Fergie's Tech Blog

US-VISIT Failures: The Homeland Security Paper Chase

Kevin Poulsen writes on 27B Stroke 6:

When, last September, a spokeswoman for DHS's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) phoned me to ask that I voluntarily withdraw a month-old Freedom of Information Act request, I had to wonder why.

The request was for any documents pertaining to an earlier failure of a sensitive DHS system used to screen incoming visitors to the US. Called US-VISIT, the system is a network of Windows PCs and mainframe servers that takes fingerprints and digital photos of travelers as they enter the country, and checks each visitor against scores of national security and criminal watchlists.

The August computer failure led to long queues at airports across the country, but was only tersely explained to the public. The DHS initially said a computer virus had infected one of the mainframe servers -- in Virginia. Later, the agency reversed itself and claimed there was no virus, and the outage was a normal computer crash.

We now know that neither version was entirely true. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

posted by Fergie @ 5/09/2006 05:41:00 PM