Tag: dha

DHS Secretary Admits: “We’re Taking a Very Close Look” at Vaccine Passports

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on Friday that the federal government is “taking a very close look” at the idea of creating federal vaccine passports for international travel. Mayorkas, who also oversees the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), made the admission on ABC’s Good Morning America.

The admission seems to contradict earlier statements from the White House that the federal government was not looking at creating vaccine passports for American citizens.

In April, Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the White House was not considering vaccine passports.

“The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” Psaki said. “There will be no federal vaccination database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”

Psaki repeated the supposed White House stance against vaccine passports as recently as May 21.

So, is Alejandro’s admission that DHS and TSA are indeed looking at vaccine passports for Americans an about-face on the subject, or is it just the Biden administration speaking out of both sides of its mouth?

Keep reading

DHS to scan social media posts looking for “domestic terrorists” after Capitol breach

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to launch a warning system to detect “domestic terrorism” threats by gathering and analyzing intelligence on public social media posts and making predictions on future actions.

The purpose of the system is to detect the sort of posts that allegedly proceeded the breach of the US Capitol on January 6. Law enforcement agencies were criticized for ignoring or missing the posts.

According to a DHS official involved in the efforts, the focus is supposedly not on the posters, but to identify the targets of domestic terrorism. The official also said that, for now, the DHS is using human data analysts, not computer algorithms, to analyze public social media posts.

Keep reading