I was initially intrigued to read about the recent "malicious cyberattack" on a U.S. Customs and Border Protection subcontractor. My fascination quickly turned to alarm when I discovered the federal government downplayed the data breach, and that it was actually covert U.S. border detailed surveillance information that was stolen.
The Washington Post reported on Friday, "Hacked documents reveal sensitive details of expanding border surveillance."
The federal government initially said none of a 100,000 images of faces and license plates stolen in the cyberattack had been identified "on the Dark Web, the corner of the Internet where stolen documents are often traded and displayed … where files are hidden from search engines and accessible only through special software, such as the Tor browser, that allow for enhanced encryption and user anonymity." However, the Post reported on Friday, the feds "woefully understated the number of sensitive documents, totaling hundreds of gigabytes, that are now freely available on the Web."
Proof of that comes in the fact that the Post took "several days of computer time to capture it all." And what did the news agency find? The Post explained:
The documents offer an unusually intimate glimpse of the machinery that U.S. officials depend on for the constant monitoring of legal immigration through the border. They also illuminate the government's plans for expanding its use of license plate readers and facial-recognition cameras, including such details as how many cameras are focused on which traffic lanes at some of the busiest border crossings in the world.
The hoard of hacked documents includes detailed schematics, confidential agreements, equipment lists, budget spreadsheets, internal photos and hardware blueprints for security systems.
Among potentially sensitive government materials are internal Department of Homeland Security handbooks, border surveillance diagrams and dozens of signed nondisclosure agreements between the subcontractor and government authorities, as well as companies such as Microsoft and the defense-contracting giant Northrop Grumman.
To add insult to injury, "The files also offer extensive detail on – and, in some cases, a literal road map to – equipment that has been installed at U.S. military bases and the United States' most highly trafficked border gateways."
What?! Does that not alarm anyone else, especially with a southern border that's already as porous with illegal activity as a summer campground in a swamp being penetrated by mosquitos?
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington think tank, explained, "This is red meat for their competitors … [and] a whole set of domestic and foreign terrorists and criminals who might want to use that information."
On Thursday, U.S. Border Custom Chief Carla Provost told the House Homeland Security Committee that the agency has documented more than 100,000 immigrants who they know managed to illegally sneak past them and get into the interior of the country.
Provost explained to Congress, "This high level of 'got aways' is a direct result of agents being reassigned away from the frontline to provide humanitarian support to the unprecedented numbers of individuals and families in custody."
Provost words make me think about the ridiculous words of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from just a few months ago, calling president Trump's national security crisis at the border "an emergency he created. … An illusion he wanted to convey." Really?
Just this past week, a surge of Haitians were arrested every day at the U.S. southern border in Texas.
And the question that haunts me is: Who is responsible for the "malicious cyberattack" and theft of covert details about U.S. border surveillance? And what do they intend to do with that information?
Rio Grande Valley Sector Texas Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, one of the top officials that oversees border security for 277 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border and about 315 miles up the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, shared recently that there is nothing "manufactured" about the "border crisis."
Ortiz recently "apprehended 133 people from different countries other than Central America and Mexico. … From Pakistan, India, Romania, China, on and on and on."
Yes, you read that right: 133 migrants from different countries other than Central America and Mexico: people from India, Romania, China, Pakistan and other countries were apprehended in a single day before crossing illegally into the U.S. And that's what happened on just a single sector – a 277-mile stretch of our 2000-mile southern border.
Chief Ortiz clarified that he was indeed talking about one day: "Just in this sector alone 450 people were apprehended total. We continue to see increases. We are averaging about 620 a day in this sector [alone]." (And keep in mind that Ortiz explained at many border areas it takes only "15 [or] 20 seconds" to get into our country.)
Mrs. Pelosi, are Chief Ortiz's words or the illegal entrances just an illusion?
Are we really not concerned that there's even one bad apple in Ortiz's 620-a-day barrel of illegals trying to cross into our country? And what about the 100,000 illegals that Chief Provost just shared with Congress that have alluded U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents that have already come into our country?
I realize what a 2017 State Department report declared: there is "no credible evidence terrorist groups sent operatives via Mexico into the United States." But that's referring to the past. What about the future?
What liberal politicians and mainstream media are not telling you is what the rest of that report says: "The U.S. southern border remains vulnerable to potential terrorist transit. …" Why would we leave it that way?
What they also aren't telling you is that terrorists ARE attempting to enter our country right now. For proof of that, simply read the National Review's report: "Yes, We've Nabbed Terrorists on the Southern Border."
In 2012, after Osama Bin Laden was killed, the Los Angeles Times reported that his private papers revealed he apparently sought an operative with a valid Mexican passport, according to U.S. Intelligent analysts.
So, what's to stop a future recruitment of another terrorist operative from Mexico or one of the other 133 countries of those trying to cross illegally right now into Ortiz's sector of the U.S.? And how much easier did we just make it for them to do so by giving the Dark Web the U.S. covert border surveillance information through the recent cyberattack and hack?
Let me repeat the warning of Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology: "This is red meat for their competitors … [and] a whole set of domestic and foreign terrorists and criminals who might want to use that information."
What the mainstream media is not telling you is that potential terrorists are just one threat with liquid borders. Officials in Texas have also told us that thousands of child sexual predators are also pouring illegally through our southern border. Migrant children on the other side of the border are also at grave risk, as NPR recently reported: they have become unwilling mules to smuggle drugs into the U.S. for cartels, and their families are extorted to comply in lieu of their safe passage into our country.
Cartels are causing daily carnage on both sides of the border as Congress continues to dodge and delay dealing with our immigration crisis. As Time magazine reported on the conviction of drug king pin El Chapo, who still uses our southern border even from prison to propagate his mayhem in the U.S.: "[He] has left a trail of victims to rival any conventional war. In the U.S., there were more than 15,000 heroin-related deaths in 2016, a fivefold increase since 2010. In Mexico, the clash between rival cartels fighting one another and security forces over billion-dollar trafficking routes and other rackets is estimated to have killed more than 119,000 people over a decade. If the war on drugs were classified as a military conflict, it would be one of the world's deadliest." (And El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel is just one of only a dozen or so cartels or criminal organizations that together control 90 percent of the wholesale illicit drug market in the U.S.)
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed about 12 Americans each day are killed by illegal immigrants, though some challenge those findings.
And what about the billions of dollars taxpayers are spending to house more and more illegal criminals each year in U.S. prisons? Breitbart News reported, "Nearly 95 percent of foreign nationals in federal prison are illegal aliens, while the Bureau of Prisons data has revealed that about one-in-five inmates are foreign-born. There are close to 40,000 criminal illegal and legal immigrants incarcerated in federal prisons across the country, making up about 21 percent of the total federal prison population. [117,994 illegal immigrants and 43,618 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2016 alone.] Nearly all of those inmates are from Central and South America, resulting in a cost to U.S. taxpayers of about $1.4 billion every year."
I could say so much more, but I'm already well over my allotted column space. Anyone who knows me knows I love all peoples of the world. I'm all for immigration, but legal immigration.
For more jaw-dropping information about the real border crisis, please see my two-part articles: "Seven Clear and Present Dangers at the U.S. Borders and Ports: Part 1 and Part 2." They include but are not excluded to: identity theft, drug and gun trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and many other gang and criminal alien mayhem, including brainwashing and preying upon U.S. children through social media.
Please write your state and federal representatives today and demand that they finally and immediately fix our southern border and immigration crisis. All they have to do is enforce the laws already on the books. And please share this column with them and on your social media, because most people and even politicians are not aware of this breaking information.
Congress should also better secure government and federal contractors computer storage from hacks like the one that just stole secret border and defense information. Maybe they should also consider better vetting federal subcontractors.
Illusion and manufactured emergency, Mrs. Pelosi? I don't think so! As the head of the U.S. House of Representatives, culpability falls on you for enabling these continued criminalities.
I'll ask it one more time: Who is responsible for the "malicious cyberattack" and theft of covert details of expanding border surveillance? And what do they intend to do with that information?