Tag Archives: Visa

Exclusive: North Korean leaders used Brazilian passports to apply for Western visas – sources

A scan obtained by Reuters shows an authentic Brazilian passport issued to North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un. Handout via REUTERS

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his late father Kim Jong Il used fraudulently obtained Brazilian passports to apply for visas to visit Western countries in the 1990s, five senior Western European security sources told Reuters.

While North Korea’s ruling family is known to have used travel documents obtained under false pretences, there are few specific examples. The photocopies of the Brazilian passports seen by Reuters have not been published before.

“They used these Brazilian passports, which clearly show the photographs of Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il, to attempt to obtain visas from foreign embassies,” one senior Western security source said on condition of anonymity.

“This shows the desire for travel and points to the ruling family’s attempts to build a possible escape route,” the security source said.

The North Korean embassy in Brazil declined to comment.

Brazil’s foreign ministry said it was investigating.

A Brazilian source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the two passports in question were legitimate documents when sent out as blanks for consulates to issue.

Four other senior Western European security sources confirmed that the two Brazilian passports with photos of the Kims in the names of Josef Pwag and Ijong Tchoi were used to apply for visas in at least two Western countries.

It was unclear whether any visas were issued.

The passports may also have been used to travel to Brazil, Japan and Hong Kong, the security sources said.

Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported in 2011 that Jong Un visited Tokyo as a child using a Brazilian passport in 1991 – before the issue date on the two Brazilian passports.

‘JOSEF PWAG’

Both 10-year passports carry a stamp saying “Embassy of Brazil in Prague” with a Feb. 26, 1996, issue date. The security sources said facial recognition technology confirmed the photographs were those of Kim Jong Un and his father.

The passport with Jong Un’s photo was issued in the name of Josef Pwag with a date of birth of Feb. 1, 1983.

So little is known about Jong Un that even his birth date is disputed. He would have been 12 to 14 years old when the Brazilian passport was issued.

Jong Un is known to have been educated at an international school in Berne, Switzerland, where he pretended to be the son of an embassy chauffeur.

Jong Il’s passport was issued in the name Ijong Tchoi with a birth date of April 4, 1940. Jong Il died in 2011. His true birth date was in 1941.

Both passports list the holders’ birthplaces as Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The first security source declined to describe how the passport copies had been obtained, citing secrecy rules.

Reuters has only seen photocopies of the passports so was unable to discern if they had been tampered with.

(Editing by David Clarke)

Government workers begin shutdown as Senate vote looms

The U.S. Capitol is lit during the second day of a shutdown of the federal government in Washington, U.S., January 21, 2018.

By Amanda Becker and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of federal workers began shutting down operations on Monday with the U.S. government closed and the Senate prepared to try again to restore funding, if only temporarily, and resolve a dispute over immigration.

As government employees prepared for the first weekday since the shutdown began at midnight Friday, U.S. senators were to vote at midday on a funding bill to get the lights back on in Washington and across the government until early February.

Support for the bill was uncertain, after Republicans and Democrats spent all day on Sunday trying to strike a deal, only to go home for the night short of an agreement.

Federal employees received notices on Saturday about whether they were exempt from the shutdown, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said. Depending on their schedules, some were told to stay home or to go to work for up to four hours on Monday to shut their operation, then go home. None will get paid.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said late Sunday that an overnight vote on a measure to fund government operations through Feb. 8 was canceled and would be held at 12 p.m. EST (1700 GMT) on Monday.

Up until Monday, most federal workers were not directly affected by the shutdown that began at midnight on Friday.

The federal Office of Personnel Management said on its website on Sunday night that “federal government operations vary by agency.”

The Department of Defense published a memo on its website detailing who does and does not get paid in a shutdown and saying that civilian employees were on temporary leave, except for those needed to support active-duty troops.

The Department of Interior led by Secretary Ryan Zinke, offered no guidance on its website, which still had a “Happy Holidays from the Zinke Family” video near the top of the site. The department oversees national parks and federal lands.

The State Department website said: “At this time, scheduled passport and visa services in the United States and at our posts overseas will continue during the lapse in appropriations as the situation permits.”

Markets have absorbed the shutdown drama over the last week, and on Monday morning world stocks and U.S. bond markets largely shrugged off Washington’s standoff even as the dollar continued its pullback. U.S. stock futures edged lower.

‘DREAMERS’ DRAMA

The U.S. government has not been shut down since 2013, when about 800,000 federal workers were put on furlough. That impasse prevented passage of a needed funding bill centered on former Democratic President Barack Obama’s healthcare law.

The problem this time focused on immigration policy, principally President Donald Trump’s order last year ending an Obama program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which gave legal protections to “Dreamer” immigrants.

The “Dreamers” are young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children by their parents or other adults, mainly from Mexico and Central America, and who mostly grew up in the United States.

Trump said last year he would end DACA on March 5 and asked Congress to come up with a legislative fix before then to prevent Dreamers from being deported.

Democrats have withheld support for a temporary funding bill to keep the government open over the DACA issue. McConnell extended an olive branch on Sunday, pledging to bring immigration legislation up for debate after Feb. 8 so long as the government remained open.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer objected to the plan and it was unclear whether McConnell’s pledge would be enough for Democrats to support a stopgap funding bill.

Congress failed last year to pass a complete budget by Oct. 1, the beginning of the federal fiscal year, and the government has been operating on a series of three stopgap spending bills.

Republicans control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where they have a slim 51-49 majority. But most legislation requires 60 Senate votes to pass, giving Democrats leverage.

Trump told a bipartisan Senate working group earlier this month that he would sign whatever DACA legislation was brought to him. The Republican president then rejected a bipartisan measure and negotiations stalled.

McConnell had insisted that the Senate would not move to immigration legislation until it was clear what could earn Trump’s support.

Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who is involved in bipartisan immigration negotiations, said McConnell’s statements on Sunday indicated there was progress in negotiations and he urged his Democratic colleagues to approve another stopgap bill.

(Additional reporting by Ginger Gibson and Damon Darlin; Editing by Peter Cooney and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Turkey says will not submit to ‘impositions’ from United States in visa crisis

U.S. Consulate is pictured in Istanbul, Turkey, October 11, 2017. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey will not submit to “impositions” from the United States over an on-going visa crisis and will reject any conditions it cannot meet, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday.

A delegation from the United States is visiting Turkey in an attempt to repair diplomatic ties between the NATO allies after both countries stopped issuing visas to each other’s citizens this month.

Washington first suspended visa services at its missions in Turkey, after Turkish authorities detained two Turkish nationals employed as U.S. consular staff. The U.S. delegation has asked Ankara for information and evidence regarding the detained staff, private broadcaster Haberturk reported.

“We will cooperate if their demands meet the rules of our constitution but we will not succumb to impositions and we will reject any conditions that we cannot meet,” Cavusoglu told a news conference, when asked about the report of requests from the U.S. delegation.

A translator at the consulate in the southern province of Adana was arrested in May and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) worker was detained in Istanbul two weeks ago. Both were detained on suspicion of links to last year’s failed coup, allegations the United States has rejected.

Haberturk said the U.S. delegation, which arrived in Turkey this week, laid out four conditions to solve the visa crisis, including that Turkey must provide information about its investigations into the detained workers, and evidence related to DEA worker Metin Topuz.

President Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman said last week Topuz had been in contact with a leading suspect in last year’s failed military coup. Turkish media reported similar accusations against the translator in May.

The U.S. delegation told Ankara that if the contacts which Turkish authorities are seeking to investigate were undertaken on the instructions of the consulate, the employees should not have been arrested, Haberturk said.

(Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by Ece Toksabay; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Trump administration moves to make tougher U.S. visa vetting permanent

A sign warns of surveillance at the International Arrival area at Logan Airport in Boston.

By Yeganeh Torbati

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration moved on Thursday to make permanent a new questionnaire that asks some U.S. visa applicants to provide their social media handles and detailed biographical and travel history, according to a public notice.

The questionnaire was rolled out in May as part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, and asks for all prior passport numbers, five years’ worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history. (See: http://bit.ly/2v0qsR2)

A State Department official declined to provide data on how many times the form had been used or which nationalities had been asked to fill it out since May, only stating that it estimates 65,000 visa applicants per year “will present a threat profile” that warrants the extra screening.

President Donald Trump ran for office in 2016 pledging to crack down on illegal immigration for security reasons, and has called for “extreme vetting” of foreigners entering the United States. On Wednesday, he threw his support behind a bill that would cut legal immigration to the United States by 50 percent over 10 years.

The Office of Management and Budget, which must approve most new federal requests of information from the public, initially approved the form on an “emergency” basis, which allowed its use for six months rather than the usual three years.

The State Department published a notice in the Federal Register on Thursday seeking to use the form for the next three years. The public has 60 days to comment on the request.

The questions are meant to “more rigorously evaluate applicants for terrorism, national security-related, or other visa ineligibilities,” the notice said.

While the questions are voluntary, the form says failure to provide the information may delay or prevent the processing of a visa application.

Trump ordered a temporary travel ban in March on citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. After months of legal wrangling, the Supreme Court in June allowed the travel ban to go forward with a limited scope.

The form does not target any particular nationality.

Seyed Ali Sepehr, who runs an immigration consultancy in California serving Iranian clients applying for U.S. visas, said that since late June, all of his clients who have been referred for extra security checks have also been asked to fill out the new form.

Kiyanoush Razaghi, an immigration attorney based in Maryland, said he knows of Iraqis, Libyans and Iranians who have been asked to fill out the form.

Immigration attorney Steve Pattison said one of his clients, who is not from one of the six travel ban countries, had been asked to fill out the new form when applying for a visitor visa, indicating that consular officers are using it broadly.

“It could be that everyone is missing another consequence of the use of the form – its deployment in a far wider sense to cover all sorts of individuals,” Pattison said.

 

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; editing by Sue Horton and Grant McCool)

 

Trump administration moves to make tougher U.S. visa vetting permanent

FILE PHOTO: A sign warns of surveillance at the International Arrival area, on the day that U.S. President Donald Trump's limited travel ban, approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, goes into effect, at Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., June 29, 2017. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

By Yeganeh Torbati

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration moved on Thursday to make permanent a new questionnaire that asks some U.S. visa applicants to provide their social media handles and detailed biographical and travel history, according to a public notice.

The questionnaire was rolled out in May as part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, and asks for all prior passport numbers, five years’ worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history. (See: http://bit.ly/2v0qsR2)

A State Department official declined to provide data on how many times the form had been used or which nationalities had been asked to fill it out since May, only stating that it estimates 65,000 visa applicants per year “will present a threat profile” that warrants the extra screening.

President Donald Trump ran for office in 2016 pledging to crack down on illegal immigration for security reasons, and has called for “extreme vetting” of foreigners entering the United States. On Wednesday, he threw his support behind a bill that would cut legal immigration to the United States by 50 percent over 10 years.

The Office of Management and Budget, which must approve most new federal requests of information from the public, initially approved the form on an “emergency” basis, which allowed its use for six months rather than the usual three years.

The State Department published a notice in the Federal Register on Thursday seeking to use the form for the next three years. The public has 60 days to comment on the request. (See: http://bit.ly/2uZNXJD)

The questions are meant to “more rigorously evaluate applicants for terrorism, national security-related, or other visa ineligibilities,” the notice said.

While the questions are voluntary, the form says failure to provide the information may delay or prevent the processing of a visa application.

Trump ordered a temporary travel ban in March on citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. After months of legal wrangling, the Supreme Court in June allowed the travel ban to go forward with a limited scope.

The form does not target any particular nationality.

Seyed Ali Sepehr, who runs an immigration consultancy in California serving Iranian clients applying for U.S. visas, said that since late June, all of his clients who have been referred for extra security checks have also been asked to fill out the new form.

Kiyanoush Razaghi, an immigration attorney based in Maryland, said he knows of Iraqis, Libyans and Iranians who have been asked to fill out the form.

Immigration attorney Steve Pattison said one of his clients, who is not from one of the six travel ban countries, had been asked to fill out the new form when applying for a visitor visa, indicating that consular officers are using it broadly.

“It could be that everyone is missing another consequence of the use of the form – its deployment in a far wider sense to cover all sorts of individuals,” Pattison said.

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; editing by Sue Horton and Grant McCool)

Kremlin orders Washington to slash embassy staff in Russia

A general view shows the U.S. consulate in the far eastern city of Vladivostok, Russia, July 31, 2017.

By Maria Tsvetkova and Jack Stubbs

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin has ordered the United States to cut about 60 percent of its diplomatic staff in Russia but many of those let go will be Russian citizens, tempering the impact of a measure adopted in retaliation for new U.S. sanctions.

The ultimatum issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin is a display to voters at home he is prepared to stand up to Washington, but is also carefully calibrated to avoid directly affecting the U.S. investment he needs, or burning his bridges with his U.S. opposite number Donald Trump.

All staff at the U.S. embassy in Moscow were on Monday summoned to an all-hands meeting where Ambassador John F. Tefft briefed employees on the Russian decision – the toughest diplomatic demarche between the two countries since the Cold War.

“The atmosphere was like a funeral,” said the person present, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to talk to the media.

Putin said on Sunday Russia was ordering the United States to cut 755 diplomatic staff by September. The move, he said, was in reaction to Congressional approval for a new round of sanctions against Moscow.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that the 755

could include Russian citizens, a group who comprise the vast majority of the United States’ roughly 1,200 embassy and consulate staff in Russia.

The clarification from the Kremlin means that there will not necessarily be a mass expulsion of U.S. diplomats because the numbers to be cut can be made up from Russian staff.

Reducing their numbers will affect embassy and consular operations, but that step does not carry the same diplomatic impact as expelling U.S. diplomats from Russia.

Commenting on which diplomatic staff would have to go, Peskov told reporters on a conference call: “That’s the choice of the United States.”

He added: “(It’s) diplomats and technical employees. That is, we’re not talking purely about diplomats – obviously, there isn’t that number of diplomats – but about people with non-diplomatic status, and people hired locally, and Russian citizens who work there.”

A U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called Russia’s action “a regrettable and uncalled-for act … We are assessing the impact of such a limitation and how we will respond to it”.

As of 2013, the U.S. mission in Russia, including the Moscow embassy and consulates in St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok, employed 1,279 staff, according to a State Department Inspector General’s report that year. That included 934 “locally employed” staff and 301 U.S. “direct-hire” staff.

Forcing the United States to scale back its diplomatic presence will reinforce Putin’s reputation at home as a resolute defender of Russia’s interests. That will help burnish his image before next year’s presidential election, when he is expected to seek another term.

But the consequences of the Russian retaliation are not so stark that it would permanently alienate U.S. President Donald Trump, according to Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Moscow Carnegie Center, a think tank.

By announcing his counter-measures before Trump signed the sanctions legislation into law, “Putin is sending a message that he is punishing Congress’s America, and not Trump’s America,” Baunov wrote in a Facebook post. “(Putin) has taken Trump out of the direct line of fire and spared his ego.”

Absent from the Russian retaliation were any measures that directly target U.S. investment in Russia. U.S. bluechip companies such as Ford, Citi and Boeing have projects in the country, bringing the kind of investment the Kremlin needs to lift a sluggish economic recovery.

 

COUNTER-MEASURES

The Russian measures were announced after the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate overwhelmingly approved new sanctions on Russia. The White House said on Friday that Trump would sign the sanctions bill.

The new U.S. sanctions arose in part from conclusions by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Trump win it, and to punish Russia further for its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

Moscow’s response included word that it would seize two U.S. diplomatic properties – a warehouse in southern Moscow and a complex on the outskirts of the city that embassy staff use for weekend recreation.

On Monday, a Reuters journalist saw five vehicles with diplomatic license plates, one of them a cargo truck, arrive at the recreation complex. The convoy was refused access, the journalist reported.

At the warehouse, a Reuters TV cameraman saw several trucks being loaded by workers in the uniforms of embassy employees.

In an interview broadcast on Russian state television on Sunday, Putin said he acted as there was no sign that relations between Russia and the United States were improving under Trump.

“We were waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, were holding out hope that the situation would change somehow. But it appears that even if it changes someday it will not change soon,” Putin said.

Putin said Russia could take more measures against the United States, but not at the moment. “I am against it as of today,” he said in the interview with Vesti TV.

 

TOWN HALL MEETING

Embassy employees in Moscow were on Monday anxiously waiting to hear if they would keep their jobs.

The person who was present at the embassy meeting said Ambassador Tefft described the Russian decision as unfair.

The ambassador provided no details of where the staff cuts would fall, the witness said, but said Russian staff who were let go would have the right to apply for a special immigration visa to the United States.

“People asked what Russian staff should do now, since a lot of Russian people working for the embassy are blacklisted and cannot find a job in Russian companies,” said the person present.

“The ambassador said that by playing these diplomatic games, the Russian government first of all attacks its citizens, and the Russian government did not even know that the majority of people working at the embassy were Russians.”

An embassy spokeswoman confirmed the meeting had taken place, and the account of the ambassador’s remarks. She declined comment on which departments would be affected by the cuts.

One area likely to be hit by the staff cuts is the U.S. operation that issues visas to Russian citizens seeking to travel to the United States, according to a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul.

“If these cuts are real, Russians should expect to wait weeks if not months to get visas to come to U.S.,” McFaul wrote in a Twitter post on Sunday.

 

(Additional reporting by Polina Devitt, Dmitry Madorsky and Gennady Novik in Moscow and Yeganeh Torbati in Washington; writing by Christian Lowe; editing by Mark Heinrich)

 

Exclusive: U.S. asks nations to provide more traveler data or face sanctions

Staff demonstrate the flow of passengers as they queue to X-ray shoes, mobile phone and bags at the security gates at Cointrin airport in Geneva, Switzerland, November 24, 2016. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

By Arshad Mohammed and Mica Rosenberg

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department will require all nations to provide extensive data to help it vet visa applicants and determine whether a traveler poses a terrorist threat, according to a cable obtained by Reuters.

Countries that fail to comply with the new protocols or take steps to do so within 50 days could face travel sanctions.

The cable, sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts on Wednesday, is a summary of a worldwide review of vetting procedures that was required under U.S. President Donald Trump’s revised March 6 executive order that temporarily banned U.S. travel by most citizens from six predominantly Muslim countries.

The memo lays out a series of standards the United States will require of other countries, including that they issue, or have active plans to issue, electronic passports and regularly report lost and stolen passports to INTERPOL.

It also directs nations to provide “any other identity information” requested by Washington for U.S. visa applicants, including biometric or biographic details.

The cable sets out requirements for countries to provide data on individuals it knows or has grounds to believe are terrorists as well as criminal record information.

Further, countries are asked not to block the transfer of information about U.S.-bound travelers to the U.S. government and not to designate people for travel watchlists based solely on their political or religious beliefs.

“This is the first time that the U.S. Government is setting standards for the information that is required from all countries specifically in support of immigration and traveler vetting,” the cable said.

The cable can be read here: (http://reut.rs/2untHTl).

The new requirements are the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration says it is taking to better protect the United States from terrorist attack.

However, former officials said much of the information sought is routinely shared between countries, including examples of passports and additional details about particular travelers that may present security concerns.

Some U.S. allies may worry about privacy protections if Washington is seen as seeking information beyond what is already shared, said John Sandweg, a former senior Homeland Security Department official now with the firm Frontier Solutions.

“I don’t think you can ignore the political aspects of the unpopularity of the current administration. That puts political pressure to stand up to the administration,” he said.

The cable lays out risk factors the U.S. government will consider when evaluating a country. Some of these are controversial and could be difficult for countries to prove to U.S. satisfaction, including ensuring “that they are not and do not have the potential to become a terrorist safe haven.”

Countries are also expected to agree to take back citizens ordered removed from the United States.

If they do not provide the information requested, or come up with an adequate plan to, countries could end up on a list to be submitted to Trump for possible sanction, including barring “categories” of their citizens from entering the United States.

The real worries for countries may not come until the results of this review are known, said Leon Rodriguez, the former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“Once they start making decisions I think that is where there is going to be a lot of anxiety,” he said, saying delays in visa processing for nations that do not pose much of a threat could start to hurt “ordinary business and personal travel.”

The most controversial of Trump’s immigration-related moves are two executive orders, challenged in federal court, which impose a temporary ban on travel to the United States for most citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

While the orders were initially blocked from being enforced, the Supreme Court on June 26 allowed the ban to go into effect for people from the six nations with no strong ties to the United States.

The cable requires countries to act quickly, but stressed that the United States would work with foreign nations to assess if they meet the standards and, if not, to come up with a plan to help them do so.

The cable asks that U.S. diplomats “underscore that while it is not our goal to impose a ban on immigration benefits, including visas, for citizens of any country, these standards are designed to mitigate risk, and failure to make progress could lead to security measures by the USG, including a presidential proclamation that would prohibit the entry of certain categories of foreign nationals of non-compliant countries.”

The cable says the U.S. government has made a preliminary determination that some countries do not meet the new standards and that others are “at risk” of not meeting them. It does not name these, listing them in a separate, classified cable.

The State Department declined comment on the cable, saying it would not discuss internal communications.

“The U.S. government’s national security screening and vetting procedures for visitors are constantly reviewed and refined to improve security and more effectively identify individuals who could pose a threat to the United States,” said a U.S. State Department official on condition of anonymity.

(Additional reporting by Julia Ainsley and Andrew Chung; Editing by Sue Horton, Bernadette Baum and David Gregorio)

State Dept. seeks tougher visa scrutiny, including social media checks

A person stands at the counter of U.S. Immigration upon arriving at Miami airport March 13, 2013. REUTERS/Desmond Boylan

By Yeganeh Torbati and Mica Rosenberg

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of State has proposed tougher questioning of visa applicants believed to warrant extra scrutiny, according to a document published Thursday, in a push toward the “extreme vetting” that President Donald Trump has said is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks.

Questions about social media accounts would be part of the stepped-up criteria, which would apply to 65,000 people per year, or about 0.5 percent of U.S. visa applicants worldwide, the State Department estimated. It did not target nationals of any particular countries.

A set of new questions would apply to visa applicants “who have been determined to warrant additional scrutiny in connection with terrorism or other national security-related visa ineligibilities,” the State Department said in a notice to the Federal Register.

Those applicants would be required to provide all prior passport numbers, five years’ worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as 15 years of biographical information, when applying for a U.S. visa. Consular officers would not request user passwords for social media accounts, the document said.

If granted, the new criteria would mark the first concrete step toward more stringent vetting that Trump asked federal agencies to apply toward travelers from countries he deemed a threat to the United States in an executive order issued in January and revised in March.

While parts of the travel order, including a temporary ban on the entry of nationals from several majority-Muslim countries, were halted by federal courts, the review of vetting procedures detailed in an accompanying memorandum remains in place.

“Collecting additional information from visa applicants whose circumstances suggest a need for further scrutiny will strengthen our process for vetting these applicants and confirming their identity,” a State Department official said.

The State Department’s proposal also says that applicants may be asked to provide additional travel dates if a consular officer determines they have been in an area which was “under the operational control of a terrorist organization.”

The proposed changes must undergo a public comment period before being approved or denied by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by May 18. OMB did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Homeland Security, which was also tasked with reviewing vetting procedures for visa applicants, said the State Department request does not preclude DHS from identifying new “ways to protect the American people.”

“Some improvement will be classified, others will be public, but the Department has only just begun ways to enhance the security of our immigration system,” DHS spokesman David Lapan said.

SOCIAL MEDIA SNAGS

Immigration lawyers and advocates say the request for 15 years of detailed biographical information, as well as the expectation that applicants remember all their social media handles, is likely to catch applicants who make innocent mistakes or do not remember all the information requested.

They also question whether the time-consuming screening can achieve its intended goal of identifying potential terrorists.

“The more effective tactics are the methods that we currently use to monitor terrorist organizations, not just stumbling into the terrorist who is dumb enough to post on his Facebook page ‘I am going to blow up something in the United States,'” said John Sandweg, a former senior official at DHS who is now with the firm Frontier Solutions, which provides investigatory, crisis management and other services.

Applicants may not necessarily be denied a visa if they fail to provide all the information if it is determined they can provide a “credible explanation,” the notice said.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson first introduced similar measures in a March cable to American consular officers that outlined questions officers should ask in order to tighten vetting of visa applicants.

But Tillerson had to withdraw that guidance just days later because the OMB had not approved those specific questions.

The State Department estimated that the additional screening measures would take approximately an hour per applicant, meaning an additional 65,000 additional hours of work per year.

Tillerson’s cables anticipated delays as a result of the rules implementation.

“Somebody’s got to do the work,” said Greg Siskind, an immigration attorney in Memphis. “It’s going to cause operations at a lot of consulates slow to a crawl.”

(Link to proposal: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/05/04/2017-08975/notice)

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Writing by Julia Edwards Ainsley; Editing by Yara Bayoumy, Alistair Bell and Leslie Adler)

Exclusive: U.S. embassies ordered to identify population groups for tougher visa screening

A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer interviews people entering the United States from Mexico at the border crossing in San Ysidro, California, U.S. on October 14, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake

By Yeganeh Torbati, Mica Rosenberg and Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has directed U.S. diplomatic missions to identify “populations warranting increased scrutiny” and toughen screening for visa applicants in those groups, according to diplomatic cables seen by Reuters.

He has also ordered a “mandatory social media check” for all applicants who have ever been present in territory controlled by the Islamic State, in what two former U.S. officials said would be a broad, labor-intensive expansion of such screening. Social media screening is now done fairly rarely by consular officials, one of the former officials said.

Four cables, or memos, issued by Tillerson over the last two weeks provide insight into how the U.S. government is implementing what President Donald Trump has called “extreme vetting” of foreigners entering the United States, a major campaign promise. The cables also demonstrate the administrative and logistical hurdles the White House faces in executing its vision.

The memos, which have not been previously reported, provided instructions for implementing Trump’s March 6 revised executive order temporarily barring visitors from six Muslim-majority countries and all refugees, as well as a simultaneous memorandum mandating enhanced visa screening.

The flurry of cables to U.S. missions abroad issued strict new guidelines for vetting U.S. visa applicants, and then retracted some of them in response to U.S. court rulings that challenged central tenets of Trump’s executive order.

The final cable seen by Reuters, issued on March 17, leaves in place an instruction to consular chiefs in each diplomatic mission, or post, to convene working groups of law enforcement and intelligence officials to “develop a list of criteria identifying sets of post applicant populations warranting increased scrutiny.”

Applicants falling within one of these identified population groups should be considered for higher-level security screening, according to the March 17 cable.

Those population groups would likely vary from country to country, according to sources familiar with the cables, as the March 17 memo does not explicitly provide for coordination between the embassies.

Trump has said enhanced screening of foreigners is necessary to protect the country against terrorist attacks.

Advocates and immigration lawyers said the guidance could lead to visa applicants being profiled on the basis of nationality or religion rather than because they pose an actual threat to the United States.

“Most posts already have populations that they look at for fraud and security issues,” said Jay Gairson, a Seattle-based immigration attorney who has many clients from countries that would be affected by Trump’s travel ban.

“What this language effectively does is give the consular posts permission to step away from the focused factors they have spent years developing and revising, and instead broaden the search to large groups based on gross factors such as nationality and religion.”

Virginia Elliott, a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, said the department was working to implement Trump’s presidential memorandum “in accordance with its terms, in an orderly fashion, and in compliance with any relevant court orders, so as to increase the safety and security of the American people.”

State Department officials declined to comment on the specifics of the cables, saying they were internal communications.

CABLE FLURRY

In cables dated March 10 and March 15, Tillerson issued detailed instructions to consular officials for implementing Trump’s travel order, which was due to take effect on March 16.

Following successful legal challenges to an earlier, more sweeping travel ban signed by Trump in January, the White House issued a narrower version of the ban earlier this month.

On the same day Tillerson sent out his memo about implementing the new executive order on March 15, a federal court in Hawaii enjoined key parts of the order. That forced him to send another cable on March 16, rescinding much of his earlier guidance.

On March 17, Tillerson issued a fourth cable that set out a new list of instructions for consular officials. At the same time, it withdrew more sections of the March 15 guidance, because they had been issued without approval from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for reviewing all agency rules.

A White House spokesman referred questions about the cables to the State Department and OMB.

Reuters could not determine to what extent the cables departed from guidance given to consular officers under previous administrations, since this type of guidance is not made public.

Some of the language in the cables, including the line that “all visa decisions are national security decisions,” is similar to statements made by U.S. officials in the past.

Some consular officials suggested some of the March 17 guidance – aside from identifying particular populations and doing more social media checks – differed little from current practice, since vetting of visa applicants is already rigorous.

PHONE NUMBERS, EMAIL ADDRESSES

Among the instructions rescinded by Tillerson were a set of specific questions for applicants from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, the countries targeted by Trump’s March 6 executive order, as well as members of populations identified as security risks.

The questions asked where applicants had lived, traveled and worked over the previous 15 years. Applicants would also have been required to provide prior passport numbers and all phone numbers, email addresses and social media handles used in the previous five years.

The March 16 and 17 cables from Tillerson instructed consular officers not to ask those questions, due to court action and pending approval by the OMB.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have called for wider social media screening for those seeking to enter the United States, saying that such checks could help to spot possible links to terrorist activity.

Some former officials and immigration attorneys cautioned that delving deeper into applicants’ social media use could significantly lengthen processing time of visas.

“There’s so much social media out there,” said Anne Richard, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration. “It’s not something you can do on a timely basis.”

Both the March 15 and March 17 cables seem to anticipate delays as a result of their implementation. They urged embassies to restrict the number of visa interviews handled per day, acknowledging this “may cause interview appointment backlogs to rise.”

(Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Arshad Mohammed and John Walcott in Washington; Editing by Sue Horton and Ross Colvin)

Two Major Cyber Attacks disrupt service on major sites

An attendee looks at a monitor at the Parsons booth during the 2016 Black Hat cyber-security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S

By Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz

(Reuters) – Cyber attacks targeting the internet infrastructure provider Dyn disrupted service on major sites such as Twitter and Spotify on Friday, mainly affecting users on the U.S. East Coast.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible and Gillian Christensen of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was “investigating all potential causes.”

Dyn said it had resolved one attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second attack a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.

In addition to the social network Twitter and music-streamer Spotify, the discussion site Reddit, hospitality booking service Airbnb and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down.

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division, one of the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning. Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

The attacks were the latest in an increasingly menacing string of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks disrupting internet sites by overwhelming servers with web traffic.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned on Oct. 14 that hackers were using a powerful new approach to launch these campaigns – infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into “bot” armies that can launch DDoS attacks.

“We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company said on its website. “Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told Reuters he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected.

“We provide service to Amazon but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality at the moment,” he said.

Dyn is a Manchester, New Hampshire-based provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which act as switchboards connecting internet traffic. Requests to access sites are transmitted through DNS servers that direct them to computers that host websites.

Dyn’s customers include some of the world’s biggest corporations and Internet firms, such as Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter, SoundCloud and BT.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle in Boston and Dustin Volz in Washington; Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankurt and Malathi Nayak in New York, Jeff Mason in Washington; Editing by Bill Trott)