From McClatchy's D.C. bureau:
WASHINGTON — 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....MORE
In
other news:
The NSA Has Inserted Its Code Into Android OS, Or Three Quarters Of All Smartphones
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/09/196211/linchpin-for-obamas-plan-topredict.html#.Ud1jd6x0lqe#storylink=cpy
