Information sharing Archives

Within the next 6 to 12 months, Homeland Security Department officials say they expect to have a long-awaited, instantaneous system for tracking foreigners who have overstayed their visits. Lawmakers have said such a tool is crucial for removing potential terrorists.

In 2002, DHS began to build a comprehensive entry and exit system for collecting biometric data from visitors traveling to the United States but nearly a decade later the exit part still doesn't exist.

Without an exit system, the department has encountered difficulty accurately identifying overstays, according to the Government Accountability Office. DHS estimates there were 36 overstays among the 400 people convicted through international terrorism-related investigations between September 2001 and March 2010. Five of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, were overstays.

Those statistics may change if all goes according to plans that DHS officials outlined at a House hearing this week.

The department is looping together a multitude of databases operated by three DHS components and the intelligence community to more quickly see red flags. Once integrated, the systems maintained by Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US-VISIT will be able automate previously manual searches and cross-check those findings with law enforcement and intelligence data. In essence, the integrated app will generate an e-dossier on leads, testified John D. Cohen, DHS principal deputy coordinator for counterterrorism.

"Instead of us being reactive," by screening an accumulated list of potential overstays, "CBP and the technologists will be developing essentially a hot sheet," he told members of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. It "will essentially create a dashboard available to ICE, on a day to day basis, that will provide them with insights about those public safety and national security risks that are either overstays or existing visa holders."

At first, the application will not be the biometric one envisioned by authorities after 9/11. It will include biographic information and certain fingerprints from travelers entering the United States, and, with advances in research, gradually grow into a robust biometric system. "You have the foundation for a biometric exit capability of the future," Cohen said.

Already, the department has taken steps toward this goal by vetting a backlog of 1.6 million overstays, Cohen said.

In May, DHS officials began by scratching off names of people who had since left the country or changed immigration status. Then, they screened in-house law enforcement and immigration records, as well as intelligence holdings from the National Counterterrorism Center, to winnow the remaining 757,000 people to 2,000 high-risk individuals. Of those, some had died or since become part of an ongoing investigation, leaving several hundred potential leads.

Two months later, all of the previously un-reviewed overstay records had been analyzed from a national security and public safety perspective, Cohen said. ICE currently is pursuing suspects, he added.

"I cannot for one tell you how much better I feel now," said Subcommittee Chairman Candice Miller, R-Mich.

Not so, said GAO.

"If we're going to focus on the national security and public safety folks, which is the thing to start with -- it gives the impression that once you're in the country, you're in. Unless you act out," Richard M. Stana, GAO director for homeland security and justice issues, said at the hearing.

Omar Abdel-Rahman -- an overstay -- had no criminal record before he was arrested for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, noted.

The Federal Trade Commission is allowing the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arm of the Homeland Security Department access to its secure consumer complaint database so USCIS officials can investigate scammers posing as immigration legal advisers, federal officials announced on Thursday.

Typically only law enforcement officials can search through the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network, which warehouses tips that customers submit to the Better Business Bureau, National Consumers League and other watchdog organizations.

USCIS, FTC and Justice Department officials announced the new data exchange on Thursday as part of a public awareness campaign to crack down on unauthorized legal assistance providers. Many imposters charge unwitting immigrants for resources the government offers for free, like application forms, or falsely claim they can expedite the approval process, according to USCIS officials. Some promise to help clients obtain immigration papers for which the applicant is ineligible.

Obama administration officials have been stressing the White House's commitment to immigration enforcement, as they try to ease the way for comprehensive immigration reform.

USCIS posted several campaign ads on YouTube to educate people on how to avoid immigration scams, but the promos do not encourage reporting deceptive outfits. The ads direct Internet users to the uscis.gov/avoidscams website for more information. A "Report Immigration Scams" tab on the site takes visitors to an interactive Web page where they can notify authorities about suspicious professionals.

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller has postponed a computer security hearing to attend the funeral of Judge M. Blane Michael, a proponent of digital privacy who served as Rockefeller's special counsel during his first term as governor of West Virginia, aides for the senator said on Monday.

Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has not yet announced a new date for the hearing, previously scheduled for Wednesday, which was to examine the economic ramifications of cyber threats in the private sector.

Last year, Michael, who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, lectured to students at his alma mater New York University School of Law that the Internet may undermine the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections: "The digital age is placing our privacy in jeopardy. Technological advances in the way we communicate and store information make us increasingly vulnerable to intrusive searches and seizures."

The disconnect between analogue-era privacy and communications laws and the evolving, online nature of criminal activity has been the subject of several congressional hearings during the past year. Lawmakers are considering updating civil liberties legislation, such as the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, as well as establishing new computer crime rules as part of comprehensive cyber legislation.

During his speech, Michael noted that people store their digital files, including love letters, diaries and financial records, on an Internet service provider's remote server, so that they can access their documents from any computer.

"But online storage also raises questions about whether we retain any Fourth Amendment privacy interest in files once we store them remotely because they are then technically accessible to the Internet service provider," he said.

Michael cited a case that involved the government's seizure of Google's email servers, which house millions of people's personal data, just to look for just a few incriminating messages.

"In evaluating whether there is a privacy interest in personal files stored online, the current framework leaves room for considering other sources of interpretation, including the Fourth Amendment's formative history and contemporary norms and circumstances," he said.

On Friday, Rockefeller said in a statement that Michael was unvarnished in his honesty, uncanny in his humor and unequaled in his humility. He called him "a brilliant judge who never took for granted the power and the responsibility of deciding the cases that impacted people's lives or righted serious wrongs.

"I will be forever fortunate to call him my dearest friend and confidant - the kind you just trust to his very core and whose deep, easy companionship abides with you for a lifetime," he said.

Insurance companies are preparing for the economic fallout of the tsunami rippling through the Pacific by generating risk models based on ground motion data feeds from the U.S. Geological Survey.

"The second responders are actually the insurance industries" said Simon Thompson, director of commercial solutions at map software firm Esri. He already is fielding phone calls from financial sector clients asking for maps of possible damage to facilities so they can predict the cost of the magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake that hit early Friday morning.

His team is pulling from government data feeds that track the intensity of the seismic activity to illustrate potentially hit structures along the California coast, hotels in Hawaii and ships in the Pacific. Other data sources Esri is harnessing to help the private sector are USGS shake maps, which are close-to-live maps of ground motion and shaking intensity.

"When you look at the shake maps you look at the type of impact that will have on buildings," Thompson said. For example, one company that insures a Hilton hotel in Hawaii is estimating the cost of possible damage to a private lagoon on the establishment's property.

Another commercial mapmaker, Google, is pinpointing for the general public locations, where the tsunami is headed based on estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.

Editor's note: There have been multiple estimates of the earthquake's magnitude. The USGS estimated the earthquake's magnitude at 9.0.

The need for public safety agencies to have interoperable radios is well-documented. In January the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved an order that would establish interoperability standards for a nationwide public safety communications network.

First responders rely heavily on scarce and shrinking VHF spectrum as well as complex radios, said John Santo, executive director of Customs and Border Protection's wireless systems program office. One of the biggest challenges, he said, is that his agents cannot see what they are responding to.

New technologies necessary for interoperable systems are sometimes called "bleeding edge," since there is a risk in using them. But for public safety, that includes real blood, because first responders usually respond to life-threatening situations, said John Powell, interoperability chair of the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, during an all-day FCC forum on Friday that addressed various interoperability issues.

The feds are getting tough with online crime. On Thursday, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested one Texan for pirating broadcasts of live sporting events and announced the sentencing of another in a software piracy conspiracy.

Bryan McCarthy, 32, of Deer Park, Texas, allegedly operated channelsurfing.net, which he used to streamline live, copyrighted sporting events over the Internet. The site was seized by federal authorities on Feb. 1. According to the criminal complaint the site was an online portal for pirated sports events from the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and National Hockey League, among others. The website also contained links to various live television channels.

McCarthy, who has been charged with one count of criminal infringement of a copyright, made $90,000 in profits from online merchants advertising on the site, according to an ICE press release. The site had 1.3 million hits since being shut down. If convicted, McCarthy faces a maximum of five years in prison.

"Brian McCarthy allegedly sought to profit by intercepting and then streaming live sporting events, hiding behind the anonymity of the internet to make a quick buck through what is little more than high-tech thievery," said Preet Bhara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a prepared statement. "This arrest sends a clear message that this office, working with its partners at HSI, will vigorously protect valuable intellectual property rights through arrests and domain name seizures."

Also Thursday, David Fein, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, said 46-year-old Michael Uszakow, who went by the alias "iced," was sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to pay a fine of $2,000 for his involvement in an underground online community that used the Internet to engage in large-scale distribution of copyrighted software, video games, movies, music files and other protected material.

Participants in the "warez scene" worked as "crackers" to break the digital copyright protections of material while others distributed the software to file storage sites on the Internet. According to Fein, Uszakow uploaded and downloaded thousands of files from the warez server known as Nite Ranger Hideout.

Looking for the latest images from Government Accountability Office reports? Well, now you can find them on the photo-sharing site Flickr.

On Thursday, the agency announced that it joined the White House and NASA on the site. GAO's page features 36 images that can be viewed and downloaded. All are taken from GAO reports, including "causes and rate of rail accidents, 2000-2009" and "top 20 U.S. seaports by number of foreign seafarer arrivals, fiscal year 2009."

"GAO continues to seek out new, innovative ways to convey our findings," said Gene L. Dodaro, U.S. comptroller general and head of the GAO. "The images in our reports help tell the story of government accountability by making complex concepts and data more understandable. Our Flickr page will allow us to highlight selected images and share them more easily with Congress and the public."

When Dee Dee Myers became President Clinton's press secretary in 1993, there were 50 websites worldwide. By the time Dana Perino left her job as press secretary for President Bush in 2009, there were over 20 billion websites worldwide, said Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. Sesno moderated a panel discussion with four former press secretaries sponsored by the university Monday evening.

The panel took place as President Obama's current press secretary, Robert Gibbs, wraps up his term. His last day is Friday when Jay Carney will take over the office.

Thanks to the Internet, people all over the country now have a say in what's happening, said Perino. The Wyoming native noted that while her grandfather can't get the New York Times delivered to his ranch, he can stay informed.

Yet, all this connectivity presents a challenge for the White House. For example, when a plane crashed in Long Island, N.Y., two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Ari Fleischer, President Bush's press secretary from 2001 to 2003 took nearly five hours to brief the press, making sure to get all the facts correct.

"I made enemies in the press [that day]," he said, noting that the continuous news cycle amplified speculation over the cause of the crash at a time when terrorism was foremost in many peoples' minds -- without any word from the White House.

Perino admitted that she resisted social media at first, but now she has nearly 30,000 followers on her Twitter page. By comparison, Gibbs on his official page has just under 147,000 followers.

Egypt has gone dark. According to Renesys, a Manchester, N.H.-based company that monitors Internet routing data, the Egyptian government appears to have taken the unprecedented step of ordering service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet.

"Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world," Renesys said in a blog post. "The Egyptian government's actions . . . have essentially wiped their country from the global map."

At 12:34 a.m. Friday in Egypt, Renesys said they observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. The company said this is different from what happened previously in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or in Iran, where the Internet connections were rendered painfully slow.

The blackout also appeared to extend to mobile phones. British Telecom provider Vodafone confirmed on their website that all mobile operators in Egypt were instructend to suspend services in selected areas of the country. "Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it," the company said.

And the fact that those in Egypt might not see reaction from the US government, which condemned the moves, was not lost on State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowely: "We are concerned that communication services, including the Internet, social media and even this #tweet, are being blocked in #Egypt," he wrote on the micro-blogging site late Thursday.

Ford Motor Company said Thursday it will become the first automaker to build and demonstrate vehicle prototypes that communicate with other vehicles. Using short-range communication, a technology similar to WiFi, vehicles will exchange information about possible hazards, such as imminent crash situations.

At the Washington Auto Show, Ford also said it will double its investment in intelligent vehicle technologies in 2011, although the automaker did not provide any figures for that investment.

How this technology might eventually play out in the federal fleet is unclear. On Monday, the Transportation Department launched a challenge to find ways for using wireless connectivity to improve road safety.

According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, intelligent vehicles potentially could prevent more than 4 million police-reported light vehicle crashes annually, or about 81 percent of all such crashes involving unimpaired drivers.