Even before U.S. intelligence specialist Chelsea Manning and NSA contractor Edward Snowden became world famous after revealing embarrassing State Department cables and NSA spying programs, the Obama administration launched a government-wide initiative intended to crack down on leakers within federal agencies. The unprecedented Insider Threat Program was designed to boost security within the government. But after Manning’s WikiLeaks disclosure, it became truly Orwellian, urging federal employees to monitor their colleagues’ activities and demanding managers to keep track of all actions of their subordinates.
The program extended far beyond U.S. national security apparatus: federal agencies, even those totally unrelated to defense and intelligence, including the Peace Corps, Social Security Administration, and Education Department, are required to watch for “high-risk persons or behaviours,” among co-workers.
According to McClatchy, government agencies use this program to crack down on disclosure of any internal information, even if it doesn’t contain classified information.
“Hammer this fact home,” a Defense Department strategy from 2012 says. “…leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”
Despite President Obama’s statements on the importance of whistleblowers and promises to run “the most transparent administration in history,” the program clearly threatened both whistleblowers and transparency advocates.
In an interview with RT, investigative journalist Dave Lindorff described the Insider Threat Program as completely inefficient.
“Let’s be clear about this, it’s not about national security, it’s about preventing people from telling the truth about problems with government, about corruption, about failed policies and so on. What it really is… is the Obama administration has gone beyond even the Nixon administration in its fears of leaks, and its efforts to control the story. It’s trying to prevent the press from getting access to people inside the government … so that all they get is public relations handouts,” he said.
Despite no evidence that the program actually prevented any national security breaches, the Obama administration keeps pumping resources into it. The National Insider Threat Task Force, created within the government, is preparing to hire an army of spooks to monitor employees of federal agencies.
According to Patricia Larsen, co-director of the NITTF, the job description of these anti-leak specialists requires a combination of counterintelligence, information security, and human resources. So far, all NITTF staff has been hired through job classifications related to one — but not all — of these three fields.
“[We’ve] got to professionalize that workforce of people who do this for a living,” she said. “[The] reason that you are there is to help protect your colleagues, not to out them,” Larsen insisted at a recent conference organized by Nextgov earlier this month. While this statement might help to recruit potential employees, there’s also no doubt a serious financial incentive.
While no NITTF pay scale has been released, similar positions with other firms pay between $100,000 and $130,000 a year.
