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and includes over two million households.³ The Census Bureau has posted some of the results from the ACS to American FactFinder.⁴ It has not released the public-use version of the ACS for researchers to download and analyze. However a good deal of information can be found at FactFinder. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this analysis comes directly from FactFinder.
The immigrant population, referred to as the foreign-born by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers, and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, nor does it include those born in outlying U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of illegal immigrants respond to the ACS.⁵ Thus, all the figures reported above are for both legal and illegal immigrants.

End Notes

¹ The 3.3 million arrivals number is necessarily an estimate because the growth number of 1.4 million measures July 2010 to July 2013. The arrival data in Factfinder, on the other hand, shows four million arrivals for January 2010 to July 2013. This is the only level of detail available in Factfinder for year of arrival. However, the 2010 public-use ACS is available and shows 700,000 immigrants in the country who arrived in the first half of 2010. Subtracting that from the four million implies that 3.3 million new immigrants arrived July 2010 to July 2013, the period in which the immigrant population grew 1.4 million.
² The 2013 ACS shows four million immigrants living in the United States in July 2013 who indicated that they arrived in the United States in 2010 or later. (Unlike the public-use data, FactFinder does not report immigrants’ detailed years of arrival. Instead, results are grouped by decade.) The 2010 public-use file of the ACS showed 3.5 million immigrants in the country who arrived in 2007, 2008, or 2009. (We exclude those who indicated they came between January and July 2010.) Therefore, in total 7.5 million immigrants arrived 2007 to 2013. The actual total is higher because the 7.5 million figure does not include those who arrived after 2007, but died or went home by 2013.
³ Detailed information on the survey methodology, questions, and other information on the American Community can be found here.
⁴ FactFinder can be found here.
⁵ The Department of Homeland Security uses the ACS as the basis for its estimates of the illegal immigrant population. See the most recent iteration of the unauthorized immigrant population, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2012”.

Karen Zeigler, Steven A. Camarota

Jason Chaffetz says Secret Service prostitution bombshell shows White House ‘taking care of its own’

Oct. 9, 2014 9:37am Pete Kasperowicz

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Thursday that the latest revelations about the 2012 Secret Service prostitution scandal shows the Obama administration appears to have different standards of conduct for White House staff compared to other federal agencies.
Chaffetz was reacting to news that the White House knew earlier than it initially said that a member of President Barack Obama’s advance team, Jonathan Dach, hired a prostitute while in Colombia, and ultimately decided he did nothing wrong. A story in the Washington Post also indicated that the White House may have pressured investigators to delay a final report on the investigation until after the 2012 election.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Thursday that the White House appears to be protecting its own people from punishment in the 2012 Secret Service prostitution scandal. (AP Photo/Deseret News, Tom Smart, Pool)

“Remember, there were nearly two dozen Secret Service military personnel who were either fired or reprimanded,” Chaffetz said on Fox News Thursday. “But the concern is that when it came to the White House, and the White House taking care of its own personnel, a totally different standard, and perhaps some misdirection and some coverup to make sure that that story never saw the light of day before the 2012 election.”
Late last week, Chaffetz wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough saying that he has information a White House staff person checked in a prostitute while in Colombia, and that “steps were taken by the administration to cover-up or deflect their involvement in the initial incident.”
Chaffetz noted that in April 2012, Carney dismissed the idea that the White House had any knowledge of the incident.

Supposed WaPo "exclusive" was previously reported by AP, CBS, ABC, Politico, The Hill & others – 2 years ago. http://t.co/dk9qV0TbJK
— Josh Earnest (@PressSec) October 9, 2014

Late Wednesday night, White House Spokesman Josh Earnest dismissed the Post story in a tweet by noting that many of the details came out two years ago. Earnest noted an AP story from September 2012, which said the White House had become aware of the White House staffer’s involvement in the prostitution scandal.
That story, however, noted that the White House decided no wrongdoing had occurred, and that it stemmed from a false record that a White House staffer had stayed at the hotel in Colombia.
But that prompted Chaffetz to tweet back to Earnest, “Then you should have no problem providing all the information you have to our committee. Will you do that?”

.@PressSec Then you should have no problem providing all the information you have to our committee. Will you do that?http://t.co/JkR2YbOErp
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 9, 2014

The Post story said Dach’s lawyer rejected the idea that he brought a prostitute back to his hotel room. Dach was a volunteer at the time, but now works at the Office on Global Women’s Issues at the State Department.
Read Chaffetz’s letter here:

by Taboola

Russia Deploying Tactical Nuclear Arms in Crimea

Obama backing indirect talks with Moscow aimed at cutting U.S. non-strategic nukes in Europe

Russian President Vladimir Putin / AP

BY: Bill Gertz Follow @BillGertz
October 10, 2014 4:40 pm
Russia is moving tactical nuclear weapons systems into recently-annexed Crimea while the Obama administration is backing informal talks aimed at cutting U.S. tactical nuclear deployments in Europe.
Three senior House Republican leaders wrote to President Obama two weeks ago warning that Moscow will deploy nuclear missiles and bombers armed with long-range air launched cruise missiles into occupied Ukrainian territory.
“Locating nuclear weapons on the sovereign territory of another state without its permission is a devious and cynical action,” states the letter signed by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R., Calif.) and two subcommittee chairmen.
“It further positions Russian nuclear weapons closer to the heart of NATO, and it allows Russia to gain a military benefit from its seizure of Crimea, allowing Russia to profit from its action.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent months “has escalated his use of nuclear threats to a level not seen since the Cold War,” they wrote.
In a related development, the Obama administration is funding non-official arms control talks with Russia through a Washington think-tank that are aimed at curbing U.S. tactical nuclear arms in Europe.
The first round of talks was held in Vienna Monday and Tuesday.
Critics say Obama administration arms control officials at the State Department and Pentagon are using the informal nuclear talks as groundwork for future tactical nuclear arms cuts.
Such cuts are likely to be opposed by NATO allies, especially in Eastern Europe, worried by growing Russian military threats to the continent.
Regarding the nuclear deployments to Crimea, Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R., Okla.) first disclosed last month that Putin had announced in August his approval of deploying nuclear-capable Iskander-M short-range missiles along with Tu-22 nuclear-capable bombers in Crimea, located on the Black Sea.
“The stationing of new nuclear forces on the Crimean peninsula, Ukrainian territory Russia annexed in March, is both a new and menacing threat to the security of Europe and also a clear message from Putin that he intends to continue to violate the territorial integrity of his neighbors,” Inhofe stated in a Sept. 8 op-ed in Foreign Policy.
In their Sept. 23 letter to the president, McKeon, Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of the subcommittee on strategic forces, and Rep. Michael Turner (R., Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, noted Russia’s violation of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty by building a banned cruise missile. The missile has been identified by U.S. officials as the R-500.
The lawmakers said the Russian nuclear deployment in Crimea represents the “clear, and perhaps irrevocable tearing” of the 1997 agreement between NATO and Russia that allowed Russia to maintain a military presence within the alliance.
The Russian nuclear deployment plans and treaty violation should have been discussed during the recent NATO summit in Wales but were not, they said.
As a result, the congressmen urged the president to brief Congress on the threatening Russian nuclear deployments in Crimea. They also called on the president to suspend the NATO-Russia accord and demand the removal of all Russian military personnel from NATO facilities.
Additionally, they asked that the United States and its allies halt all arms control surveillance flights by Russia carried out under the Open Skies Treaty.
Significantly, the three House leaders called on the administration to begin research and development on deployment sites for new U.S. intermediate-range ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles, if Russian refuses to return to compliance with the INF accord.
Putin “must be made to understand that his actions will accomplish nothing more than the alienation [of] Russia from the West, its economy and its security architecture,” the lawmakers said.
“Until we have a strategy that convinces Mr. Putin he cannot achieve his dream of a ‘New Russia’ through illegal annexations, covert invasions, and nuclear saber-rattling, statements and sanctions along cannot be expected to have an effect on his actions,” the letter warns.
“Too much is at stake to continue to allow Russia’s dictator to continue to proceed on his current path toward regional destabilization without serous opposition.”
The action “further undermines Russian credibility in terms of the Budapest Memorandum that the Russian Federation signed in 1994,” the congressmen said.
The memorandum promised Ukraine would have security assurances against threats or use of force in exchange for Kiev giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons – at the time the third largest arsenal in the world.
On the Track 2 talks between Russian experts and a group hosted by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the program leader was identified as anti-nuclear arms advocate Sharon Squassoni.
Squassoni took part in a study three years ago sponsored by the leftist, anti-nuclear weapons group Ploughshares Fund that called for removing all U.S. tactical nuclear arms from Europe.
Thomas Moore, a former senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who quit CSIS over concerns about Squassoni’s anti-nuclear slant, said he felt the Track 2 program, which was to cost $215,000 in federal funding, was unwise after Russia’s military takeover of Crimea which began last February.
Moore said in an interview that the administration could be using the CSIS Track 2 talks as a way of conducting direct negotiations to further reduce U.S. nuclear arms in Europe.
“Now is the wrong time to entertain any such ideas with any Russians, whether they are official or unofficial Russians, because they all support Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and violation of the INF treaty,” Moore said, noting that verifying any tactical nuclear arms reductions is nearly impossible.
“My goal was to verify and keep our nukes in Europe,” he said, noting that Squassoni knows little about nuclear arms and has been “a partisan for Obama and his anti-nuclear agenda in Europe.”
CSIS spokesman Andrew Schwartz confirmed that the Track 2 talks involving U.S., Russian and European experts are aimed at “limiting non-strategic nuclear weapons.” He declined to identify the U.S. or foreign members of the project and said a report on the program would be published in summer or fall of next year. He said the notion that the project has not been adjusted to account for the Crimea crisis is wrong.
Squassoni confirmed her participation in the Ploughshares study but said in an email that the recommendations of that project were not discussed during the first Track 2 meeting this week.
“I can assure you that my personal views do not interfere with my ability to facilitate balanced, analytically sound dialogues,” she said.
The CSIS-Russia Track 2 nuclear talks also are being supported by Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; and Andrew Weber, who recently resigned as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defenses amid allegations of insubordination and improper personnel activities.
A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to provide details surrounding Weber’s resignation but said he would be taking a lesser position at the State Department.
A U.S. official close to the Pentagon said Weber ran afoul of his superiors as a result of his anti-nuclear arms positions, and practices related to hiring and the use of personnel within his office.
Alexandra Bell, a spokeswoman for Gottemoeller said: “The administration is supportive of the domestic and international non-governmental community’s right to conduct research, scholarship, advocacy and Track 2 dialogues as they see fit.”
Both the Pentagon and State Department spokeswomen would not address the question of whether holding informal nuclear talks on cutting nuclear weapons in Europe with the Russians will undermine NATO security in the aftermath of the Crimean crisis.
Former Pentagon official Mark Schneider, a strategic nuclear arms specialist, said the Track 2 and any formal arms talks on tactical nuclear arms would fail.
“They can have as many tracks as they want but the Russians will not agree to limits on tactical nuclear weapons,” Schneider said. “Their advantage is too great.”
The United States is believed to have around 200 nuclear weapons in Europe. Russia’s tactical nuclear arsenal is at least 2,000.
“NATO politics will prevent any cuts in U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe,” he said. “This is obviously about the worst possible time to talk about something like this.”
Schneider said nuclear policymakers should focus on deterrence now instead of disarmament.
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman told state-run Interfax March 26 that a “missile-carrying regiment” of Tu-22 Backfire nuclear bombers will be deployed to the Crimean airbase at Gvardeyskoye within two years.
IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly described the nuclear-capable Tu-22s to be based in Crimea as “the backbone of Soviet naval strike units during the Cold War.”
Rogers, the strategic forces subcommittee chairman, said Sept. 18 that the Russians have discussed “plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Crimea.”

This entry was posted in National Security and tagged Barack Obama, Crimea, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Vladimir Putin. Bookmark the permalink.

obamas agenda to remove the Secret Service and replace them with his mil...

Senator wants answers from Napolitano on CFATS

by Staff Reports
Source: SecurityInfoWatch.com
Created: August 9, 2012

Whistleblower alleges program mismanagement, wasteful spending

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced on Tuesday that he has sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano seeking answers regarding allegations of mismanagement and spending abuse by the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program.
In the letter, Grassley says that following news reports late last year that the program was suffering from a number of issues, an internal whistleblower has since contacted his office and provided further details of CFATS mismanagement.
Among the allegations from the whistleblower were that CFATS assigned employees to non-existent field offices, which subsequently led to employees working from home while claiming to be located at phantom offices. A byproduct of this, according to the letter, was that some employees lived in low locality pay areas while claiming duty stations in high locality pay areas and thus received improper locality pay. In addition, equipment was allegedly purchased through the program that the agency had no use for, such as HAZMAT suits and hundreds of notebook computers.
The whistleblower also alleged that DHS Undersecretary Rand Beers refused to report these abuses to the inspector general when he was made aware of them in a memo.
"The whistleblower’s accusations, if true, show a systemic failure of the CFATS program that has placed Americans in danger and wasted close to $500 million in taxpayer dollars," Grassley wrote in the letter.

Grassley has asked Napolitano to respond to his inquiry by Aug. 13.
In addition to these allegations, CFATS has also come under fire recently for its decision to drop the screening of workers at chemical facilities against the FBI’s terror database. Suzanne Spaulding, deputy undersecretary for the DHS’ National Protection and Programs Directorate, made the announcement during testimony before the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee last month. She did not say why the plan was shelved or if it would be replaced.

DHS ‘fusion centers’ portrayed as pools of ineptitude and civil liberties intrusions

By Robert O'Harrow Jr. October 2, 2012

An initiative aimed at improving intelligence sharing has done little to make the country more secure, despite as much as $1.4 billion in federal spending, according to a two-year examination by Senate investigators.
The nationwide network of offices known as “fusion centers” was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to address concerns that local, state and federal authorities were not sharing information effectively about potential terrorist threats.
But after nine years — and regular praise from officials at the Department of Homeland Security — the 77 fusion centers have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions, according to a scathing 141-page report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations.

The creation and operation of the fusion centers were promoted by the administration of President George W. Bush and later the Obama administration as essential weapons in the fight to build a nationwide network that would keep the country safe from terrorism. The idea was to promote increased collaboration and cooperation among all levels of law enforcement across the country.
But the report documents spending on items that did little to help share intelligence, including gadgets such as “shirt button” cameras, $6,000 laptops and big-screen televisions. One fusion center spent $45,000 on a decked-out SUV that a city official used for commuting.
“In reality, the Subcommittee investigation found that the fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever,” the report said.
The bipartisan report, released by subcommittee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and ranking minority member Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), portrays the fusion center system as ineffective and criticizes the Department of Homeland Security for poor supervision.
In a response Tuesday, the department condemned the report and defended the fusion centers, saying the Senate investigators relied on out-of-date data. The Senate investigators examined fusion center reports in 2009 and 2010 and looked at activity, training and policies over nine years, according to the report.
The statement also said the Senate investigators misunderstood the role of fusion centers, “which is to provide state and local law enforcement analytic support in furtherance of their day-to-day efforts to protect local communities from violence, including that associated with terrorism.”
The DHS statement also said that all of the questioned expenses were allowable under the rules.
Department officials have defended the fusion centers in the face of past criticism from the news media and internal reviews. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and other senior officials have praised the centers as centerpieces of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.
Mike Sena, president of the National Fusion Center Association, an advocacy organization, called the report unfair. Sena, who manages the center in the San Francisco Bay area, said fusion centers have processed more than 22,000 “suspicious activity reports” that have triggered 1,000 federal inquiries or investigations. He said they also have shared with the Terrorist Screening Center some 200 “pieces of data” that provided “actionable intelligence.”
The Senate report challenged the value of the training and much of the information produced by the centers. It said that DHS analysts assigned to the fusion centers received just five days of basic training for intelligence reporting. Sena said they received an array of other training as well.
Some analysts at the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which received the fusion center reports, were found to be so unproductive that supervisors imposed quotas for reports, knowing those quotas would diminish the quality of the intelligence, according to the Senate report. Many of those analysts at the DHS intelligence office were contractors.
Investigators found instances in which the analysts used intelligence about U.S. citizens that may have been gathered illegally. In one case, a fusion center in California wrote a report on a notorious gang, the Mongols Motorcycle Club, that had distributed leaflets telling its members to behave when they got stopped by police. The leaflet said members should be courteous, control their emotions and, if drinking, have a designated driver.
“There is nothing illegal or even remotely objectionable [described] in this report,” one supervisor wrote about the draft before killing it. “The advice given to the groups’ members is protected by the First Amendment.”
Financial questions were pervasive, with the report saying oversight has been so lax that department officials do not know exactly how much has been spent on the centers. The official estimates varied between $289 million and $1.4 billion.
A DHS official, who insisted on not being identified because he was not authorized to talk to the news media, acknowledged that the department does not closely track the money but said it conducts audits of the fusion spending. The official said that just under half of the fusion centers’ budgets comes from the department.
In the statement, the department said its Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the grants, provides “wide latitude” for states to decide how to spend the money.
“All of the expenditures questioned in the report are allowable under the grant program guidance, whether or not they are connected with a fusion center,” the statement said.
The Senate report said local and state officials entrusted with the fusion center grants sometimes spent lavishly. More than $2 million was spent on a center for Philadelphia that never opened. In Ohio, officials used the money to buy rugged laptop computers and then gave them to a local morgue. San Diego officials bought 55 flat-screen televisions to help them collect “open-source intelligence” — better known as cable television news.
Senate investigators repeatedly questioned the quality of the intelligence reports. A third or more of the reports intended for officials in Washington were discarded because they lacked useful information, had been drawn from media accounts or involved potentially illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to the Senate report.

Save the Secret Service: Remove it from the Department of Homeland Security

By John Piper

Recent Secret Service security incidents and the resignation of its Director have triggered Congressional calls for a top-down management review. Inasmuch as Secret Service reports to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), one would hope that DHS does not manage that review. There is a clear need for competence and objectivity. The review should conclude that moving Secret Service back to the Treasury Department is essential to restoring its effectiveness.
Examples of DHS incompetence are legion. In a recent speech before over 200 chemical industry managers, a DHS senior executive advised the audience to note that he is the only speaker that does not have a PowerPoint presentation. He stated that no one can get a PowerPoint approved in DHS, and, that never have so few been managed by so many.
One of DHS’s major responsibilities is chemical and petroleum security. It took DHS nearly four years to produce a risk assessment model. Never mind that there were many pre-existing models from US national laboratories that could have been used immediately. DHS then was tasked with implementation of the Chemical Security Act of 2006. They tried to tier rank the chemical industry in terms of their processes and related risk potential. Over 4000 companies were screened into the tier requiring vulnerability assessments and security plans. If they did not do it right and exactly as scheduled, those companies were threatened with fines, penalties, shut downs and lawsuits. Four years later, thanks to a whistle blower, it was disclosed to the US Senate that DHS had failed to review one single submission. The DHS senior executive explained that they recognized problems and had developed a 92 element corrective action plan.
In 2010, after regular praise from officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the 77 intelligence centers were deemed to have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions, according to a scathing 141-page report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations. “In reality, the Subcommittee investigation found that the intelligence centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever,” the report said. Financial questions were pervasive, with the report saying oversight has been so lax that department officials do not know exactly how much has been spent on the centers. The official estimates varied between $289 million and $1.4 billion—so much for DHS numbers.
In terms of personnel management, Senator Grassley reported allegations from a whistleblower that DHS assigned employees to non-existent field offices, which subsequently led to employees working from home while claiming to be located at phantom offices. A byproduct of this, according Grassley, was that some employees lived in low locality pay areas while claiming duty stations in high locality pay areas and thus received improper locality pay. In addition, equipment was allegedly purchased through the program that the agency had no use for, such as HAZMAT suits and hundreds of notebook computers. The whistleblower also alleged that DHS Undersecretary Rand Beers refused to report these abuses to the inspector general when he was made aware of them in a memo.
President Obama recently signed Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD 21). This stipulates that PPD 21 will be a “successor” to previous measures, such as the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). The real reason for this is that DHS has failed to implement the NIPP according to scope and schedule and PPD 21 will provide cover for their incompetence. It would be interesting to see the current implementation status of PPD 21 requirements.
So, in this DHS environment, Secret Service faces competition for resources and decisions from over 25 agencies and over 250,000 employees. Instead of direct reports to the Secretary of Treasury through one assistant secretary, there are multiple layers for everything. Secret Service is down over 500 positions and cannot seem to get the approvals for a fast track hiring process. The same can be said for procurement processes. The result is staff exhaustion. FBI, CIA, DEA and ATF emerged from the post 9/11 environment in tact. Using those models, an independent organization, like GAO, should be used for the top down management review mandated by Congress.
Mr. Piper retired from the US Secret Service after a 20-year career having served as a manager of the Forensic Sciences Division and the Technical Security Division. Mr. Piper was responsible for security engineering and risk management at the White House and Treasury Department complexes, and other related facilities. Mr. Piper possesses an MS from University of Pennsylvania.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

U.S. Immigrant Population Record 41.3 Million in 2013

Asian, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrant populations grew most since 2010

Jason Chaffetz says Secret Service prostitution bombshell shows White House ‘taking care of its own’

30

DHS ‘fusion centers’ portrayed as pools of ineptitude and civil liberties intrusions

Save the Secret Service: Remove it from the Department of Homeland Security