The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to broaden its Secure Communities program nationwide by 2013, according to a DHS release. Administered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative agency within DHS, Secure Communities aims to identify and possibly remove illegal immigrants with criminal histories from the United States.

The program, which began in October 2008, was expanded on Aug. 10, to all 25 counties that line the Southwest border of the United States In the past 18 months, the program has grown from covering 14 U.S. jurisdictions to 544.

Mario Alberto-Lopez (R) waits to be unshackled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents before being led to the Mexican border and released from custody on May 25.

Under Secure Communities (S-Comm), when an individual is arrested, his or her fingerprints are recorded with a biometric scanner, and all available information about the arrestee is sent to ICE. The agency then checks immigration records and criminal databases for information on the individual, and if a criminal conviction and illegal immigration are found, the person can be deported.

According to the DHS, the program is meant for “identifying and removing convicted criminal aliens who pose a public safety threat to American communities.”

A key concern about S-Comm is that it will encourage racial profiling, and that individuals who are not convicted of crimes will be deported. “Preliminary data confirms that some jurisdictions, such as Maricopa County, Arizona, have abnormally high rates of noncriminal S-Comm deportations,” says a report from several rights groups, including the National Day Laborer Organization Network.

Small Percentage Deported

To date, the program has identified more than 262,900 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, and more than 34,600 of them were removed from the United States. According to the DHS, more than 9,800 of the individuals removed were convicted of “major violent or drug offenses.”

Although ICE is screening a large number of individuals through S-Comm, only a small percentage of them are being removed, according to Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vaughan said that after speaking with ICE agents and local law enforcement officers, she has not seen any evidence of racial profiling through S-Comm.

Since the system runs a check on immigration status automatically, police officers will no longer need to make the determination themselves of whether or not to check an individual’s immigration status.

The DHS has a goal to identify 95 percent of those within the illegal immigrant population who have criminal histories by using biometric scanners. The agency hopes to accomplish this sometime beyond 2011, according to a 2009 DHS report. The 2009 goal was to identify 30 percent of the population, and the 2010 goal is to identify 60 percent.

The information will give ICE “data needed to analyze the size, characteristics, and geographic distribution of the criminal alien population across the country; these results will inform future strategic decisions,” says the report.

According to Vaughan, S-Comm could affect not only individuals who are illegal immigrants, but also those on legal visas or green cards who did not disclose criminal convictions. Since it uses biometric scans, it can also catch individuals who try to give an alias.

Border Security

Under S-Comm, close to 10 percent of individuals arrested nationwide could be subjected to deportation, according to Vaughan.

Still, the chances of the program being implemented to its full potential remains unlikely. According to a 2009 DHS report on S-Comm, “The size of the alien population subject to immigration enforcement actions exceeds ICE’s current capacity. Due to these resource constraints, ICE is limited to conducting enforcement actions only against a subset of potential subjects.”

S-Comm is part of the DHS border security operations, which has seen a major increase over the past year.

The expansion of S-Comm was announced just three days before President Barack Obama signed the Southwest Border Security Bill into law, which will provide $600 million to combat the Mexican drug cartels and secure the border.

A portion of the funds, earmarked for illegal immigration, will be focused “where we think the best efforts ought to be,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said during an Aug. 13, press conference.

She added, “And that is making sure we are removing from our country criminal aliens, felony fugitives, gang members who are also in our country illegally, particularly once they’ve served their sentences.”

An ongoing concern among the immigrant population is how border security affects them. According to University of Illinois professor Anthony Sisneros, the effects of border security operations tend to spill over into the entire Mexican immigrant population, ranging from racism to deportation of illegal immigrants who do not have criminal histories.

Sisneros said issues of immigration reform and border security are “complicated by the drug war on the border.” He added that “it is a concern that there is a particular focus on Mexican immigrants.”

“No one is against fighting drugs and engaging on the drug war on the border, but it gets mixed up, and it gets thrown into the pot of discussion on immigration reform,” he said.

Power Plant Control Room

Just hours before reports emerged that hackers were for the first time attempting to take over specific infrastructure plants, a former CIA director told ABC News that weaknesses in critical infrastructure systems in the U.S. were among the country’s greatest threats to national security.

“One of [the greatest threats] is the vulnerability of our electricity grid to hacking and to physical attack on things like transformers,” former CIA Director John Woolsey said Tuesday. “We have 18 critical infrastructures in the United States: water, food, sewage, etc. All of the 17 others depend on the electrical grid.

“So the vulnerability of that grid to things like hacking is a very serious problem,” he said.

The same day, officials at the Department of Homeland Security confirmed a report by The Associated Press that last month hackers targeted critical infrastructure systems with malicious computer code. While it is hardly the first time hackers have attempted to gain access to infrastructure systems, experts said it was first time they employed a certain type of “worm,” called Stuxnet, that was created to seize complete control of a specific critical infrastructure location.

“Most of the activities we have seen over the past several months has involved intrusions into enterprise or corporate networks that’s the front office area of a control plant or power plant — those intrusions aren’t coming in,” Sean McGurk, director of control system security at the National Cyber Security Division, told ABC News. “The activity we have seen most recently that is most interesting, has to do with actually accessing control networks… Now the control networks are those networks that actually perform the physical functions, whether its building automobiles, generating power or purify water.”

McGurk said the attack was unique mostly because it was “very targeted, very sophisticated.”

But often, the more complex the attack is, the more bread crumbs are left for investigators to trace back to its source.

“Attribution is really the key that we are focusing on right now,” McGurk said. “Often these malicious attackers will leave footprints behind by which we are able to identify the activity, because this code is very complex and they’ve used multiple layers of encryption.”

Though most of the recent cyber attacks on infrastructure have taken place abroad, the DHS also confirmed that it has been deployed Cyber Emergency Response Teams more than a dozen times to help wage the digital war in the U.S. The teams have conducted 50 assessments and helped investigate 13 cyber security incidents so far, the AP reported.

America’s electricity infrastructure, often referred to as a “grid,” is composed of more than 5,300 power plants across the nation — including nuclear power plants — which send electricity down thousands of miles of complex distribution lines to more than 140 million customers, according to the National Infrastructure Protection Plan as posted on the DHS website. To coordinate the massive effort, several computer systems are employed.

“The electricity infrastructure is highly automated and controlled by utilities and regional grid operators using sophisticated energy management systems that are supplied by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to keep the system in balance,” the report said.

CLICK HERE to download a PDF of the DHS’ National Infrastructure Protection Plan.

Up to 85 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure is operated by private companies, according to the AP. Vulnerabilities often appear to hackers due to out-dated security measures, McGurk said. The DHS’ Cyber Emergency Response Teams were created to provide on-site incident response in addition to analysis in cooperation with the private companies.

Electricity is just one of the 18 “critical infrastructure and key resources sectors” identified by the DHS, also including water, finance and communications systems.

Many of these systems — like electricity and information technology systems — are interdependent, cyber security and communications assistant secretary Greg Garcia told attendees during the 2008 National Cyber Security Awareness Month.

“IT systems and networks, as you all know, are the nervous system of our country’s critical infrastructure,” Garcia said. “So just think of it. We depend on information technology for seemingly everything. Like managing food processing, water purification, electricity generation and distribution. Online banking, telephone transmission. Filing your news stories on time, reporters. Dispatching emergency services and keeping our nation safe.

“So protecting cyberspace in my view is as important to our national interests as protecting our land and our sea borders,” he said.
[Via:ABC]

Hungry for some piping hot pizza? If you live in the Washington, DC area, your pie could come to your door wrapped in an enticing Help Wanted ad from the Department of Homeland Security. The Transportation Safety Administration, a unit of DHS, has taken to advertising open security officer positions at Washington Reagan National and Dulles International airports on pizza delivery boxes.

The box-top ads tout the positions as “a career where X-ray vision and Federal benefits come standard.”

Interested individuals are instructed to apply for the full- and part-time positions online at a TSA jobs website or phone a toll-free number.

Reporter Michelle Basch at WTOP radio in Washington was surprised to see the ad on the delivery box for the pizza she ordered last night. “Does this mean the TSA is desperate, or just creative?” she asked.

Source: Portfolio

As “gee-whiz” high-tech wonders seamlessly morph into “your papers, please!,” more often than not in “new normal” America science and technological innovation are little more than deranged handmaids serving corporate crime and political power.

In the interest of “keeping us safe,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled a spiffy new surveillance cam “that puts others to shame,” CNET breezily reported last week.

ISIS The 360 degree surveillance Camera that sees all

The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (ISIS) is a hemispherical group of cameras roughly the size of a basketball that, if one believes giddy accolades by enthusiasts touting the system, will lovingly wrap us in a “high-res video quilt,” a DHS press release gushes.

The ultra-wide camera undergoing field-tests since December at Boston’s Logan International Airport, streams distortion free, real-time stitched video and has a resolution capacity of approximately 100 megapixels which our guardians say is “as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare. You can zoom in close…and closer…without losing clarity.”

But with an abundance of acronyms, and a decided lack of imagination from a gaggle of secret state agencies, one shouldn’t confuse Homeland Security’s ISIS with one incubating beneath the dark wings of the Pentagon’s “blue sky” office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

That program, Integrated Sensor Is Structure, also known as ISIS, is being shepherded along by Lockheed Martin, America’s No. 1 defense corp. DARPA’s ISIS promises to build an autonomous airship powered by solar fuel cells for American warfighters, one capable of staying aloft for a decade above 70,000 feet, well out of the way of an adversary’s surface to air missiles.

According to the description on the Strategic Technology Office’s web site, their ISIS “will develop the technologies that enable extremely large lightweight phased-array radar antennas to be integrated into an airship platform.” This would enable ground commanders “to track the most advanced cruise missiles at 600 km and dismounted enemy combatants at 300 km.”

Pentagon gurus and the corporations they so lovingly serve, recently awarded Lockheed Martin and subcontracting Raytheon Corporation, a $400 million dollar contract for Phase III work on the radar system, Defense Systems reported in April. DARPAcrats claim the high-flying airship will provide “theatre-wide, persistent area surveillance and tracking capabilities” to America’s Borg Army of resource grabbers.

And with The New York Times reporting June 14 that the “United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that sometime soon the corrupt Karzai regime, the Taliban, their ISI paymasters and their American overlords will cozy up and play “let’s make a deal”!

Nor should either project be confused with the failed “secure border” scheme known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System or ISIS (there it is again!) or its successor, America’s Shield Initiative. No, that corporatist boondoggle which cost taxpayers some $439 million between 1997 and 2006, eventually morphed into the equally useless Secure Border Initiative or SBInet.

Fully in keeping with the tenor of the times, to wit, that government should get “out of the way” and let business work its magic, DHS’s own Inspector General described the troubled history of the project in critical testimony to Congress. The IG criticized lax practices that led the Department to allow the contractors, led by Boeing Corporation, decide what the system would look like and what technology would be used to build it.

Needless to say, that didn’t work out well! Just this week Washington Technology reported that Boeing “could see its lucrative, but troubled Secure Border Initiative contract scaled back as Homeland Security Department officials consider stopping future construction of the ‘virtual-fence’ security systems along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Like predecessor ISIS, the $800 million program has suffered from delays, technical glitches and “changes” in direction. In March, Home Sec Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the program was “being re-evaluated as part of an ongoing reassessment.” No matter, with cash in hand Boeing, and a string of disappointed subcontractors, can afford to “move on.”
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Austin Texas – The federal government may soon send unmanned aircraft to scour West Texas and the state’s coastal waters in an effort to boost border security, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a letter to the governor sent Friday.

Perry had formally requested the assistance a week ago. The need also was underscored in a phone call that Democratic nominee Bill White had with Napolitano on Thursday.

Homeland Security has six drones and is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to get the necessary clearance to begin flying over Texas, Napolitano wrote.

Before operations start, ground control stations, pilots, sensor operators and maintenance support have to be allocated. She said that the governor would be kept apprised of the progress.

“This is encouraging news, and we are hopeful that this technology and additional federal resources will be deployed to Texas as soon as possible,” said Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger.

Perry has complained that the federal government has not done enough to secure the border, especially in light of escalating drug violence in Mexico border towns.