Department Of Homeland Security Quotes

If I had been in charge of reorganizing the government’s security agencies into a homeland defense organization, I would have divided the responsibilities into two agencies: The Bureau of What the Fuck Was That? and The Department of What the Fuck Are We Gonna Do Now?

But, alas, nobody anticipated the United States Department of Homeland Security.

We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

But withholding information about vulnerabilities in US systems so that they can be exploited in foreign ones creates a schism in the government that pits agencies that hoard and exploit zero days against those, like the Department of Homeland Security, that are supposed to help secure and protect US critical infrastructure and government systems.

Anubis is associated with the mummification and protection of the dead for their journeys through Denver International Airport to the afterlife. He is usually portrayed as being half human and half jackal, and holding a metal detector in his hand ... Anubis is employed by the Department of Homeland Security to examine the hearts of all travellers to make sure they have not exceeded the weight limit for psychological baggage ... He is also shown frisking mummies and confiscating firearms and other contraband. It doesn't take much to tip the scales in favour of a dead body cavity search or an afterlifetime travel ban.

I’ll never forget walking through airport security when I was flying to give a speech to a Christian men’s group in Montana. The Department of Homeland Security screeners obviously didn’t recognize me as “Jase the Duckman” from Duck Dynasty, and I felt like I was one wrong answer away from being led to an interrogation room in a pair of handcuffs!

While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.

Even now, with the expectation that a substantial percentage of newly naturalized aliens would vote for the Democratic Party’s 2016 nominee for president, the Department of Homeland Security’s Task Force on New Americans is reportedly focusing resources on urging 9 million green card holders (aliens and noncitizens) to become naturalized American citizens as quickly as possible, in hopes of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.65

The police state We now have well over 100,000 domestic federal law enforcement agents armed and ready to enforce the laws to “make everyone safe and secure.” We also have our TSA “friends” at the airports protecting us with an army of over 50,000 bureaucrats. The Department of Homeland Security has more than 240,000 employees. The FBI has about 35,000 employees. Around 90,000 IRS employees enforce draconian tax laws that limit self-sufficiency, put people in fear, and are used as a political tool to help suppress dissenters to the empire. There are many thousands of others “making sure we’re safe and secure from our foreign enemies” while our domestic enemies, including politicians, bureaucrats, and government profiteers, are ignored.

the president signed an executive order that required the Department of Homeland Security to publish a weekly tally of crimes committed by immigrants. Critics noted that Trump’s order was literally out of the Nazi playbook; Hitler’s press outlets published a weekly digest of crimes committed by Jews.

And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little more than a decade old, but in 2011 over three hundred of its employees were arrested for crimes such as drug smuggling, child pornography and selling intelligence to drug cartels. Like

President Obama, inciter-in-chief, regularly used violent rhetoric to gin up the Democrats: ‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.’ He supported the most violent, seditious movements of 21st-century America (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Muslim Brotherhood groups, to name a few), while directing the Department of Homeland Security to track ‘right-wing extremists’—in other words, Americans like you and me.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the federal building that housed the Department of Homeland Security, about fifteen stories up, locked in a standard federal issue interrogation room. Metal chair, metal table, big one-way mirror window, just like the movies. My arms were bound behind me with at least three flex-cuffs. The only addition to the room were the four tactical team members standing in each corner of the room, M4 rifles slung across their chests. Books, Splitter, Data and old Rattler himself, Agent Simmons.

The squad’s leader, Inspector Martin Roma, had been trying for two months to get the new Police Commissioner to learn more about our group. The NYPD Special Situations Squad is off the official org chart, but has been in existence in one form or another for decades. Formed to deal with the unexplainable world of the supernatural, the head of the squad always reports directly to the Commissioner. When the new mayor had swept into office last November on a platform of social issues, he had fired the old Commissioner and brought in his handpicked replacement. Said replacement hadn’t taken his Department of Homeland Security briefing on things that go bump in the night very seriously.

The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anticapitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement, the military, and the White House. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that dwarf anything carried out by the left. White supremacists were responsible for forty-nine homicides in twenty-six attacks in the United States from 2006 to 2016, far more than those committed by members of any other extremist group, according to a report issued in May 2017 by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.109

George W. Bush’s legacy will always be defined by the events of September 11, 2001, which provided him with something of a delayed mandate. Without 9/11, there would have been no unconstitutional Patriot Act, no Homeland Security Department, no decade-long occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and no open-ended “war on terror.” As such, it is important to look closely at exactly what really happened on 9/11/2001.

Some incidents of facial profiling have been more inconvenient than others. I’ll never forget walking through airport security when I was flying to give a speech to a Christian men’s group in Montana. The Department of Homeland Security screeners obviously didn’t recognize me as “Jase the Duckman” from Duck Dynasty, and I felt like I was one wrong answer away from being led to an interrogation room in a pair of handcuffs! Hunting season had recently ended, so my hair and beard were in full bloom! The security screeners saw a Bible in my bag, and I guess they figured I was a Christian nut because of my long hair and bushy beard. Somehow, I made it through the metal detector and an additional pat-down, and I guess they couldn’t find a justifiable reason to detain me. But as I was getting my belongings back together, I accidentally bumped into a woman. She screamed! It must have been an involuntary reflex. It was a natural response, because she thought I was going to attack her. Once she finally settled down, I made my way to the gate and sat down to compose myself. After a few minutes, a young boy walked up and asked me for my autograph. Finally, I thought to myself. Somebody recognizes me from Duck Dynasty. Not everyone here believes I’m the Unabomber! Man, I could have used the kid about twenty minutes earlier, when I was trying to get through security! I looked over at the boy’s mother, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I realized they were very big fans. I signed my name on a piece of paper and handed it to the kid. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Ask me anything you want.” “How much does Geico pay y’all?” he asked. My jaw dropped as I looked at the kid. “Wait a minute, man,” I said. “I’m not a caveman!” “What do you mean?” the boy asked. “I’m Jase the Duckman,” I said. “You know--from Duck Dynasty? Quack, quack?” It didn’t take me long to realize the boy had no idea what I was talking about. In a matter of minutes, I went from being a potential terrorist to being a caveman selling insurance.

A golden visa is a permanent residency visa issued to individuals who invest, often through the purchase of property, a certain sum of money into the issuing country. The United States EB-5 visa program requires overseas applicants to invest a minimum of anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million, depending on the location of the project, and requires at least 10 jobs to be either created or preserved.[22] When these criteria are met, the applicant and their family become eligible for a green card. There is an annual cap of 10,000 applications under the EB-5 program.[citation needed] The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has offered its EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program since 1990. It is designed to encourage foreign investment in infrastructure projects in the U.S., particularly in Targeted Employment Areas (TEA), high unemployment areas. The funds are channeled through agencies called regional centers, now designated only by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The funding opportunities allow the investor to make a sound financial investment and obtain a U.S. “Green Card. A large majority of users of such programs are wealthy Chinese seeking legal security and a better quality of life outside of their home country.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

For better or for worse—although often for the worse—what human nature craves in the face of psychologically acute threats like the 2008 economic meltdown, ISIS, or Ebola is decisiveness. That’s partly why the approval of George W. Bush, who famously bragged, “I don’t do nuance,” jumped more than 30 percentage points after 9/11. Americans found closure in expressing increased trust in a self-convinced government. Bush’s popularity tracked up and down with the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded threat warning.

available for inspection by authorized officials of the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Labor, and Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. Submission of the information

Obama has nearly doubled the National Debt, relaxed the requirements for receiving food stamps and disability payments, given away 12,000,000 free “Obama phones”, overridden attempts by the individual States to end inner city vote fraud, (14) broken his promise to close the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, and built up the Praetorian Guard known as the “Department of Homeland Security” to monstrous dimensions (2000 armored vehicles, 10’s of 1000’s of fully automatic machine guns, 100’s of millions of rounds of bullets etc).

Assyria had no more prospect of halting the human flow than can the British government stop illegal entrants to the UK, although an effective natural moat surrounds the British Isles. There is little hope that the US Department of Homeland Security will have greater success with its border fence than did King Shulgi of Ur and his successors, whose ‘wall to keep out the Amorites’ failed to prevent the migrants’ eventual takeover of all lower Mesopotamia and their founding of Old Babylon.

Department of Homeland Security. “Each one of them is mid- to upper-level management in their agencies.

The Department of Homeland Security announces today that the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its mission to include protecting not just airports, but the interstates and railroads of the United States. As Americans travel, they’ll start noticing checkpoints along the interstates where the TSA and DHS will randomly stop travelers so we can protect the United States from terrorist attacks. With the help of the new national identification cards we’re now issuing, the TSA will be able to keep track of where Americans are going. If you’re traveling from your home, in say, Philadelphia, and you tell the TSA you’re going to Toledo, the TSA’s computer will follow that up by examining the checkpoints in Ohio that lead to Toledo. Tracking chips in these new ID’s, which will only be active when you travel, will ping your ID to see if you arrived at your location. Once the TSA is satisfied, your ID will be no longer pinged.

worked hard for fifty years to get to this moment in time and I’m not going to see it fail. We have the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the TSA, FEMA, and other departments, and they have been waiting for Order 21 to be activated for the past several decades. Once ordered, it will be very hard for any opposition to try to overturn it. It will be in stages, with the final stage being leader of the whole world.

The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.

Even the U.S. government has shown its interest in this field, with the Department of Homeland Security awarding blockchain infrastructure builder Factom a $199,000 grant to develop an IoT security solution. It’s a small number by ICO fund-raising standards but a noteworthy vote of confidence in blockchain technology from a government agency. Factom’s model would create an identity log of data emitted by a device, including its unique identifier, its manufacturer, its update history, its known security issues, and its granted authorities. The idea is that if a device’s history of performance, permissions, and certification is recorded in an immutable ledger, hackers can’t alter the record to disguise a flaw they’ve exploited. It’s not clear how much oversight the U.S. government would have over the system. Context Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is doing similar work to achieve what it calls “data veracity.” In various industries, it is pulling together consortia of interested parties to agree on open-data standards for APIs (application processing interfaces) that would allow parties to share data stamped with unique cryptographic hashes that provably identify the device and its owner.

What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

The next day, Thursday, November 12, election security groups, including from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Association of State Election Directors, released a joint statement that said, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.

Their true numbers, Nevins concluded, are "considerably higher than the UN agency estimates." Gerardo seemed to fit this category. Another potential "black swan," to use the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's own term, is the impact of environmen tal breakdown in the world. The numbers put out by agencies and organizations regarding the future displacement of people caused by climate change are in live debate and range between 150 million and 1 billion by 2050. According to one report, these displacements will be "staggering," without an antecedent in human history. Already disasters are displacing "three to ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Many claim that terrorist Muslims are entering the country solely to birth U.S. citizens that can be groomed and indoctrinated for future terrorist acts. Although according to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security there has never been even one case where this was found to be true,

According to an official document of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, right-wing extremists include “groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” It also includes those “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, played the part of the free-spending venture capitalist of that same heady era. Whereas in the nineties the goal was to develop the killer application, the “next new new thing,” and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new “search and nail” terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon.

and establishing the Gestapo of the 21st Century, The Department of Homeland Security, which is the enforcement arm of the Patriot Act.

China has its Great Firewall, and many nations have censorship embedded in the fabric of their web. In 2012, privacy groups initiated lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over its plans for an “Internet Kill Switch,” a legal wrangle that has continued as of this writing.[366] Possibly a greater threat than this, however,

An abridged list of victims includes Google, Booz Allen Hamilton, AT&T, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Visa, MasterCard, and the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Energy. Hacking is central to China’s decades-long campaign to steal technologies it can’t invent and intellectual property it can’t create.

Since the 2001 Amerithrax Anthrax spore “attacks,” HHS has increasingly been horizontally integrated with the intelligence community (see Chapter 21) as well as with the Department of Homeland Security to form a health security state with enormous ability to shape and enforce “consensus” through widespread propaganda, censorship, “nudge” technology, and intentional manipulation of the “Mass Formation” hypnosis process using modern adaptations of methods originally developed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels [417

What are you talking about? I’m not some terrorist.” “You’re apparently not familiar with the way the military and Homeland Security define ‘terrorist.’ We’re working together nowadays. It’s a wonderful world of mutual cooperation that enables us to detain ‘domestic extremists’ like yourself.” “What a pile of crap.” “My report says you think my employer is a police state. Are you saying you wouldn’t fight us over that quaint piece of paper we call the Constitution?” “Damn right.” “Well, there you are. In the eyes of the Justice Department, you’re an extremist. They were forward-thinking enough to include people like you in the guide they published to assist the military and Homeland Security in identifying who we could potentially detain indefinitely under the National Defense Authorization Act.

Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Appointed by Trump himself, Krebs had spent two years working to harden America’s election systems from outside interference. In the aftermath of the election, Krebs repeatedly countered Trump’s false stolen-election claims. On November 12, Krebs had issued a joint statement with other state and federal election officials explaining that “the 2020 election was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

Federal agencies and departments continued to closely monitor influencers. Even the Department of Homeland Security compiled a list of “media influencers” to monitor to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event,” causing waves of worry about the government’s interest in protecting or monitoring a free press.

While China was downplaying the virus, the number of infected patients and the number of dead, it was quietly buying up medical equipment and protective personal equipment from around the world. It simultaneously dropped its exports of medical supplies. Associated Press cited a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report, which stated that in early January 2020 the Chinese government “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic in order to allow for its own stockpiling of medical supplies.

We have the money. We've just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians' canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

In successive State of the Union addresses President Obama has warned of the danger of cyberattacks on our infrastructure. Government is adapting to the “new normal” of daily hacking, and cyber specialists such as Richard Clarke and George Cotter, who held senior government posts, have explained that the Russians and the Chinese are almost certainly inside the grid, mapping its vulnerabilities. Keith Alexander and Howard Schmidt warn that independent actors will soon have the capability to damage the grid, if they don’t have it already. If nothing else, the United States demonstrated with Stuxnet what a carefully planned cyberattack can do to the most securely defended equipment. Still, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including the current secretary, treat the likelihood of a crippling attack on one of the nation’s power grids as nothing more than a speculative threat, and an unlikely one at that.

To be fair to President Bush, however, his approach to revenue was not a new one. In 1980, the year when Planet Ponzi started to turn, the average effective federal tax rate on the median American household was 11.4%. By 2010, that rate had plummeted to just 4.7%.10 That is not a reasonable amount for the average family to pay in exchange for defense, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, homeland security, the Department of Education, environmental protection, and various other services besides. The results are all too predictable. If you want to understand why we have a deficit in the US, look at figure 3.2. The graph is unusual in that it aggregates all sources of government revenues: not just taxation but other fees, charges, utility revenues, rents‌—‌any money that leaves your pocket and ends up in the government’s.11

However, in order for the State to raise the price of this or any other services, some degree of public support is needed. Thus, the State will tend to provoke or allow crime or the threat of foreign aggression to increase, so that it may cite these security threats when expanding its own budget for defense. Take, for example, the destruction of the twin World Trade Center towers. Subsequent to the terror attacks on 9/11, the Department of Defense budget was massively increased, federal agents took over the role of providing airport security, and the Department of Homeland Security was born.

The callousness of the Obama administration on all of these issues was demonstrated on July 14, 2015, when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Under questioning by Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) about the murder of Kate Steinle by an illegal alien, Johnson made it clear he had no knowledge of the case: REP. CHABOT: Has the administration reached out to the Steinle Family, to your knowledge? SEC. JOHNSON: To who? REP. CHABOT: To the family of the woman who was brutally murdered by this individual who had committed seven different felonies in four different states and to my understanding had been deported, kept coming back, has the administration reached out to that family? SEC. JOHNSON: I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer to that question, sir. Perhaps no exchange speaks more cogently to the Obama administration’s icy indifference to the damages, injuries, deaths, and fallout from its illegal alien policies and its mishandling of immigration over the entire eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Reduced risk of solar flares: In 1859, a massive solar flare and geomagnetic storm hit the Earth. Magnetic storms induce electric currents in wires. Unfortunately for us, by 1859 we had wrapped the Earth in telegraph wires. The storm caused powerful currents in those wires, knocking out communications and in some cases causing telegraph equipment to catch fire. Since 1859, we’ve wrapped the Earth in a lot more wires. If the 1859 storm hit us today, the Department of Homeland Security estimates the economic damage to the US alone would be several trillion dollars—more than every hurricane that has ever hit the US combined.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2010) estimated that in January 2010 10.8 million undocumented immigrants were living in the United States,

federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined.

He has abused his authority over the Department of Homeland Security, and its component agencies charged with enforcement of the immigration laws, to confer an administrative amnesty on categories of illegal immigrants, which categories he has unilaterally defined, in order to undermine federal immigration laws and the constitutional authority of Congress to enact immigration law.

As a federal district court in Texas recently ruled, federal law “mandates the initiation of immigration removal proceedings whenever an immigration officer encounters an illegal alien who is not ‘clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.’” Moreover, the court explained, the Department of Homeland Security does not have “prosecutorial discretion” to ignore this requirement; Congress, not the president, has the plenary power to make immigration law; and the executive branch may not “implement measures that are incompatible with Congressional intent.

He and his subordinates have instituted a policy whereby American immigration agents assist human traffickers in assisting aliens with relatives in the United States to enter the United States illegally. A federal district judge in Texas has issued a court order noting “the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States.”7

to pull the wounded agent from the fight. Instead, the agent had to be loaded on to a horse and brought out of the area! Why is this happening? Obama’s rules. Taylor also told how in December of 2011, the Department of Homeland Security cancelled Close Air Support helicopters – even though they are very effective in helping

The scale of U.S. military operations is remarkable. The U.S. Department of Defense has (as of a 2014 inventory) 4,855 military facilities, of which 4,154 are in the United States; 114 are in overseas U.S. territories; and 587 are in forty-two foreign countries and foreign territories in all regions of the world.2 Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the U.S. intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of U.S. national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans’ benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.

By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. “If we make the wrong choice,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, “the danger is that we’ll get hit again—that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” In May, just prior to the Democratic Convention, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that al Qaeda’s preparations for an attack were 90 percent complete; immediately after the convention, the Department of Homeland Security issued yet another terrorist alert, which diverted America’s attention away from Kerry and back to the “wartime” president, George Bush. The strategy worked.

Several years ago, not long after the terror attacks on September 11, our police department managed to bilk Homeland Security out of a few million bucks so it could arm up and join the national craze of ETF—Extreme Terror Fighting. Never mind that our city is far away from the major metropolitan areas, or that there has been absolutely no sign of any jihadists around here, or that our cops already had plenty of guns and ninja gear. Forget all that—we had to be ready! So in the arms race that followed, our cops somehow got a new tank. And once they learned how to drive it, then, hell, it was time to use it.

Fast forward to today. Americans still have very few options when it comes to trying the lesser-known varieties of charcutería available to the Spanish people. Hope exists, however, that this may be soon rectified, as evidenced by the sweeping acquittal of many Italian cured-meat imports in April 2013.20 For now, anyway, we can travel to Spain and consume to our heart’s content. We can buy what precious little is available in our country. We can make it ourselves. Or we can make a futile attempt at stuffing contraband pork into our suitcases and pray, with the wide-eyed, guilt-laden face of a Colombian drug mule, not to get busted by the Department of Homeland Security. Just know that on this point, dear reader, I can offer a bit of personal advice: Getting caught is an epic fail of disastrous proportions, even if it’s not your fault. Case in point: After a trip to Madrid and the surrounding countryside, my Spanish “family” thought that they’d surprise me with a little package of morcilla secreted away in my suitcase. It was a gesture borne of more heart than brains, as ultimately it truly was a great surprise—especially when I found myself tagged for an agricultural check at a particularly thorough US Customs checkpoint. I simply didn’t understand. I’d filled out my Customs card and done everything right. Yet there I was, unloading my dirty unmentionables on a counter for God, curious passersby, and the TSA to look over and admire. And that’s when I caught a waft of

What Parenti and others have termed a “political theatrics of terror” includes also the military policing exercises intensified in the 1990s along the U.S. border region with Mexico. Operation Last Call—a vigorous round up of “Mexican-looking” people (they could be light-skinned African Americans, Chinese American, Caribbean, or other people of color, or even just white folk travelling with such)[156]—was a statewide assault by the then U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Now, after 9/11, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) runs similar operations, and was at the forefront of immigrant deportations throughout the Obama presidency.

A Department of Defense program known as “1033”, begun in the 1990s and authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, and federal homeland security grants to the states have provided a total of $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police forces, either for free or on permanent loan, the magazine Mother Jones reported. The militarization of the police, which includes outfitting police departments with heavy machine guns, magazines, night vision equipment, aircraft, and armored vehicles, has effectively turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well, into quasi-military forces of occupation. “Police conduct up to 80,00 SWAT raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early ‘80s”, writes Hanqing Chen, the magazine’s reporter. The American Civil Liberties Union, cited in the article, found that “almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios’. The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics are used disproportionately against people of color”.

The Obama administration has shown again and again that it has little interest in enforcing this country’s immigration laws and providing real border security. Judicial Watch has found evidence that, in essence, the administration gave the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol a Benghazi-style “stand down” order when it comes to enforcement, and has done everything it can to provide administrative amnesty, as well as government benefits, to millions of illegal aliens.

NCCIC delivers a full spectrum of cyber exercise planning workshops and seminars, and conducts tabletop, full-scale, and functional exercises, as well as the biennial National Cyber Exercise: Cyber Storm and the annual Cyber Guard Prelude exercise. These events are designed to assist organizations at all levels in the development and testing of cybersecurity prevention, protection, mitigation, and response capabilities.

Victims included U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections (SBOEs), secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities.186 The GRU also targeted private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administering election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations.187 The GRU continued to target these victims through the elections in November 2016. While the investigation identified evidence that the GRU targeted these individuals and entities, the Office did not investigate further. The Office did not, for instance, obtain or examine servers or other relevant items belonging to these victims. The Office understands that the FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the states have separately investigated that activity. By at least the summer of 2016, GRU officers sought access to state and local computer networks by exploiting known software vulnerabilities on websites of state and local governmental entities. GRU officers, for example, targeted state and local databases of registered voters using a technique known as "SQL injection," by which malicious code was sent to the state or local website in order to run commands (such as exfiltrating the database contents).188 In one instance in approximately June 2016, the GRU compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE's website. The GRU then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters,189 and extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious activity was identified.190 GRU officers [REDACTED: Investigative Technique] scanned state and local websites for vulnerabilities. For example, over a two-day period in July 2016, GRU officers [REDACTED: Investigative Technique] for vulnerabilities on websites of more than two dozen states.

Fall 2016. On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Trump speaking in graphic terms about women years earlier, which was considered damaging to his candidacy. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks made its second release: thousands of John Podesta's emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016. The FBI and other U.S. government institutions were at the time continuing their investigation of suspected Russian government efforts to interfere in the presidential election. That same day, October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint public statement "that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations." Those "thefts" and the "disclosures" of the hacked materials through online platforms such as WikiLeaks, the statement continued, "are intended to interfere with the US election process.