The Congress Daily has announced that a senior Homeland Security Department (DHS) official says a comprehensive plan for tracking foreign visitors is nearing completion.  This plan comes after Congress’ approval of $362 million in spending for the US-VISIT program for fiscal year 2007, with $200 million of it with until DHS submits a comprehensive plan for the US-VISIT system.   

According to appropriators, the plan must detail how funding will be spent, what the strategic objectives of the program are, and a schedule for developing a system to determine when foreigners leave the U.S. before DHS can receive this additional funding.  Robert Mocny, acting director of the program, said his office will submit his plan to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff for final approval.  The system planned for implementation will check the fingerprints and facial photographs of foreigners on current U.S. government watch lists to determine if they have ties to undocumented immigration or terrorism.  

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Via press release, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Emilio Gonzalez announced the realignment of the Agency’s office to better balance the workload and personnel amongst USCIS field offices.  Upon its 2003 establishment, USCIS inherited the INS structure, consisting of three regions and thirty-three districts.  USCIS’ workload distribution, however, varies greatly from that of INS.  The incompatibility between the two led some USCIS districts having workforces up to 50 times larger than other districts.  

The realignment process does not affect the locations of or the services offered at local USCIS district offices.  However, USCIS will establish a new Southeast Regional office in Orlando , Florida .  The placement of this regional office will allow USCIS to balance the immigration and citizen ship workload in this area of the country.  Also, USCIS is creating two new management districts in Sacramento , California and Tampa , Florida .  

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At the result of a court order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently acknowledged that they deliberately left over 1,300 US-VISIT computer workstations vulnerable to a cyberattack. This vulnerability left a Morocco-born "Zotob" computer virus to crash DHS’ US-VISIT screening system last year, via the backbone network of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Bureau, Wired Magazine reports.  The virus struck shortly after the $400 million US-VISIT program was launched in January 2004.  

Among the court documents, the system implemented by DHS suffered "security related issues (that) could compromise the confidentiality, integrity and availability of sensitive US-VISIT data if they are not remediated."  The US-VISIT workstations run Windows 2000 Professional, which features a plug-and-play interface that could allow a hacker to take complete control of a computer network.  Microsoft announced the vulnerability on August 9, 2004.  Four days after this announcement, a teenage Moroccon virus writer launched Zotob, which spread through the security invulnerability.  

A spokeswoman for DHS’ US-VISIT program office refused to comment on this week’s release of court documents.  ICE declined to speak of the virus’ infiltration of its backbone network, referring inquiries back to DHS.