RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/how-isis-member-got-past-immigration-and-became-us-daniel-greenfield/

The year that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s Islamic terror state travel ban, an Iraqi member of ISIS applied for American citizenship.

Hawazen Sameer Mothafar didn’t have much to worry about. Not only was he already living in the United States, but under political pressure, Iraq had been taken off the travel ban list.

And no one would have suspected Mothafar of being an ISIS terrorist. He was in a wheelchair.

When Mothafar was asked at his immigrantion interview this year whether he was involved with a terrorist organization, he must have thought it was a formality. But three months later, Mothafar was under arrest, charged with lying to a government agency, and aiding ISIS.

Mothafar not only managed to get through an immigration interview while denying any terrorist ties, but he spoke in court through an Arabic translator, suggesting a poor grasp of English.

Not only did our immigration system make an alleged ISIS member a citizen, but took an immigrant with nothing to offer this country, who doesn’t even speak the language, and who, according to his lawyer, has to be cared for by his family, and welcomed him in.

Over a thousand Iraqi refugees have been resettled in Portland, Oregon. The small city of Troutdale near Portland, once an all-American locale perfect for picture postcards, has absorbed some of the spillover. And there was nothing all-American about Mothafar.

Mothafar hadn’t come to Troutdale for the annual summerfest parade (cancelled this year because of the pandemic) or hiking past waterfalls. When he came into town under the great ‘Gateway to the Gorge’ arch that’s Troutdale’s claim to fame, he was coming for Jihad.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16902/china-covid-economy

China’s economy is worse than it appears, and its vaccines, needed for a full recovery, are still in development, far behind America’s. In the meantime, Beijing’s response to the coronavirus, which includes the smearing of America, is resulting in China losing friends worldwide.

Government stimulus is powering much of the current growth as are net exports. Yet the current “flood of defaults” in China points to widespread weakness. Beijing’s spending spree, therefore, is not sustainable, even with the help of foreign investment.

Ultimately, the economy will recover only when China has an effective and safe vaccine. Although the Chinese have had months of head start, they are far behind America.

China is fast losing support in capitals around the world. It is not hard to figure out why. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping deliberately spread the virus beyond China’s borders — by lying about the transmissibility of the disease and, while locking down Wuhan, forcing countries to take arrivals from China — and others are now starting to understand the maliciousness of the Communist Party. Moreover, they are learning about its venality. For instance, China this spring sold Italy medical protective gear that Italians had donated to Beijing a few weeks earlier.

The U.K.-based Centre for Economics and Business Research believes that, due to China’s superior response to COVID-19, the Chinese economy will become the world’s largest by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast.

“For some time, an overarching theme of global economics has been the economic and soft power struggle between the United States and China,” the Centre wrote in a December 26 report. “The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic fallout have certainly tipped this rivalry in China’s favor.”

No, it has not. In fact, the opposite looks to be true. The Centre’s prediction, which mimics one of Beijing’s narratives, is more than just premature. It is based on fundamentally wrong assumptions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16874/mexico-border-drug-trafficking

In a border community like El Paso, the Mexican cartels have an insidious, silent and powerful control that few people wish to acknowledge or accept — that includes a largely compliant news media who usually report what happens, but rarely, if ever, ask “Why?” or “How can this go on, decade after decade, without accountability or resolution?”

If a population is dying from overdoses that is one-third as large as the COVID pandemic — and we don’t see, don’t hear about it, and apparently don’t really care about it, what does that say about us?

Tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, billions of taxpayer dollars, fifty years — and the highest overdose rate in history? It is terribly unpopular to blame law enforcement, especially when they are being unfairly attacked by the militant fringe elements like Antifa and various lunatic municipal officials seeking to defund them — but cleaning house within various agencies and increasing police pay would go a long way towards thwarting our greatest domestic threat.

A year ago, President Donald J. Trump declared he would name Mexican Cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He paused his decision, and then tabled it, based on assurances from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a reported wave of resistance from his own cabinet. The incoming Biden administration has the cartels virtually “high-fiving” each other — they know a Biden administration will do nothing to stop cartel dominance and control of the US-Mexico border.

Here is the answer: Law enforcement corruption. The question? Why are we continuing to fight and lose the “War on Drugs,” proclaimed by President Nixon, almost fifty years ago, in June 1971?

Think about the U.S. forces arrayed against Mexican drug cartels: DEA, FBI, Homeland Security, state police forces, county sheriffs, municipal police forces, even the postal service. We have established High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task forces with their own regional fusion centers.

https://www.newsweek.com/yes-cyber-spying-that-bad-opinion-1556487

The United States has been attempting to strengthen its cybersecurity since at least 1988, when it enacted the first Computer Security Act—replaced in 2002 by the Federal Security Management Act. It sounds great in concept: federal agencies are required to “develop, document, and implement” programs for security management “including those provided or managed by another agency, contractor, or other source.”

How’s it working out?

Solarwinds, a network management software company, was recently discovered to have had malware inserted into its products. Its clients’ systems have been compromised for as long as nine months. Someone—possibly the Russians, possibly the Chinese—has been inside the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department and major American industries. The list gets longer every day.

The U.S. has a cybersecurity industry that costs the government and private companies billions of dollars. But all that is money down the toilet if the entire infrastructure is compromised—which it currently is. Virtually every computer and computer processor used in the United States is, in part or entirely, made in foreign countries, with China directly and indirectly providing 90 percent of the hardware. We haven’t been looking at hardware for possible infiltration, but we should have been.

/https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/deep-state-strike-force-lloyd-billingsley/

The DOJ (Sessions, Rosenstein), FBI (Comey, Strzok), and CIA (Brennan) were all key players in the attempted coup against President Trump. As that unfolded, and long before, a more powerful agency was playing a bigger role, largely out of sight from the media and public.

The Senior Executive Service (SES) was established to “ensure that the executive management of the Government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the Nation and otherwise is of the highest quality.” SES leaders “serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees” as “the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce. They operate and oversee nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies,” including the State Department, the Army, Navy, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.

The SES launched during the Carter administration as part of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and a response to the “moral and management failures of Watergate and Great Society program implementation.” The response was to create another bureaucracy more powerful than the others, “a cadre of high-level managers in the government.”  In 1981, Karlyn Barker of the Washington Post reported that the SES wasn’t working as intended, and that raised an issue.

Back in 1978, Rep. Herb Harris, Virginia Democrat, warned that the SES “will open the door to politicization.” The government provides evidence that the SES was political from the start.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/12/18/as-bad-as-that-hack-of-u-s-government-agencies-was-its-far-worse-than-you-think-n1218811

Information about the massive hack of U.S. government networks just keeps getting worse and worse. Now we learn that America’s nuclear infrastructure was probably compromised, starting with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees a broad range of nuclear activities and includes the NNSA — the National Nuclear Security Administration. It makes and stores the nuclear weapons.

Politico:

They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE.

The hackers have been able to do more damage at FERC than the other agencies, and officials there have evidence of highly malicious activity, the officials said, but did not elaborate.

It’s not likely the hackers were able to penetrate the really sensitive information. The Pentagon says that the malware employed only affected business systems.

“At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only, and has not impacted the mission essential national security functions of the department, including the National Nuclear Security Administration,” Hynes said in a statement. “When DOE identified vulnerable software, immediate action was taken to mitigate the risk, and all software identified as being vulnerable to this attack was disconnected from the DOE network.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/hack-of-federal-government-larger-than-previously-thought-warns-cisa_3623466.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-12-17-5

The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Thursday that the hacking campaign that targeted the federal government is larger than what was previously known.

The alleged foreign actors gained backdoor access in more ways than through the SolarWinds software, which was publicly disclosed by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this week.

“One of the initial access vectors for this activity is a supply chain compromise of the following SolarWinds Orion products. CISA has evidence of additional initial access vectors, other than the SolarWinds Orion platform; however, these are still being investigated,” CISA said in a statement on Thursday.

But it stressed that the “SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise is not the only initial infection vector this advanced persistent threat actor leveraged.”

The agency also furthermore warned that the threat “poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities” as well as the private sector.

Foreign hackers, whose country of origin is not known, compromised “government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and private sector organizations” starting in March 2020 or before, according to CISA.

The cybersecurity agency noted that it “expects that removing this threat actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging for organizations,” adding: “It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures that have not yet been discovered.”