search for international terrorist entities

The White House maintains that it is "building a culture of preparedness'' with its new national strategy for homeland security.

Yet the new report arrives on a day on which it is reported in Washington that a private intelligence firm which monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new videotape of Osama bin Laden before its official release last month and notified the Bush administration.

The firm gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the release by al Qaeda, the Washington Post reported today. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had started downloading the video from the company's Web site. By the middle of that afternoon, the video and a transcript had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, told the newspaper that this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation.

The White House, saying that intelligence agencies are looking into the matter, insisted today that the leak did not come from 1600 Pennsylvania

"We were not'' the source of the leak, Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said today � yet the White House certainly is concerned about it. "We really want American citizens to know that their government is responsive... and they should know their sources will be protected.''

Moments later, the White House released its new homeland security plan.

"This strategy is a national strategy and not simply a federal strategy,'' Frances Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, told reporters, noting that it builds upon a report issued in 2002. "It incorporates lessons learned from exercises and real-world catastrophes.''

Asked about the leak reported today, Townsend said: "We do, we understand, and God knows we'll learn more as time goes on… that the link to the site was (relayed) to the intelligence community, and the link was the part that was made public.''

"Look, we are only going to be successful in the war on terror with the help of the American people,'' she said. "Any time an individual or commercial entity cooperates with us… and doesn't get the protection they deserve, that is an area for concern.'' The Director of National Intelligence will be looking into the matter, Townsend said.


Townsend was asked how the new report differs from an earlier National Intelligence Estimate, released in July, in which the White House identified al Qaeda as a continuing threat to homeland security.

"What we were very much struck by was the evolving nature of the threat,'' Townsend said of the work that went into that. The new report involves a "tactical'' response to the continuing threats.

The new report also builds upon the original 2002 report in which the government spelled out what new capabilities it needed to build in the face of new terrorist threats. This report, she said, assesses what has been done since then and what still needs to be accomplished.

This is the White House's outline of the updated National Strategy for Homeland Security:

This Strategy is a national strategy � not a Federal strategy � and articulates our approach to secure the Homeland over the next several years. It builds on the first National Strategy for Homeland Security, issued in July 2002, and complements both the National Security Strategy issued in March 2006 and the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism issued in September 2006. It reflects our increased understanding of the threats confronting the United States, incorporates lessons learned from exercises and real-world catastrophes, and articulates how we should ensure our long-term success by strengthening the homeland security foundation we have built. This includes calling on Congress to make the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reforms in the Protect America Act of 2007 permanent.

? Since September 11, 2001, our concept of securing the homeland has evolved, adapting to new realities and threats. The Strategy issued today incorporates this increased understanding by:

? Acknowledging that while we must continue to focus on the persistent and evolving terrorist threat, we also must recognize that certain non-terrorist events that reach catastrophic levels can have significant implications for homeland security.

? Emphasizing that as we secure the Homeland we cannot simply rely on defensive approaches and well-planned response and recovery measures. We recognize that our efforts also must involve offense at home and abroad.

Our National Efforts to Secure the Homeland

The Strategy provides a common framework through which our entire Nation � Federal, State, local, and Tribal governments, the private and non-profit sectors, communities, and individual citizens � should focus its homeland security efforts on the following four goals:

1. Prevent and disrupt terrorist attacks. To prevent and disrupt terrorist attacks in the United States, we are working to deny terrorists and terrorist-related weapons and materials entry into our country and across all international borders, disrupt terrorists' ability to operate within our borders, and prevent the emergence of violent Islamic radicalization in order to deny terrorists future recruits and to defeat homegrown extremism.

2. Protect the American people, our critical infrastructure, and key resources. To protect the lives and livelihoods of the American people, we must undertake measures to deter the threat of terrorism, mitigate the Nation's vulnerability to acts of terror and the full range of man-made and natural catastrophes, and minimize the consequences of an attack or disaster should it occur.

3. Respond to and recover from incidents that do occur. To save lives, mitigate suffering, and protect property in future catastrophes, we must strengthen the foundation of an effective, coordinated response. This includes clarifying roles and responsibilities across all levels of government and the private and non-profit sectors. We must also focus on ensuring we have the operational capabilities and flexibility necessary to facilitate both short-term recovery and an effective transition to long-term rebuilding and revitalization efforts.

4. Continue to strengthen the foundation to ensure our long-term success. To fulfill these responsibilities over the long term, we will continue to strengthen the principles, systems, structures, and institutions that cut across the homeland security enterprise and support our activities to secure the Homeland. Ultimately, this will help ensure the success of our Strategy to secure the Nation. This includes:

? Applying a comprehensive approach to risk management. We must apply a risk-based framework across all homeland security efforts in order to identify and assess potential hazards (including their downstream effects), determine what levels of relative risk are acceptable, and prioritize and allocate resources among all homeland security partners, both public and private, to prevent, protect against, and respond to and recover from all manner of incidents.

? Building a Culture of Preparedness. Our entire Nation shares common responsibilities in homeland security. In order to help prepare the Nation to carry out these responsibilities, we will continue to foster a Culture of Preparedness that permeates all levels of society � from individual citizens, businesses, and non-profit organizations to Federal, State, local, and Tribal government officials and authorities.

? Developing a comprehensive Homeland Security Management System. In order to continue strengthening the foundations of a prepared Nation, we will establish and institutionalize a comprehensive Homeland Security Management System that incorporates all stakeholders. This system involves a continuous, mutually reinforcing cycle of activity across four phases � guidance; planning; execution; and assessment and evaluation.

o Relevant departments and agencies of the Federal government must take the lead in implementing this system, and State, local, and Tribal governments are highly encouraged to ultimately adopt fully compatible and complementary processes and practices as part of a full-scale national effort.

o In order to ensure the success of this system, our Nation must further develop a community of homeland security professionals by establishing multidisciplinary education opportunities. In addition to covering homeland and relevant national security issues, this education should include an understanding and appreciation of appropriate regions, religions, cultures, legal systems, and languages. We also must continue to develop interagency and intergovernmental assignments and fellowship opportunities, tying them to promotions and professional advancement.

? Improving incident management. We must develop a comprehensive approach to incident management that will help Federal, State, local, and Tribal authorities manage incidents across our goals of prevention, protection, and response and recovery. Our approach will build upon the existing National Incident Management System (NIMS) and help decision-making during crisis and periods of heightened concern.

? Better utilizing science and technology. The United States derives much of its strength from its advantage in science and technology, and we must continue to use this advantage and encourage innovative research and development to assist in protecting and defending against the range of natural and man-made threats confronting the Homeland.

? Using all instruments of national power and influence. The United States is using its instruments of national power and influence � diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement � to prevent terrorism, protect the lives and livelihoods of the American people, and respond to and recover from incidents. We must build on these efforts, by continuing to enhance our processes for sharing all relevant and appropriate information throughout all levels of government and with our partners, and by prioritizing the continued transformation of our law enforcement and military.

Working With Congress To Make FISA Reform Permanent, And Other Legislative Action

The U.S. Congress should take bold steps to fulfill its responsibilities in the national effort to secure the Homeland and protect the American people.

? Congress should help ensure that we have the necessary tools to address changing technologies and homeland security threats while protecting privacy and civil liberties. We must make additional reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and ensure that the statute is permanently amended so that our intelligence professionals continue to have the legal tools they need to gather information about the intentions of our enemies while protecting the civil liberties of Americans.
? Both houses of the Congress should take action to further streamline the organization and structure of those committees that authorize and appropriate homeland security-related funds and otherwise oversee homeland security missions.

? The Congress should fully embrace a risk-based funding approach so that we best prioritize our limited resources to meet the most critical homeland security goals and objectives first.

Progress Made Securing The Homeland

Since September 11, we have made extraordinary progress in securing our Homeland and fighting the War on Terror. We have:

? Disrupted multiple potentially deadly plots against the United States. We have greatly increased worldwide counterterrorism efforts since 9/11, which has constrained the ability of al-Qaeda to attack the Homeland and led terrorist groups to find that the United States is a harder target to strike.

? Strengthened our ability to protect the American people by creating the Department of Homeland Security. We have also enhanced our homeland security and counterterrorism architecture through the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Homeland Security Council, the National Counterterrorism Center, and U.S. Northern Command, a Department of Defense combatant command focused on homeland defense and civil support.

? Made our borders more secure. We are implementing an effective system of layered defense by strengthening the screening of people and goods overseas and by tracking and disrupting the international travel of terrorists.

? Instituted an active, multi-layered approach to that integrates the capabilities of Tribal, local, State and Federal governments, as well as those of the private and non-profit sectors. In addition, Federal grant funding and technical assistance has also enhanced State, local and Tribal homeland security training and equipment, emergency management capabilities, and the interoperability of communications.
?
? Worked with Congress to create, implement, and renew key legal reforms. The USA PATRIOT Act, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, and the Protect America Act of 2007 promote security and help to implement 9/11 Commission and WMD Commission recommendations, while protecting our fundamental four Guatemalans who came to mop and vacuum the theme restaurant.

The arrests were part of sting on a Florida-based janitorial service that provided workers on contract to restaurants around the country.

If the janitors at Jillian's had been garden-variety undocumented workers, they likely would have kept sweeping floors. But their employer was suspected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of violating a collection of laws.

The janitor bust is the new style of federal work site immigration enforcement. Since about 1999 and definitely since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the government has targeted employers who knowingly break the law by encouraging or participating in immigrant smuggling, abusing workers, not paying taxes or document fraud.

The owners of Palm Beach-based Rosenbaum-Cunningham International were charged with evading $18.6 million in employment taxes.

Agents arrested about 200 illegal workers nationwide in the sting, including 13 at four restaurants in metro Atlanta. All 13 were Guatemalan and were processed for deportation, Smith said.

The new enforcement tactic is a shift away from the 1990s, when the government annually issued hundreds of noncriminal fines to businesses for employing illegal immigrants.

The new direction means ICE has drastically cut enforcement efforts against employers who just hire illegal workers in Georgia and nationally. Now, fines for simply hiring illegal immigrants are rare.

ICE initiated only three such noncriminal fines in the United States in 2004, the last year for which national statistics are available. In the southern region, the government issued one fine in four years, for $123,000, to a restaurant in North Carolina earlier this year.

Noncriminal fines are usually issued to employers who don't complete the paperwork to prove an employee has the right to work in the United States.

Federal immigration officials say it's a shift in policy rather than a retreat from work site enforcement.


Mandate changed

The mandate is two-pronged: the primary goal, since Sept. 11, is to protect sensitive targets such as airports, military bases and nuclear power plants. The next priority is to target abusive employers and those involved in immigrant recruiting, smuggling or fraud.

"The sheer volume of our work requires us to prioritize our response among all our investigative duties," said Ken Smith, special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of ICE.

Under the first mandate, the agency reviewed the employment forms of about 5,000 workers at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and arrested 35 illegal immigrants in the past four years, Smith said. In January, ICE raided Fort Benning, another sensitive site, charging 24 illegal workers with document fraud and ID theft.

On the second score, local ICE agents busted Sin Sin Employment Agency in Chamblee in 2005. The couple who ran the agency placed thousands of illegal workers in restaurants in several states. They were convicted of conspiracy and fraud related to immigrant smuggling and were sentenced to prison.

Such criminal prosecutions and seizures hit an employer harder than noncriminal fines, Smith said.

The government says criminal fines, restitutions and civil judgments this year from work site enforcement nationally total more than $30 million, according to ICE. But ICE has not said how much of that money was actually collected or whether it was from a few employers.

It's hard to tell whether the change in approach is having any effect on illegal immigration or on employers' behavior, partly because ICE says data that could illustrate that is not readily available.

ICE did not provide dollar values of fines collected from the 1990s, when the government issued thousands of fines to employers.

But, in 1992, for example, the government delivered 1,461 notices of intent to fine to employers for violating immigration laws. By 2004, there were three.

The number of people arrested at work sites for being in the country illegally has also declined sharply since the change in policy, from about 17,500 in 1997 to about 4,000 in 2007, according to INS statistics and ICE. There has been a recent uptick in arrests in the last two years.

To some degree, states and counties have stepped into the void left when ICE backed away from grass roots enforcement.

Georgia passed a law requiring anyone contracting with a public entity to run new hires through a federal database to ensure the employee can legally work in the United States. Cobb and Gwinnett counties have similar rules for contractors.

But that only affects companies paid with tax dollars.

The state can only regulate licensing, taxation and contracts, said Chip Rogers, sponsor of the law. It can't prosecute immigration violations criminally, he said.

"I think if [federal agents] would go out and find some employers who were violating the law and put them in jail because of it, then what you would have happen is the other employers would think twice about employing illegal immigrants," Rogers said.


'Contempt for law'

The change in policy has other critics.

"If you don't do the mundane work of enforcement and make that a real possibility that an employer will run afoul of the law, then what you do is you create a general contempt for the rule of law," said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank that favors tighter immigration controls.

"Interior enforcement, including going after employers, has had nothing but a precipitous fall over the last 14 years," Camarota said.

Smith said the reason for that is because it's difficult for the government to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Workers show fake IDs that look real, he said.

"The fines became just the cost of doing business for the employer," Smith said. Many levies were bartered down to "pennies on the dollar."

Mary Kay Woodworth, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Landscape & Turf Association, says an employer who is trying to follow the rules but may have some illegal immigrants on the payroll should not be the focus of a federal investigation.

The landscape industry employs many immigrants, but most employers try to hire legal workers, she said.

"Ninety-nine percent of them are filing taxes and filling out the paperwork," Woodworth said. It's not easy to spot fake documents and asking too many questions can violate a worker's rights.

"Do you think the employer can go and ask, 'Do you really think this is a legal document?' You can't do that," Woodworth said. "If it looks legal, that's the most you can do."


1999 marked shift

The shift in thinking on work site enforcement began in 1999.

In July that year, Robert Bach, an executive associate commissioner for the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, told Congress that even if INS tripled its budget it still would "not have a significant impact on illegal workers and certainly not on employers and labor markets."

INS would focus on criminal investigations against employers who engage in patterns of knowingly employing illegal workers, or who seek to hire them through smugglers, or abuse workers, Bach said.

At that time, there were an estimated 5 million unauthorized migrants in the United States, Bach said.

Estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center put that number last year at between 11 and 12 million. A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.


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The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.


But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

"We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.