The "Insider Threat" program creates a sweeping gov't. wide crackdown on federal employees who leak info
A program being implemented by the Obama administration titled "Insider Threat" requires millions of federal employees to keep a close watch on each other – a "sweeping" effort to crackdown on whistleblowers and leakers across the U.S. government, McClatchy reports Friday after obtaining a series of government documents.
The program, which has largely gone unmentioned in the media, spans all government agencies and mandates that employees and their superiors seek out “high-risk persons or behaviors” tied to someone who might expose government wrongdoing. Those who fail to expose someone they belief to be a leaker face penalties that include criminal charges.
As McClatchy reports Friday, the program creates a "sweeping" government-wide crackdown on federal employees who may find certain harmful actions or policies of their employer worthy of public knowledge.
As McClatchy reports:
President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.
Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material.
“The real danger is that you get a bland common denominator working in the government,” warned Ilana Greenstein, a former CIA case officer who says she quit the agency after being falsely accused of being a security risk. “You don’t get people speaking up when there’s wrongdoing. You don’t get people who look at things in a different way and who are willing to stand up for things. What you get are people who toe the party line, and that’s really dangerous for national security.”
President Obama has now thrown the book at seven eight whistleblowers and leakers, charging them under the Espionage Act of 1917, a law passed to criminalize anti-war dissent against US involvement in World War I. The passage of the Act and the climate of government repression during that period do not represent the nation’s finest moment, but we appear to be regressing back to those bleak days. Our time, like the second decade of the 20th century, is marked by paranoia, suspicion, distrust and government overreach.
Back then, anti-communist and anti-dissident hysteria resulted in the imprisonment and deportation of thousands of activists and radicals. Former President Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “He who is not with us, absolutely and without reserve of any kind, is against us, and should be treated as an enemy alien.” It was precisely this attitude that enabled the shameful 'House Un-American Activities Committee' and the worst intelligence abuses of the COINTELPRO period, when J. Edgar Hoover unleashed his FBI against peaceful dissidents and attempted to subvert democracy by using vast government resources to undermine First Amendment activity.
Fast forward to 2013. Nearly one hundred years after the Espionage Act was signed into law, our Constitutional law professor president is locking up and prosecuting government leakers with a ferocious passion. But he isn't content to simply throw the book at leakers after they have blown the whistle. President Obama appears to be dissatisfied with the massive roster of spies at his disposal, at last count numbering approximately five million. In what seems to be a full-throttled effort to stop the public from learning about nefarious government actions, the Obama administration wants every government worker to act as a spy, even if they work for the Department of Education or the Peace Corps.
The Department of Agriculture, “Treason 101” offers an online tutorial in the basics of spying and the Inside Espionage Threat.
The two-year-old program is now expected to be revved up in the wake of Edward Snowden’s explosive revelation of the National Security Agency’s telephone and internet data collection programs. But according to internal security experts and former government officials that the McClatchy team interviewed, the Insider Threat Program will have “grave consequences for the public’s right to know.” It could make it easier for the government to inhibit exposure of unclassified information and illegal programs and thwart legitimate whistleblowing. The program will be used to quell different perspectives, which in the end can hurt national security, they fear. Fearfulness and group think contributed to the prevailing and erroneous CIA judgment that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction, warranting invasion.
Government employees in the ‘national security’ world are already highly attuned to the state of permanent suspicion that the Obama program means to institutionalize and expand to the rest of the federal government. Time reports:
In a photograph posted online after Snowden revealed himself, his laptop displays a sticker touting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a longstanding advocate for online rights and staunch opponent of government surveillance. That would have been enough of a warning sign to make it into his file, Smith says, but investigators wouldn’t have come across it because clearance interviews aren’t performed at their homes: “You’re not around that person’s personal belongings to make any other additional observations about that person’s characters.”
Worry not, fellow citizens, because the "Insider Threat Program" is here to save us from the truth, and from having to listen to anyone who may dare utter it. Now government employees may be encouraged to visit one another’s homes, to discern whether or not they exhibit free-thinking tendencies or possess books that criticize government actions. You can never be too careful.
Under the Presidency of Barack Obama, no suspicion is too insignificant to be recorded, no activity so innocent as to go unreported. See Something, Say Something isn't enough -- because some of the bombs the government fears are simply made of words.
Political intimidation and the imposition of a kind of ubiquitous paranoia appear to be the goals of the far-reaching program, which “requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.”
http://privacysos.org/node/1090
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#.Ucg_Qt7D-Um
http://lewrockwell.com/orig14/chamberlain-j1.1.1.html
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/bombshell-governments-insider-threat-program-obligates-federal-workers-spy-their