Reports criticize DHS for lack of progress on IT
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AUGUST 20, 2004  - As the debate about adding a national intelligence director proceeds, two government reports are shedding new light on an existing dilemma: If DHS CIO Steven Cooper can&#39;t wrestle the agency&#39;s sprawling bureaucracy into ...
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A Bush administration initiative to secure the nation's ports is bogged down in industry opposition, technology flaws and evidence that it fails to safeguard workers' privacy, according to industry and government analysts.
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Most of the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement work is consumed not with stopping terrorists and unraveling their support networks, but with relatively minor administrative violations, according to a new analysis of federal records.
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State and local leaders have three years to establish and implement systems and practices needed to ensure seamless response to emergencies and incidents or else federal grants will be withheld, Homeland Security Department officials said this month.
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Despite hours of confrontational interviews of Bernard Kerik by the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, the White House failed to get a full picture of the legal and ethical problems of its nominee for homeland-security secretary, a government official
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WASHINGTON -- The government&#39;s top Defense and intelligence officials urged caution Tuesday in overhauling the nation&#39;s intelligence hierarchy in response to a damning report from the 9/11 Commission.
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More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has failed to create a unified U.S. fingerprint database because of agency infighting, meaning most visitors to the country still aren't fully screened for terrorist or criminal ties, the Justice Department's watchdog warned Wednesday.
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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hasn't finished implementing most of the IT security improvements recommended by federal auditors after a laptop containing sensitive data was stolen from an employee's home in May 2006.
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Government lawyers have hampered investigations into waste and fraud at the Homeland Security Department, officials told Congress on Tuesday.
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There's still too much paper to pluck from files. There's not enough sharing of information. Yet despite such problems, the government has been picking up speed in processing security clearances.
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DHS huddled masses tracker further delayed The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)'s plan to build hundreds of all-seeing networked surveillance towers along American borders has run into further problems. The project in question is the technology portion of the Secure Borders Initiative (SBI).â¦
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The federal government still has limited capacity to detect a disease outbreak and track its progress across the country.
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The US government may not be spending enough on oversight of state activities that uncover and deter fraud in the Medicaid health program, according to a congressional watchdog agency report released Thursday.
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Nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics reported by the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI from the September 11 attacks until early 2005 had some inaccuracies, the department's inspector general said on Tuesday.
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Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and other U.S. allies aren't doing enough to combat human trafficking, according to a State Department report, and the countries could face sanctions if they don't take steps to improve.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS)Â CIO was on the hot seat Wednesday on Capitol Hill after an independent audit found that a database that screens U.S. visitors lacked security controls. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee called on DHS CIO Scott Charbo to explain why he should keep his job after persistent cybersecurity problems at the agency. "What happened to leadership?" Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman and a Mississippi Democrat, said during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science, and Technology. "What happened to accountability?" Lawmakers also said they were concerned that the agency reported 844 cybersecurity incidents in 2005 and 2006. "Although we still have a ways to go, we've made measurable improvements in the management of information security at the department," Charbo said. "Certainly, we need to increase our vigilance to ensure that such incidents do not happen again." Many of the 844 incidents were minor, and the agency has taken major steps to fix past cybersecurity issues, Charbo said. Many of the reported cybersecurity incidents related to problems like lost laptops that did not result in data breaches, he added. The subcommittee did not have a breakdown of the incidents Wednesday. Asked about reports of bots installed on DHS computers that could send information out to hackers, Charbo said he had "no evidence" that the bots caused a breach. Thompson's comments came as the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report saying DHS continues to have "significant weaknesses in computer security controls that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of key ... systems." GAO investigators found no security controls on the US-VISIT database, the system that screens people who want to visit the U.S. for potential terrorists and criminals. Lawmakers are concerned whether terrorists could get into the database "and change or alter their names to allow them access to this country, and we wouldn't even know that they're doing it," said Representative Bob Etheridge, a North Carolina Democrat. A contractor provides IT security for US-VISIT, but DHS has its own security controls in place to protect the database, Charbo said. He didn't disclose specific security measures. The GAO doesn't have evidence that the US-VISIT database was breached, said Keith Rhodes, chief technologist and director of the GAO's Center for Technology and Engineering. "I did not see controls in place that would prevent it," Rhodes said. "I did not see defensive perimeters, and I did not see detection systems in place whether it had or had not [been breached]." GAO started a cybersecurity review of DHS a year ago but curtailed its efforts because it kept finding "more and more" problems, Rhodes said. "If we had continued to this day, I would argue we'd still be finding things," he said. "The problems were pervasive. The problems were systemic." Charbo outlined recent measures DHS has taken to improve cybersecurity there. The agency is collapsing multiple legacy WANs into a single WAN, and it is standardizing all e-mail and directory services onto a single platform, he said. The agency had 13 separate e-mail systems when it was formed out of 22 U.S. agencies in 2002, he said. DHS also is combining multiple data centers into a shared center, he said. Thompson asked how DHS officials can preach cybersecurity practices to other agencies and private companies while continuing to have its own problems. Among the incidents DHS reported were employees sending out classified documents on unclassified networks and contractors attaching unauthorized laptops to the DHS network, he said. "How can the Department of Homeland Security be a real advocate of sound cybersecurity practices without following some of its own advice?" he said. "What the department is doing on its own network speaks so loud that the message isn't getting across to anyone else."
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Administrative problems, not politics, led to a report that falsely showed a decline in worldwide terror attacks last year, the State Department inspector general's office said Tuesday.