CFATS and New Orleans New Years Day Attack

I have been hearing rumors about an ongoing investigation by CISA with respect to the automobile attack in New Orleans early on January 1^st, 2025. I have talked to no one who will discuss the investigation on the record, nor can I find anyone with any where near first-person knowledge of the reported investigation (on or off the record), so this is very iffy, but it sounds interesting enough to discuss. The rumor is that there is some sort of connection between the person accused of that attack, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, and personnel surety investigations conducted under the now defunct Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program.

The “Facts”

Now, there have been no ‘investigations’ under the CFATS Personnel Surety Program (PSP) since the program expired on July 28^th, 2023. When the CFATS program was still in place, their PSP program required covered chemical facilities to submit names of personnel authorized unaccompanied access to high-risk chemical facilities to CISA for vetting against the TSA’s Terrorist Screening Database. CISA’s part in the vetting process was little more than collecting the information from the facilities and presenting the data to TSA.

The TSDB is not strictly speaking a biometrically based database. There may be some such data (mainly pictures but some fingerprints) available on some of the listees, but it is mainly a name-based database with all of the attendant problems of multiple people with the same name. The submissions that companies made thru the PSP did include fingerprints to avoid as many of those problems as possible.

CISA apparently maintained records of those submissions for purposes of the PSP program. I have been told that access to that data was strictly controlled by CISA’s Infrastructure Security Division (which ran the CFATS program). Once the program was shut down by congressional inaction, those records were not destroyed (CISA is still hoping to see Congress reinstate the program), but access to those files were even further restricted.

Finally, I have seen nothing in the public reporting on the life of Jabbar that would indicate that he had been an employee of a chemical facility, much less a CFATS covered facility.

My Conjectures

Okay, having said all of that, what could CISA be interested in? What I suspect (and remember my lack of reliable information) is that someone remembered Jabbar’s name with respect to a PSP submission. That ‘someone’ was a probably (CISA people did not routinely see the names being submitted) from a previously covered chemical facility, or prepared data submissions for a previously covered chemical facility for the CFATS PSP, and they reported that name recall to someone in CISA’s ISD. CISA’s ‘investigation’ would then be finding and obtaining access to that old (pre-July 29^th, 2023) data and then getting the FBI to compare the fingerprint data with Jabbar’s fingerprints.

Okay #2, so what? If there was a connection of that name to the TSDB, the FBI would already have been looking into that connection. No big deal from a CFATS perspective. Except that if there had been a connection when the PSP submitted the name to TSA, there should have been a terrorism related investigation initiated by the FBI and maybe something could have been (and then again, maybe not) done to prevent the New Years Day attack. If there had been an investigation, would CISA have been notified? I do not know; it would have been the FBI’s call.

The worst case scenario would be that Jabbar was actually the person who had applied to work at a chemical company before July 2023 and the PSP submission that is being investigated was for the person who stands accused (no trial will be held to convict him since he was killed in the attack, but legally, he is only accused of the attack) of the Bourbon Street vehicle ramming attack. Lacking a negative response to the PSP query, Jabbar could then have been hired and used that employment to obtain the ingredients used to make the pipe bombs that were placed around the French Quarter but were never detonated. Nothing in public reporting would support this scenario. Still, it is more likely than the early reports that Jabbar was an illegal immigrant that crossed in from Mexico in the last two weeks to conduct this jihadist terror attack.