By using this site, you are agreeing to security monitoring and auditing. For security purposes, and to ensure that the public service remains available to users, this government computer system employs programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or to otherwise cause damage, including attempts to deny service to users.
Unauthorized attempts to upload information and/or change information on any portion of this site are strictly prohibited and are subject to prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act of 1996 (see Title 18 U.S.C. §§ 1001 and 1030).
To ensure our website performs well for all users, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) monitors the frequency of requests for DHS.gov content to ensure automated searches do not impact the ability of others to access DHS.gov content. We reserve the right to block IP addresses that submit excessive requests. Current guidelines limit users to a total of no more than 10 requests per second, regardless of the number of machines used to submit requests.
If a user or application submits more than 10 requests per second, further requests from the IP address(es) may be limited for a brief period. Once the rate of requests has dropped below the threshold for 10 minutes, the user may resume accessing content on DHS.gov. This practice is designed to limit excessive automated searches on DHS.gov and is not intended or expected to impact individuals browsing the DHS.gov website.
DHS does not allow "unclassified" bots or automated tools to crawl the site. Any request that has been identified as part of an unclassified bot or an automated tool outside of the acceptable policy will be managed to ensure fair access for all users.
Note that this policy may change as the department manages DHS.gov to ensure that the website performs efficiently and remains available to all users.