The February issue of the British-based magazine Aviation Security International features an in-depth article laying out in detail the 9/11 Commission recommendations that, if implemented, could have directly affected the success of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab's boarding of Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day. Read more...

From a Mexican friend of a friend, who titles the video below Trafficking Drugs in Bottles of Water and notes how clever this method of transporting drugs is. Everyone carries water, especially those crossing the southwest from Mexico. How easy, convenient, and terribly unsuspicious. Read more...

In the president's new proposed budget, funding has been zeroed out for the one tool on the books that can help secure domestic aviation by assuring that people are who they say they are. While the president accuses those who work for him of not "connecting the dots" to stop a terrorist attack, he and his Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, seem to continually fail to do so themselves. This is the case even though Secretary Napolitano seems sincere in her desire to strengthen aviation security. Read more...

Ever since the facts trickled out that Christmas Day attacker Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had a valid visa to the United States despite his father's in-person intelligence provided to CIA officials at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, the issue of why his visa was not revoked has been a top priority issue for the president, the press, and those of us that do national security policy development in Washington. During the discussions of why Abdulmutallab's visa was not revoked, we heard a dozen different excuses. Here are some of the best. Read more...

Janice Kephart was featured in an interview with Security-News.tv regarding ID security in the wake of the alleged Christmas Day plot. You can listen to the interview in either an mp3 or m4a format. Read more...

The REAL ID Act of 2005 sought to secure state driver license ID issuance practices and require those secure IDs be presented at airports to create a more hardened aviation security system. Although unsaid, it is well-documented that any federal officer at a portal with no means other than a black light, some minimal training, and eyesight, is significantly curtailed in identifying fraud. Read more...

The State Department last week downplayed the decision to drop the 2004 visa revocation of Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan, enabling him to reapply for a visa. Only during questioning of the new policy during a January 20 press conference covering many other topics (principally Haiti) was it made clear that if Ramadan reapplies for a visa, any possible terrorist ties will simply not be considered – ties which rendered him inadmissible in 2004. Read more...

The CNN segment on the Christmas Day Plot below features Janice Kephart discussing why we need to think about this plot not so much as an intelligence failing, but a successful terrorist travel operation akin to that used by the 9/11 hijackers. She also discusses the need to re-vet visas close to time of travel. Read more...

Dear Mr. President,

As an American and former counsel to the 9/11 Commission familiar with substantial failings of our government to foil the September 11 terrorist attack, I am concerned about the tenor of your comments of January 5, 2010. You point to "substantial failings" of the intelligence community who held "sufficient information" yet "did not connect the dots," an outcome you find "unacceptable and I will not tolerate." Read more...

Below are the full set of interviews I did with BBC 2 Radio in the last 24 hours. In all, my comments follow President Obama's statements regarding his review of the Christmas Plot. Read more...

A key secure driver's license deadline of December 31, 2009, has now been pushed back to May 11, 2011, due to the Secretary of Homeland Security's failure to push through Congress her top priority for this Congress: repeal of a law known as REAL ID that encapsulated the intent of the 9/11 Commission recommendation pertaining to state-issued ID security. For the past year, even before former Arizona Gov. Read more...

"The Cat in the Hat" fancies an exasperating experience when two bored children receive an unwelcome visit from a naive and arrogant cat who causes destruction, and then more. I thought it an appropriate analogy to these first 300 days or so with the Obama administration.

Here the Cat is President Obama, Thing One Harry Reid and Thing Two Nancy Pelosi. Sally and her brother are intelligence agents with their hands tied in the new administration. Read more...

Our borders are not secure, despite claims to the contrary by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. And she and others have linked their case for "comprehensive immigration reform" to such security. Read more...

As the January 1, 2010, deadline approaches for REAL ID compliance -- a deadline that could leave airline passengers all over the country delayed in TSA lines for failure to have a federally certified secure driver license -- DHS Secretary Napolitano faces a quandary: enforce the law she is trying to repeal, or risk turning a law for which she is responsible for implementing into a joke. Read more...

Cooking up Thanksgiving-style metaphors, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano stated yesterday that "E-Verify is at the centerpiece of our efforts to maintain a legal workforce both for large and small businesses." She quickly added that "employers need to be held accountable for maintaining a legal workforce” and “our commitment to this approach is growing." It seems that E-Verify has made its way onto the menu for immigration fixings, so much so it holds a prominent position in the center of the immigration reform table. Read more...

Today’s top news is that the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is finally getting a trial, not by a military commission, but in a courtroom in New York City. Four others that were also key to assuring logistics and finances for the plot will likely be indicted and tried with KSM, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder during a press conference this morning. Read more...

The Supreme Court seems increasingly interested in taking on immigration-related cases. In its last term, the Court took on four cases involving illegal aliens, and in three of them, the illegal alien won. Now the Court is asking the President Obama's appointee for Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, to produce a brief in the Ninth Circuit case that challenged the legality of Arizona's mandatory E-Verify law for businesses. Read more...

The Obama Administration is ignoring hard and unpleasant lessons learned from decades of prior failed immigration policies. "Alternatives to Detention" (ATD) is just another way to say "Catch and Release," which was the thorn in the side of the prior administration until they stopped it and put rule of law in place. Although managing detention facilities and their population well is a good goal, simply doing it by reducing the illegal population and dispersing them back into American communities does not help enforce immigration law or make our communities more secure. Read more...

Editor's Note: Janice Kephart presented the information below at Heritage Homeland Security University on October 1, 2009. Accompanying the presentation is a table containing status updates of various national security programs.

The following is an overview of Border ID Programs and a comparison of where these program were under the Bush Administration and where they stand today under the Obama Administration. Read more...

On 9/11, I was in Old Town Alexandria, Va., celebrating the first morning of my son entering preschool. It wasn't long before I noticed the cars coming south from the Pentagon, the smoke billowing into the air into clear blue skies, and the looks of fear and sadness on the faces of the drivers moving past me. Read more...

In late July, the Senate Homeland Security Committee passed out of committee the PASS ID Act, the "repeal and replace REAL ID" legislation promised by DHS Secretary Napolitano to the Nationals Governors Association (NGA), the lobbying shop in which she was extremely active during her tenure as Arizona governor. Read more...

Since the July 15, 2009, posting of the Center for Immigration Studies’ video, “Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border: Coyotes, Bears, and Trails," a lot has happened. None of it can be claimed to have been caused by the video, but there has been an interesting uptick in events in Washington and on the southeast Arizona border since its posting. While each of the events involving the federal government has acquired a hue of spin or premeditated silence, it does seem that a change is a coming – if the pressure keeps mounting. The Border Patrol is ramping up, the Forest Service has closed off some of the worst illegal layup areas due to potential bear encounters, and Congress is asking a lot of questions. Read more...

In November 2008, an illegal immigrant facing deportation and running for political office in Rhode Island was prosecuted and found guilty of using her position as a Rhode Island DMV clerk to sell driver's licenses to "out of state" drug dealers with stolen identities. The scam included 11 others. Read more...

Today I participated in a REAL ID v. PASS ID event at the Heritage Foundation. For the Heritage event, I created a Powerpoint presentation covering the following topics:

• the key flaws of PASS ID including the elimination of identity verification;
• the one benefit of PASS ID in enabling Enhanced Driver Licenses to be deemed compliant (which could simply be an add-on to REAL ID); and
• the importance of birth record digitization and interstate connectivity mandated by REAL ID but eliminated by PASS ID, resulting in a tremendous loss for every state's anti-fraud measures.

I spoke with Zack Martin of Secure ID News on June 17, 2009 for a podcast on the newly introduced PASS ID Act (S. 1261), which would repeal REAL ID driver license provisions. Read more...

Most European countries -- including Croatia, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain -- are among those with compulsory national ID card requirements on their citizenry. Non-compulsory national ID cards are issued by Canada, Finland, Iceland, France (previously compulsory), Sweden, and Switzerland. The European Union offers these ID cards as valid EU travel documents in place of a passport. Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom are the few holdouts in not offering a national ID card. Read more...

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative reported its first 24 hours of operation at our land and sea ports of entry-- now fully in operation across all ports of entry-- as nothing short of incredible success. On June 1, 2009, WHTI became the first fully implemented 9/11 Commission border recommendation that was not "under construction" prior to our Final Report of July 2004. I received this information from DHS leadership last night: Read more...

Today the Federal Register announced that the agency responsible for securing our borders, Customs and Border Protection, is designating enhanced driver's licenses and identification documents issued by the states of Vermont and Michigan and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Ontario as acceptable documents for purposes of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) that goes into effect at land and sea borders on June 1, 2009. Washington State (April 3, 2008) and New York (December 2, 2008) were previously designated as WHTI compliant. These documents may be used to denote identity and citizenship of, as appropriate, U.S. or Canadian citizens entering the United States from within the Western Hemisphere at land and sea ports of entry. Read more...

On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee conducted a hearing on the 2010 budget priorities of the Department of Homeland Security. The budget was submitted to Congress on May 7, 2009 as part of the President's $3.5 trillion Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Proposal. The ranking Republican on the subcommittee with jurisdiction over U.S. borders and counterterrorism, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), yesterday during the hearing specifically asked DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano whether she still supported repeal of the REAL ID Act. Read more...

How is it that seven and a half years after September 11, and nearly five years after the 9/11 Commission published its 2004 Final Report and the 9/11 and Terrorist Travel monograph whose purpose was to explain in detail how the 9/11 hijackers got in and stayed in the United States, we are still discussing the issue? Read more...