Analyst's note: We are discussing here a basic program, from our community organizer in-chief, to order federal employees to spy on each other and report back any ‘suspicious activity’ .... and it even has its own offices. And it all began with an executive order from Mr. Obama himself.
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 coworkers as a way to predict whether they might do "harm to the United States." We understand that 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.
This seems to go right along with other on-going programs like out of the state of Virginia whose Department of Health has acquired children's medical records without parental consent. This program in Virginia is receiving both state and federal funding.
This smells a lot like the inside of the communist party East Germany and the nazi party. I recommend a review of What Happened In Egypt, Expressed In ‘American’ Terms and also What Odd Guest Appears to Have Showed Up at the White House’s July 4th Party for Military Families? Ask yourself, "Why was Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the much-discussed Saudi national once identified as a “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombings, at the White House for a 4th of July celebration for military heros and their families?" Hmmmm? ... Obama hails Muslim holiday as symbol of tolerance for other faiths
[....] Not only was Alharbi named a “person of interest” in the Boston bombings, he was reportedly set for deportation on 212 (3)(B) grounds – “security and related grounds” — “Terrorist activities” — after the tragedy.
Sources told TheBlaze his file was altered on the evening of April 17 to disassociate him from the initial charges, and according to Glenn Beck, “someone later went in and tried to destroy both the original event file and an amended version.”
Even if he was invited, the fact that someone who is not an American soldier was there could spark interest.
Considering that those who fail to report suspicious activities face penalties, including criminal charges, I feel obligated to report one federal employee who goes by the name of Barack Hussein Obama, and who is presently acting as President of the United States, and who is presently engaged in irreparable harm, if not treason, to our United States. We have pointed out on a number of occasions and where the Obama administration is providing unauthorized disclosures of classified information to “aiding the enemies of the United States.”
You will also want to listen to “THIS IS NUTS!” Mark Levin slams Obama over insider threat program, calls it totalitarian, police-state.
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Linchpin for Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven, isn’t likely to work, experts say
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.”
[....] 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.
“Doing something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,” Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that wrote the report, told McClatchy. [....] some employees already are being urged to watch co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.
[....] The Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have spent tens of millions of dollars on an array of research projects. Yet after several decades, they still haven’t developed a list of behaviors they can use to definitively identify the tiny fraction of workers who might some day violate national security laws.
[....] “We have not found any silver bullets,” said Deana Caputo, the lead behavioral scientist at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit company working on insider threat efforts for U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “We don’t have actually any really good profiles or pictures of a bad guy, a good guy gone bad or even the bad guy walking in to do bad things from the very beginning.”
[....] A report by the Deloitte consulting firm identifies “several key trends that are making all organizations particularly susceptible to insider threat today.” These trends include an increasingly disgruntled, post-Great Recession workforce and the entry of younger, “Gen Y” employees who were “raised on the Internet” and are “highly involved in social networking.”
Some government programs that have embraced behavioral indicators have been condemned as failures. Perhaps the most heavily criticized is the Transportation Security Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, program.
The program, which has cost $878 million and employs 2,800 people, uses “behavior detection officers” to identify potential terrorists by scrutinizing airline passengers for signs of “stress, fear or deception.”
[....] Officials with the Army, the only government department contacted by McClatchy that agreed to discuss the issue, acknowledged that identifying potential insider threats is more complicated than relying on a list of behaviors.
[....] some current and former U.S. officials and experts worry that Obama’s Insider Threat Program could lead to false or retaliatory accusations across the entire government, in part because security officials are granted access to information outside their usual purview.
[....] Co-workers, Fingar said, should “be attentive” to colleagues’ personal problems in order to refer them to counseling, not to report them as potential security violators. “It’s simply because they are colleagues, fellow human beings,” he said.
Eric Feldman, a former inspector general of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that oversees U.S. spy satellites, expressed concern that relying on workers to report colleagues’ suspicious behaviors to security officials could create “a repressive kind of culture.” [....]
