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HOMELAND SECURITY

It’s Official: Joe Biden Is the Absolute Worst Protector of the Border in U.S. History By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/10/23/its-official-joe-biden-is-the-absolute-worst-protector-of-the-border-in-u-s-history-n1639289

The U.S. fiscal year ends on September 30, which means the final numbers on illegal aliens attempting to cross our border are in. There were 227,000 attempted border crossers in September — the highest September numbers in history. The total attempted border crossers for FY 2022 were 2.3 million — also the highest ever recorded.

Buried in the Border Patrol release was the fact that 20 known or suspected terrorists were caught at the border in September, bringing the total number of terrorists captured at the border in 2022 to 98.

“While failing regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua continued to drive a new wave of migration across the western Hemisphere, the number of Venezuelans arriving at the southern border decreased sharply nearly every day since we launched additional joint actions with Mexico to reduce irregular migration and create a more fair, orderly and safe process for people fleeing the humanitarian and economic crisis in their country,” CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said in a press release.

Would you describe this process of getting rid of Venezuelans “fair, orderly and safe”?

El Paso Times:

Border Patrol is moving around migrants it intends to expel to Mexico in what it calls “lateral transfers” to reduce overcrowding in its holding facilities in El Paso and to keep from further overwhelming Juárez, where hundreds of Venezuelans have been left on the street to fend for themselves and with orders to leave Mexico “by their own means.”

“We’re doing it an effort to decompress the Central Processing Center” in El Paso, said Border Patrol El Paso Sector spokeswoman Valeria Morales. The holding facility in Northeast El Paso has been overcrowded for weeks, amid a sharp increase in migration through the region.

The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness A new Heritage Foundation report warns about declining U.S. naval and air power.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-growing-military-weakness-heritage-foundation-index-of-u-s-military-strength-navy-air-force-army-11666029967?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Americans like to think their military is unbeatable if politicians wouldn’t get in the way. The truth is that U.S. hard power isn’t what it used to be. That’s the message of the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength, which is reported here for the first time and describes a worrisome trend.

Heritage rates the U.S. military as “weak” and “at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.” The weak rating, down from “marginal” a year earlier, is the first in the index’s nine-year history.

***

The index measures the military’s ability to prevail in two major regional conflicts at once—say, a conflict in the Middle East and a fight on the Korean peninsula. Americans might wish “that the world be a simpler, less threatening place,” as the report notes. But these commitments are part of U.S. national-security strategy.

Heritage says the U.S. military risks being unable to handle even “a single major regional conflict” as it also tries to deter rogues elsewhere. The Trump Administration’s one-time cash infusion has dried up. Pentagon budgets aren’t keeping up with inflation, and the branches are having to make trade-offs about whether to be modern, large, or ready to fight tonight. The decline is especially acute in the Navy and Air Force.

The Navy has been saying for years it needs to grow to at least 350 ships, plus more unmanned platforms. Yet the Navy has shown a “persistent inability to arrest and reverse the continued diminution of its fleet,” the report says. By one analysis it has under-delivered on shipbuilding plans by 10 ships a year on average over the past five years.

From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew to 296 warships from 291, while China’s navy grew to 360 from 216. War isn’t won on numbers alone, but China is also narrowing the U.S. technological advantage in every area from aircraft carrier catapults to long-range missiles.

The Pentagon’s Recruiting Woes Fewer young people want or are able to serve, a big problem for U.S. security.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagons-recruitment-woes-army-military-navy-air-force-u-s-defense-11665664019?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The U.S. Army recently told the press that it missed its fiscal year recruiting goal by 25%, coming up short nearly 20,000 soldiers. For 50 years America has relied on volunteers to defend the country, but that system is a luxury maintained at a cost, and its struggles deserve attention.

The Army’s troubles are acute but not unique. The Air Force barely hit its numbers for 2022. The Navy met its targets for enlisted sailors but came up short about 200 officers. Both the Navy and Air Force had to dip into “delayed entry” pools of recruits usually kept in a holding pattern for later, which means the services will start a new recruiting year in an even tougher position. The numbers are worse in the reserves.

Several factors are contributing to the shortfall. Fewer than one-quarter of Americans ages 17 to 24 are eligible to serve, and the reasons for disqualification include obesity, addiction and criminal history. The decision to close high schools during the pandemic kept recruiters at bay and left many teens mentally unwell, another disqualification.

Record job openings and Covid transfer payments hurt enlistment, but the problems run deeper. Fewer than one in 10 youth are inclined to serve, according to survey data. Dismal civic education hasn’t helped; teenagers taught to think America is a racist or imperialist country won’t wear the uniform.

Cybersecurity Awareness: Chuck Brooks

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cybersecurity-awareness-chuck-brooks

With another National Cybersecurity Awareness Month upon us, few major things have changed from the past year in terms of threats. As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions from malware and hackers. The cyber- threat actor ecosystem has grown in both size and sophistication. They are also openly collaborating in sharing targets. And tools. The cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states.

Information sharing on threats and risk is one of the most principal functions of government and industry collaboration.

Achieving a full awareness of nefarious actors who operate in the cyber realm and protecting against their capabilities is an arduous task. Clearly, industry cannot respond to growing cyber-threats alone, especially for small and medium businesses who lack the resources and expertise. Increased government and industry cooperation to meet those challenges is a viable course to help mitigate threats and challenges. It is a proven risk management model that makes good sense. In several areas.

Information sharing on threats and risk is one of the most principal functions of government and industry collaboration. Sharing such information helps allow both government and industry to keep abreast of the latest viruses, malware, phishing threats, ransomware, and insider threats. Information sharing also establishes working protocols for lessons-learned and resilience that is critical for the success of commerce and the enforcement against cyber-crimes.

Both Solar Winds and the Colonial pipeline breaches highlighted the government’s assistance in mitigating breaches and moving toward resilience. Government was directly collaborating with the companies to discover the extent of the breaches and options for amelioration.

Remediation of breaches is important to continuity; no matter what, breaches will happen. The incorporation of best practices and the lessons learned from the various and many corporate breaches over the past few years is certainly valuable data for both industry and government in terms of prevention, recovery, and continuity.

US Intelligence Warning: China Escalating Influence Operations by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18904/us-intelligence-warning-china-escalating

One of the organizations that US intelligence explicitly warned against is the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which describes itself as a “national people’s organization engaged in people-to-people diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China.”

In reality, the organization is a front for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign influence efforts. It has been operating successfully in the US for decades, especially by forging numerous sister-city relationships with US cities to influence local US political, business, media, and educational leaders. There are more than two hundred sister city pairs and fifty sister state/province partnerships between the US and China. Such partnerships, according to US intelligence, can also include business, technical, cultural, and educational exchanges between U.S. and Chinese communities.

China uses the same tactics when it comes to US business leaders: In 2021, “the PRC Embassy in Washington sent letters to select U.S. business leaders urging them to lobby the U.S. Congress to reject bills the PRC opposed, including bills designed to increase U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China….

[T]hese politicians have a strong incentive to remain uninformed. The focus is typically on economic and cultural ties and it’s easy to pretend that there is no political element… however, these local ties are in fact highly political…. This is the tactic of ‘use the countryside to surround the city'”. — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, 2021

China is doubling down on its efforts to influence state and local government leaders in the United States by exploiting the existing web of regional and local US-China relations, one of the main US intelligence agencies, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), warned in July.

154 Scientists at Los Alamos Nuke Lab Defected to China by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/154-scientists-at-los-alamos-nuke-lab-defected-to-china/

Defected of course implies that they ever worked for any nation other than China.

It’s a good thing that the Biden administration corruptly shut down the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Communist China from spying on us, manipulating us and robbing us blind to avoid offending anyone… like Beijing.

“We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the “China Initiative” fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only heightens these concerns.”

Goodbye China Initiative and U.S. National Security.

At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked on government-sponsored research at the U.S.’s foremost national security laboratory over the last two decades have been recruited to do scientific work in China — some of which helped advance military technology that threatens American national security — according to a new private intelligence report obtained by NBC News.

The report, by Strider Technologies, describes what it calls a systemic effort by the government of China to place Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were first developed.

Many of the scientists were later lured back to China to help make advances in such technologies as deep-earth-penetrating warheads, hypersonic missiles, quiet submarines and drones, according to the report.

We are literally financing our own destruction in every possible way. It’s not surprising that Communist China would want to plant its own people at Los Alamos. The mindboggling thing is that they were able to plant over 150 of them. No waiting.

Two CAIR Broadcasts in One Day The steady advance of America’s branch of Hamas. by Larry Estavan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-cair-broadcasts-in-one-day/

Two TV newscasts about the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations show a number of qualities that are present in almost all of CAIR’s TV appearances.

CAIR is on TV every day. If it misses a day, it will be on two, three, or four times or more on the following day. Last year, CAIR was on TV over 440 times.
When CAIR is on TV, it is always positive coverage. None of the hundreds and hundreds of yearly presentations of CAIR in the TV news are even mildly critical of the group.
There is always something wrong, obscured, or misrepresented in the broadcast.
The TV reports often recite CAIR press releases almost word for word.

This Monday KDFW broadcast begins by showing us still images of people wearing hairnets in a large room.

On the 911 national day of service today, the DFW chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations spent the afternoon working to help feed the hungry here in north Texas. Volunteers packed more than 100,000 meals and care packages. Their mission? To protect civil rights, enhance understanding of Islam, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.

It might take more than one viewing to realize that CAIR isn’t feeding anybody. CAIR reps are only stuffing the packages on behalf of another organization, U.S. Hunger, which KDFW never mentions even once in the broadcast. By practically reading word for word from CAIR’s press release, KDFW has produced a commercial for CAIR.

National Security Threat: China’s Eyes in America by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18885/china-drones-dji-spying

The Chinese company DJI controls nearly 90% of the world market for consumer and commercial grade drones.

The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts. Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user’s contacts, photos, GPS location, and online activities.

Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.

DJI is engaged in a fierce lobbying effort to prevent passage of the ASDA bill. So fierce that they have enlisted police officers from local jurisdictions to come to Washington and lobby congressional staffers about how great DJI drones are for their cash-strapped local forces…. DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy & Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company spent $2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last year on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to information they can scour is of more value to them than the product used to get it.

Understanding these patterns is central to recognizing that the Chinese do this to their own people as well…. [through] many different forms of what we may baldly call blackmail.

The Wilson Center, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, reported in 2017 that a small community of PRC students and diplomats have engaged in intimidation tactics ranging from intelligence gathering to financial retaliation… It was just those sorts of concerns that led the Trump administration to create the “China Initiative” within the Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of convictions of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and other forms of industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the program this year….

China’s strategy has for years hinged on infiltration by some Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad in the US and other western nations, with threats against their Chinese relatives as leverage for them to do so.

Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.

Biden Chooses New IRS Agents Over Border Security By the time you read this, 5 million illegals will have entered our country since he took over.Jenny Beth Martin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/biden-chooses-new-irs-agents-over-border-security-jenny-beth-martin/

By the time you read this, 5 million illegal immigrants will have entered our country since Joe Biden took over the presidency. That’s a stunning number, a number that destroys all previous records. You might think that with an all-out assault like that on our immigration laws, Biden would be begging the Congress for tens of billions of dollars to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents to better get a handle on the surge of illegal immigration.

If you thought that, you’d be wrong. Instead, Biden asked Congress for funding for 87,000 new IRS employees, so he could double the number of audits targeted at middle-class taxpayers.

Clearly, Biden doesn’t mind that many illegal border crossers. That’s a fair deduction, given his decision to stop enforcing our immigration laws.

That Biden actually made a decision to stop enforcing our immigration laws is evident – not just on our southwestern border, where the number of encounters with illegal aliens is at an all-time high, but throughout the rest of the country, where more than a million so-called “asylum seekers” are allowed to live while awaiting their immigration court dates (for which a huge percentage will never show up).

TSA is Allowing Illegal Immigrants on Planes with ARREST WARRANTS for ID Flying the friendly skies at taxpayer expense. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/house-republicans-want-know-why-tsa-allowing-robert-spencer/

Could the Biden administration all be some huge joke? A parody or some crazy dark comedy in which a career political hack with rapidly advancing dementia somehow becomes president and bumbles around as his radical handlers begin implementing a dizzying number of measures to weaken America and endanger Americans? Is there anything the Biden administration is doing that would make it clear that this is not actually what’s happening here?

The latest appalling news to come from Biden’s handlers is that they are allowing illegal immigrants to board commercial planes using their arrest warrants as identification. No, they’re not then arrested. They’re just flying the friendly skies, thanks to the munificence of Old Joe. Of course, that’s our money they’re spending, but what else is new?

Fox News reported Tuesday that some Republicans in the House are upset about this and are “calling for the Biden administration to provide additional information on what they call an ‘extremely troubling’ policy that allows illegal immigrants to board planes using civil arrest warrants and other related documents as ID.” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and twenty-three other Republicans wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, asking him why the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) allows illegal immigrants to fly around with “civil immigration arrest warrants and deportation orders” as their only identification.

The letter notes that aside from the obvious problems with this, “these documents are not secure documents and can easily be forged, copied, or otherwise manipulated. Given the fact that American citizens are constantly being reminded that their IDs will soon need to be REAL ID compliant to board an airplane, it is extremely troubling that TSA is allowing illegal aliens to use nonsecure documents as IDs to board planes.”

It’s also a testimony to the breakdown of the proper enforcement of the law under this administration’s misrule. An illegal immigrant with deportation orders shouldn’t be able to board a plane anywhere except to a destination somewhere outside the United States. Instead, the deportation papers themselves allow him or her a taxpayer-funded joyride.