You'll recall that McClatchy, no stranger to this, produced a major scoop a couple of weeks back on the Obama administraiton's "Insider Threat" program, which attempts to, among other things, get workers to turn in colleagues in the name of anti-terrorism. Now McClatchy's most excellent Jonathan Landay and Marisa Taylor
back with a strong follow, which opens:
In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other
security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees
to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral
profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work,
according to experts and government documents.
The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat
Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions
of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk
persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them
could face penalties, including criminal charges.
Obama mandated
the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley
Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified
computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy
group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency,
including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not
directly involved in national security.
Under the program, which is being implemented with little public
attention, security investigations can be launched when government
employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported
by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration
documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered
when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network
monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”
Federal
employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the
lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd
working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict
whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special
insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible,
electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and
“personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified
and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports
and financial disclosure forms.
Over the years, numerous studies
of public and private workers who’ve been caught spying, leaking
classified information, stealing corporate secrets or engaging in
sabotage have identified psychological profiles that could offer clues
to possible threats.
Administration officials want government workers
trained to look for such indicators and report them so the next
violation can be stopped before it happens.
“In past espionage
cases, we find people saw things that may have helped identify a spy,
but never reported it,” said Gene Barlow, a spokesman for the Office of
the National Counterintelligence Executive, which oversees government
efforts to detect threats like spies and computer hackers and is helping
implement the Insider Threat Program. “That is why the awareness effort
of the program is to teach people not only what types of activity to
report, but how to report it and why it is so important to report it.”
But
even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these
techniques.
Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through
behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic
and racial profiling and privacy violations.
“There is no
consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee
regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological
monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008
National Research Council report on detecting terrorists.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/09/196211/linchpin-for-obamas-plan-to-predict.html#storylink=cpy
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