National Security on CrossGov.com

DHS Investigates Potential Breach After 41,000 ICE, CBP and CISA Staff Records Published Online

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Homeland Security says it is looking into a potential breach after a searchable directory of more than 41,000 of its employees and contractors went online on October 28. The records name staff at ICE, CBP, Homeland Security Investigations, USCIS and CISA, with titles, offices, work phone numbers, email addresses, managers and the internal access groups each person belongs to. Some of those groups point to undercover and surveillance work.

FCC Votes to Bar Chinese Test Labs That Check 82 Percent of US Electronics by December 2028

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission voted on October 29 to stop recognizing test labs and certification bodies in countries that don’t give American labs the same treatment. China is the one that matters. From December 2028, a phone, laptop, router or camera that needs FCC approval before it can be sold in the United States can no longer be tested in a lab in mainland China.

That covers most of them. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr says labs in China tested 82 percent of the devices that applied for FCC authorization in 2025. Labs inside the United States tested about 4 percent. The draft order counts 609 recognized labs worldwide, a quarter of them in China, and notes that in 2007 the split ran the other way: US labs handled about 31 percent of applications, Chinese labs about 13 percent.

OFAC Sanctions Rwandan Defense Ministry Over M23 and 11 Facilitators of North Korean IT Worker Fraud

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added 13 names to the SDN list on October 28 in two separate actions. Ten people and one company tied to North Korea’s overseas IT worker schemes were designated. So were Rwanda’s Ministry of Defence and a Rwandan savings society that pays for the army backing the M23 rebels in eastern Congo.

The two cases have nothing in common on the ground. What links them is the tool. Both rest on executive orders, both block any property under US jurisdiction, and both came out of Treasury on the same afternoon without a vote in Congress.

Pentagon Inspector General Declines Bipartisan Senate Request to Investigate Starlink and Starshield Disruptions in Ukraine

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Defense Department’s inspector general has turned down a request from nine senators, four Republicans and five Democrats, to investigate this month’s disruptions to Starlink and Starshield satellite service in Ukraine. In a reply dated October 27, the watchdog said the questions were better answered by the department itself, and pointed the senators to the Air Force. A spokeswoman for the office said it could reconsider if new information comes to light.

FBI Arrests a CIA Contractor With Top Secret Clearance on Charges of Leaking Classified Reports to a Journalist

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The FBI arrested a CIA contractor on October 23, 2026, on a charge that he passed classified national defense information to a journalist he was dating. The Justice Department named him as Ian A. Brinksman, 42, of Washington, DC, and charged him by criminal complaint with unlawfully transmitting national defense information, an Espionage Act offense.

The case started inside the agency. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the FBI made the arrest “following a referral from the Agency.” The FBI’s Chicago Field Office led the investigation, with help from the Washington Field Office. Brinksman held a Top Secret clearance with access to sensitive compartmented information. He had worked since 2020 for a government agency in the Eastern District of Virginia and, from 2022, as a systems integration developer for a contractor to that agency.

NSA, CISA and NIST Issue Incident Response Practices for Superintelligence Agents That Act on Their Own

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The National Security Agency, CISA and NIST published 10 practices on October 20, 2026, for handling what they call “SI control incidents”: cases where a highly capable AI agent, in the new federal vocabulary a Super Intelligence agent, takes serious actions nobody told it to take.

The guidance is titled “Key Practices for Incident Readiness and Response in Super Intelligence Training and Evaluation.” It is a Cybersecurity Information Sheet, version 1.0, cleared for public release. The authors are NSA’s Super Intelligence Security Center, NIST’s Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. No foreign agencies co-signed it.

Treasury Sanctions a Greek Law Firm Behind Iran Shadow Fleet Ships as FinCEN Issues Its First Subpoena to a European Bank

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Treasury Department sanctioned a Greek and Panamanian law firm on October 21, 2026, for registering the shipping companies behind Iran’s shadow fleet. The same day it disclosed that FinCEN had used its Bank Secrecy Act subpoena power for the first time to dig into a Greek bank’s possible ties to Iran.

Both moves are part of Operation Economic Outcast, the campaign Treasury launched on August 24 to cut Iran off from the financial system. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put the message bluntly: “if you are supporting the Iranian regime, we will find you and sanction you.”

White Powder Letters Reach Election Offices in at Least Five States as the FBI Warns of Threats to Election Workers

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service are investigating suspicious letters, most of them holding white powder, that reached state election offices in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nebraska in mid-October. Postal inspectors stopped more before delivery. On October 15 the FBI issued a public warning about threats to election workers.

Two letters were opened on Tuesday, October 13. In Louisiana, a letter reached the elections office of Secretary of State Nancy Landry. The employee who opened it was taken to an emergency room as a precaution and the building was cleared for the rest of the day. Testing later found the powder harmless. The same afternoon in Oklahoma, a state elections employee opened a letter with white powder and the building was evacuated.

Treasury COINS Act Rule Would Ban US Investment in Chinese and Russian Superintelligence, Supercomputing and Hypersonics

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Treasury Department on October 22 proposed a rule that would stop Americans putting money into companies in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba that build superintelligence systems, supercomputers, quantum machines, hypersonic weapons or certain biotechnology. It is the first rule written under the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security Act, the COINS Act, which Congress folded into the FY2026 defense bill last December. Comments close on December 7.

The proposal turns a program that started as a 2023 executive order aimed at China alone into a statute-backed regime covering five countries and six technology families. It also hardens the AI piece. Under the current rules, a US investor backing a Chinese AI developer often only had to tell Treasury about the deal. Under the new text, investing in any entity developing a “super intelligence system” is simply banned. That’s Treasury following the administration’s September decision to rename artificial intelligence, the subject of an earlier CrossGov.com column.

CRS Tells Congress to Weigh Icebreaker Funding and Command Coordination as Russia Rebuilds Its Arctic Forces

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Congressional Research Service report of October 14, R49487, asks Congress to judge Russia’s Arctic build-up against what Washington is funding: icebreakers, command coordination and allied plans.

The report, “Russia’s Arctic Military Posture: Considerations for Congress”, is mostly about Russia. Its value for Washington is in what it lists as open questions for lawmakers, and in what it leaves out.

DOE Uses the Defense Production Act to Fund the Constitution Pipeline and Two Grid Projects, Up to $242 Million in Two Weeks

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Energy has committed up to $242 million of Defense Production Act money to three energy projects since October 5: a gas pipeline into New York, a second power line in Alaska and grid upgrades in Virginia. A law passed in 1950 for the Korean War is now paying for permits and power lines.

The biggest award came first. On October 5 DOE offered the Alaska Energy Authority up to $150 million for the Beluga-Healy line, about 223 miles of new transmission between Southcentral and Interior Alaska. Today a single intertie, built in the 1980s, carries power between Anchorage and Fairbanks, and most of the state’s military bases draw on it. The project is priced at $418 million, a preliminary estimate, with the other $268 million to come from non-federal sources. DOE’s release cites the state’s big military installations without naming one.

GAO Finds GPS Modernization Still Behind After DOD Cancels the OCX Ground System and Army Aviation Waits to 2049 for M-Code

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GAO reported on October 7 that the Pentagon’s GPS upgrade is still behind schedule after DOD canceled OCX, the ground control system it had funded for years. The report, GAO-27-107676, says the fix creates new risks for the next satellites and that secure M-code receivers will reach some aircraft only in 2049.

Congress asked for the review. The fiscal 2025 NDAA widened an older reporting mandate, from the fiscal 2016 NDAA, so that GAO now covers the alternatives to GPS as well as GPS itself. Those alternatives matter because GPS signals are weak and easy to jam.

GAO Finds NNSA Cut Its Federal Staff 11.9% as the Nuclear Weapons Workload Hits a Cold War High

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The National Nuclear Security Administration, the DOE agency that runs the US nuclear weapons stockpile, has lost 236 federal employees since early fiscal 2025, GAO reported on October 16. That’s 11.9% of its staff, gone in the same months its workload reached what GAO calls the highest level since the Cold War.

The agency is small and its budget isn’t. NNSA’s federal staff oversee a $25 billion annual budget and about 70,000 contractor employees who maintain the stockpile. They also run a modernization of the weapons and their infrastructure that GAO puts at $200 billion over two decades.

GAO Finds the US Cannot Tell Who Owns the Critical Mineral Mines on Federal Land

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The federal government doesn’t know how much foreign money is behind the critical mineral mines on its own land, GAO reported on October 16. The 1872 Mining Law doesn’t ask, so the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service don’t collect it.

GAO released two reports that day, both on hardrock mining, which is where most US-mineable critical minerals come from. The first, GAO-27-108094, tried to measure foreign investment in mines on federal land. The second, GAO-27-108196, looked at whether BLM checks that mining claimants are allowed to hold claims at all. Both found the same gap. The agencies that manage the land collect almost nothing on who’s behind the claims.

OFAC Hits Iran Offshore Banks, a Cartel del Noreste Racetrack and Chinese Firms Tied to Google Trade Secret Theft in One Week

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control packed a wide spread of actions into October 13 to 19: Iranian offshore banks, a Mexican cartel’s racetrack, a Bank of America settlement and a fresh use of a 2023 law against trade secret theft.

Together they show how many separate legal authorities Washington now runs at once. Every designation below rests on an executive order or an existing statute. None needed a vote.

DOJ Charges 16 People With Noncitizen Voting as Trump Allies Press for Election Emergency Powers and 1,000 Federal Monitors Deploy