“Europe has a false sense of security”

Peter S. Vincent, a former high-ranking civil servant at the United States Department of Homeland Security, warns that a million people become naturalised Europeans every year – without proper checks being carried out. He thinks that Schengen is full of holes and member states fail to disclose complete information to each other.

Few American civil servants are entitled to access “top secret” information. This means that they are entrusted with information that would cause “exceptionally grave damage to the security of the USA” if it were to be released. Normally, this authorisation remains in place even once they have left their role in the civil service. This is the case with Peter S. Vincent. He was a counter-terrorism expert at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security between 2002 and 2014. He was General Counsel to the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security for a period of five years, and was in charge of its international activities. Today, ...