Describe National Security Concerns and Their Impact on the American People

GCU Expository Essay

Describe National Security Concerns and Their Impact on the American People

The Changing face of technology is silhouetting new holes in American national security, and everyday Americans are caught between funding the threats we face and being the solution to the problems. Modern funding for terrorism relies on funds donated by unknowing donors. Modern national security concerns are a combination of governmental oversights and inequities that when combined exploit the American economy, fund terrorism overseas and at home, and directly attack the American infrastructure through a combination of physical attacks and cyber-attacks.

Gone are the days in which massive bazaars' (markets) of guns and drugs in remote regions of Afghan mountain passes were the majority of the funding for terrorist organizations. Though the statistics are unclear, chances are that most Americans have unknowingly helped fund terror cells.

"A massive cigarette smuggling ring in Detroit, smashed by the F.B.I., in which 19 people were arrested. The smugglers purchased large quantities of cigarettes in low-tax North Carolina and trucked them to Detroit where they were sold in Arab-owned convenience stores. The proceeds from this operation were being shipped to Hamas and other terrorist groups" (deKieffer, 2007, p.24-25).

Everyday Americans were unknowingly funding terrorist organizations while those organizations used the American economy against all that it stands for. There are many more businesses in the U.S. which are committing the same type of fraud but which have yet to be caught. In the U.S., Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) print the investor visa which allows a foreign national up to two years of residence in the U.S. to establish a business and provide at least ten people jobs. The capital investment for a business will even be granted by the federal government to the sum of $500,000. Chain migration would allow those ten people to be foreign nationals chose by the principle investor instead of Americans already in need of jobs. Upon completion of this two-year period, the investor must provide an "audited financial statement or other "probative evidence" to show establishment of a viable commercial enterprise" (Ryan, 2015, p. 423). The problem is an administrative oversight which allows a foreign investor to remain in the U.S. after that two-year period but not apply for permanent residence, thus the investor may remain operating their business with minimal oversight on the foreign investment visa as long as they continue to provide their yearly probative evidence (tax returns) which of course do not reflect their undocumented income stream which is being transported overseas. Moving millions of dollars covertly is a risky task, and that is where crypto currency or bitcoin and cyber-crime enter this complex scheme.

Most, if not all of the money accumulated by terrorist front businesses in America is transferred electronically to overseas accounts where it will purchase guns, ammo, and manpower for terrorist organizations. Cyber-crime is a threat to national security because of its everyday use. Every time someone checks their ledger balance or stores a password online they open themselves and the business they are using and work for to potential cybercrime- hopefully nobody with government access and a personal server would be careless with what is stored on their server. Private hacking consortiums Anonymous and Lulzsec have shown the government what they are capable of by hacking websites such as the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and have published the names and phone numbers of their federal agents online (Padmanabhan, 2012, p.194).  These groups cannot be prosecuted for this because they did not expose any classified information, they simply showed what they can do. The threat of cyber-attack is much greater than data breaches though. Police, fire and other emergency services are dispatched by computer-controlled dispatch centers. If an attack in the U.S. was underway hackers could reroute or drop all calls to emergency services, delaying first responders and magnifying the effects of an attack tenfold (Adam, Stiles, Zinars, Timmons, Leung, Stachnick, Mehrota, 2013, p.89). The internet has woven people and data together like a bulb on a strand of Christmas lights- if one bulb stops working they all stop, making it much harder to find the source of the problem. Everything in modern American life from electricity to drinking water and cell towers are all controlled by computers.