by Jacob Chamberlain
Common Dreams
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.
The program
was launched in October 2011 directly after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning
leaked military documents that exposed U.S. war crimes to the website
WikiLeaks.
“Hammer
this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies
of the United States,” says one of the documents – a June
1, 2012 Defense Department strategy written for the program.
As the documents
reveal, any “leaks to the media” are officially “equated
with espionage,” through the administration’s eyes.
As McClatchy
reports:
President
Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider
Threat Program, 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 McClatchy
piece goes on to detail the individualized implementations of the
program within differing government agencies – all with their
own tactics for identifying the “spy in our midst,” as
The Defense Department puts it.
According to
McClatchy, the Obama administration is expected to hasten
the implementation of the program in the wake of the recent earth-shattering
revelations leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden that exposed
the NSA’s vast and unconstitutional – as many have argued –
spying programs.
According to
current and former officials and experts who spoke with McClatchy,
the Insider Threat Program is making it “easier for the government
to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information
to the public,” as McClatchy writes, “while creating
toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious
investigations of loyal Americans.”
“It was
just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the
FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey,
let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only
thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan,
a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m
waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50
reward.”
“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.”
Reprinted
from Common Dreams under
a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
June 24, 2013
Copyright
© 2013 Common
Dreams
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell