From IRS and the tea parties to Homeland and the vote

UPI:  Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday his department is considering classifying electronic polling stations across the country as "critical infrastructure," entitling them to the same level of cyber-protection as the nation's power grid and financial sector.

Johnson said the federal government has been looking at how to protect electronic polling stations from cyberattacks since before it was revealed the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, likely by Russians, representing a serious foreign cyber intrusion affecting the 2016 presidential election.

While federal officials have yet to officially point the finger for the DNC hack at the Russians, The New York Times reported Thursday that intelligence officials have a "high level of confidence" the individuals behind the DNC hack have ties to the Russian government.

"We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process is critical infrastructure, like the financial sector, like the power grid," Johnson told reporters in Washington. "There's a vital national interest in our electoral process."

The nation's election infrastructure -- and the security of it -- has not undergone significant changes since passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which Johnson said "raised the bar" for security, but is now outdated.

DHS Whistle-blower Phil Haney: Dots were not connected and Americans died as a result

Link to video

This is a serious charge. Please watch the video in it's entirety.

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Airport security checkpoint.

"Fewer Agents Projected to Patrol Border"

KRGV.com: The agency [Department of Homeland Security] is budgeting for 300 fewer agents in 2017 than they did for this fiscal year.

Since September, Border Patrol agents have been catching more unaccompanied children and families at the border.

“One, we have people turning themselves in at unprecedented rates. Then we have the people that are always coming in illegally,” National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 Vice President Chris Cabrera said. “Then we have the drug flow that’s coming north and the money that’s going south and guns that are going south. And to cut jobs at a time like this is a recipe for disaster.”

For the 2017 fiscal year, Border Patrol plans to field a little more than 21,000 agents. By its projections, the agency pays $181,000 per year in operational costs for each agent.

"DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties"

The Hill: Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.

Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”...

Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.”  Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.

A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially before an attack occurs. (read the whole thing)

Five states must update driver's licenses by 2018 for TSA acceptance

"Airline passengers in five states and a U.S. territory will be unable to present their current driver's licenses at airport checkpoints after Jan. 22, 2018, under new rules announced on Friday by the Department of Homeland Security.

The Homeland Security department, which overseas the TSA, said it would begin enforcing a post-Sept. 11 law that directs federal agencies to only accept state-issued identifications that meet federal security standards that were enacted in 2005.

Most states have either adopted the more secure driver's licenses, known as REAL IDs, or have plans to do so later this year. But Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, Washington state and American Samoa have not moved to make their driver's licenses compliant with the new federal standard, meaning airline passengers from those states will have to present other forms of identification at TSA checkpoints.

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Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that states will have two years to bring their driver's licenses and identifications up to code before the new mandate takes effect."

http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/265282-tsa-to-stop-accepting-unsecured-drivers-licenses-in-2018

"Homeland Security Knew Illegal Aliens Falsely Claimed “Credible Fear” to Stay in U.S."

The Obama administration let hundreds of illegal immigrants stay in the U.S. even though federal authorities knew in advance that an open borders group coached them to falsely claim “credible fear” to get asylum, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The operation was part of a scam conducted by an immigrant rights organization called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA), which in recent years has coordinated demonstrations along the Southwest border in Texas and Arizona. In mid-2014 the group orchestrated a racket seeking to bring 250 illegal aliens into the U.S. through the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California. To assure the migrants were allowed to stay in the U.S., the group had them falsely claim that they had a “credible fear” of returning to their native country. Foreigners can claim asylum under five categories, based on fear of persecution over race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a specific social group. (read more)