Global Entry participants and domestic travelers subject to constant government vetting
Homeland Security vets over nine million Americans a day!
I lost multiple years of my life reading the new Department of Homeland Security Annual Performance Report, which was published March 13, suckered one again — like Charlie Brown preparing to kick the football — into thinking that the multi-hundred page document would tell me something about the primary mission of DHS, which is protecting the United States from international terrorism. The not so surprising news though is this: Terrorism is hardly mentioned, and domestic terrorism is mentioned even less. But here’s the revelation. If you have Global Entry, or if you step on an airplane for a domestic flight, homeland security is checking you out — daily. Read on.
Not surprisingly, the foreign immigration problem is front and center described in various ways to obscure any big picture (performance looks something like ‘number of meals served’). Cyber-everything is also a safe zone for DHS to fret about, its overall endeavor a long-term campaign to get private industry to “partner” with the federal government in receiving information and assistance, all with the goal of having everyone apply central standards and “comply” with what Washington wants.
The only new endeavor seems to be what the report describes as the “emerging cyber-financial threat of Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO) using chain-hopping, privacy focused coins, and stable coins to mask/launder illicit proceeds,” transforming the hunt for financial transactions and money laundering.
“Transnational criminals continue to innovate new ways to commit fraud, like through their use of digital assets, requiring resourcing for training and tools to keep pace. The Secret Service continues to adapt to the evolving landscape of cyber-enabled financial crimes and will fine-tune the recording of metrics associated with emerging crimes and fraud schemes. Presently, the Secret Service is conducting a review of the investigative systems and metrics, which will result in technological and policy updates to more accurately capture and report loss amounts.”
Also revealed is that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE, “has the broadest authorities of any federal investigative agency to include investigating crimes related to the sexual exploitation of children, weapons smuggling, drug trafficking, network intrusion, money laundering, human trafficking, and theft of intellectual property.” The document tells us that “In FY 2022, HSI initiated over 1,000 Type 1-Initial significant Homeland Security Investigation cases, a 55 percent Year-Over-Year increase from FY 2021.” A 55 percent increase! Oy.
The rest of the report is filled with weird statistics:
63% of the Department’s strategic measures met their targets, the report says. The FY 2023-2024 performance plan includes a total of 99 measures of which 60% “sustained or improved performance” from the previous year. It sounds pretty low, but what do I know?
Between September 2021 and October 2022, the DHS intelligence component (I&A) prepared 241 “finished intelligence products,” final reports that had gone through vetting. Only 134 of them were shared with state, local, tribal, territorial, and “private sector partners,” and 232 of them were shared with the rest of the intelligence community. I’m curious about what those nine reports that weren’t shared with anyone were about.
“Illicit cross-border activity persisted at historic volumes, necessitating operational adjustments to facilitate humanitarian efforts as many facilities continued to operate well beyond capacity,” the report says. The report says that “a growing number … are from countries other than Mexico (66%) and [are being] exploited by criminal organizations.”
“Border Patrol agents interdicted over 2.3 million of approximately 3 million detected illegal entries (75.9%) on the Southwest Border in FY 2022.” That’s specifically 2,320,442 of 3,057,686 detected illegal entries, according to the report. If I read this correctly, does this mean that 25 percent weren’t caught?
“The rate of multiple encounters among migrants entering illegally on the Southwest Border decreased to 16.6% in FY 2022 after finishing 2021 at 26.6%,” the report says. Of 1,480,416 unique subjects encountered, 246,045 made at least a second attempt. At the same time though, the report says that Border Patrol agents made it to a detection site of illegal crossers “in a timely manner” (within 24 hours!) only 83.2 percent of the time, down from 96.9 percent in FY 2021. ““Agents reached sites with indications of possible activity in remote, low-risk areas within 24 hours at a rate of 83.2% after notification from CBP’s Office of Intelligence (OI) in FY 2022,” the report says. Did the number of second-encounter individuals really decline? Who knows.
The number of “Known Traveler Number holders” — those with TSA Pre and Global Entry and other travel documents — increased to over 31 million, the report says. Global Entry, had 7,404,648 participants as of October 1, 2022, and the number of additional applicants surpassed 10 million in FY 2022. That number exceeds the previous records of approximately three million applicants prior to the pandemic in 2019, the report says.
And then comes the gem of a revelation:
About 12,000 Global Entry members have had their special status revoked as of the end of FY 2022, the report says. “CBP checks all GE members against major law enforcement databases every 24 hours,” the report says. “The measure demonstrates the effectiveness of the GE trusted traveler program at correctly identifying low-risk travelers and quickly incorporating any changes in traveler risk-status that result in suspension or removal to ensure that all active GE members meet required security protocols at all times.”
In English? If you are a Global Entry user, your name is run through government and commercial databases daily to look for derogatory information. “The CBP National Targeting Center checks all current GE members against major law enforcement databases every 24 hours to identify any GE members who have a law enforcement violation, derogatory information related to terrorism, membership expiration, or any other legitimate reason to warrant suspending or revoking trusted status and conducting a regular primary inspection,” the report says.
And not only that. TSA looks at an average of two million domestic airline passengers every day to “vet” the travelers for derogatory information. “TSA continues efforts with Amtrak to determine strategies for vetting rail passengers,” the report says, coming soon. What’s TSA looking for? Obvious those on various terrorist watch lists and no-fly lists, and something mysterious called the “PreCheck Disqualification Protocol.” The TSA also says that has to update its vetting program to “reflect recent changes in privacy, security postures, and evolving threats.” I think that means political activists that the government and the elite don’t tolerate, those that they call domestic terrorists.
The latest development on this front is that the US government is now demanding that it -as in the US Department of Homeland Security - should get access to government registers of identity, personal information such as medical info, biometrics eg DNA, and police records…..in all European countries. By 2026. Or people from these countries will be forced to apply manually for visas every time they wish to travel to the US.
Some are doing it without question and some are making pantomime debates before inevitably doing it.
Its as if we dont know about thing about this and the Snowden revelations never happened.
Sheep.
Thank you for you boring reading with important and interesting results :)
By no means the same gravity, but I used to sit in every local Council meeting, including the meetings that made the real decisions before getting there. It was years of horrendousness, with sometimes the important part at the end of 5hrs of a sore arse when I was the only member of the Puiblic remaining. Or it was put under green pages which meant I would be told to leave the room so they could discuss it secretly.
That's South Africa but bureaucracy, corruption and politics is the same almost everywhere. And if that's the foundation, it can only get worse with each level up.