This is right off the charts! I guess they are afraid of a whistleblower stampede.
I think they are too late.
The Washington Post recently obtained a
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo that warned staff not to
read articles — get this —printed in
the Washington Post that covered whistleblower revelations
about classified information.
Specifically, DHS — and we are not making this up —
implied that there could be legal repercussions for employees who
read WashingtonPost stories about whistleblowers and the information that they
disclose. In particular, a DHS memo prohibited reading of
such articles from any computer outside of the DHS office:
The Department of Homeland Security has warned
its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a
Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows
how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international
communications.
An internal memo from DHS headquarters told workers on
Friday that viewing the document from an “unclassified government workstation”
could lead to administrative or legal action. “You may be violating your
non-disclosure agreement in which you sign that you will
protect classified national securityinformation,” the
communication said.
The memo said workers who view the article through an
unclassified workstation should report the incident as a “classified data
spillage.”
“Classifed data spillage.” This “data spillage” is
in the press and on the web around the world — and DHS is implying that the NSA
is monitoring employees use of computers outside the office to see if
they are reading such media coverage, so much for not spying on Americans.
This is so retro totalitarian, so Soviet and Stasi
Kafkaesque, that it’s hard to believe. As a
websiteTechDirt comments: “Got that? Working for the government
and merely reading the news about things the government is
doing might subject you to legal action.”
Of course, if a co-worker who is an “Insider Threat”
informant sees you reading a whistleblower-related article in
a print newspaper, he or she may report you as a potential danger to
national security. This is not an exaggeration.
In case you managed to miss stories about operation
“Insider Threat” (formally known as the National Insider Threat Policy),
this is the Obama administration‘s program to turn the hundreds of
thousands of people who work in the surveillance state apparatus into
stool pigeons. Of course, as in any police state apparatus, anyone can report
another person against whom they hold a personal grudge as an “enemy of the
state.” I wish that all this were hyperbolic fear mongering against some
perfectly legitimage national concerns, but it is not.
According to the Federation of American Scientists
blog on secrecy:
A national policy on “insider threats” was developed by
the Obama Administration in order to protect against actions by
government employees who would harm the security of the nation.
But under the rubric of insider threats, the policy subsumes the seemingly
disparate acts of spies, terrorists, and those who leak classified
information.
The insider threat is defined as “the threat that an
insider will use his/her authorized access, wittingly or unwittingly, to do
harm to the security of the United States. This threat can
include damage to the United States through espionage, terrorism, [or]
unauthorized disclosure of national security information,” according
to the newly disclosed National Insider Threat Policy, issued in November
2012.
One of the implications of aggregating spies, terrorists
and leakers in a single category is that the nation’s spy-hunters
and counterterrorism specialists can now be trained upon those who
are suspected of leakingclassified information.
Subsequent articles on the “Insider Threat”
program have revealed that it is shabbily constructed and sets up an
environment of co-workers fearing each other.
A BuzzFlash at Truthout reader sent in a satirical song
performed by the late Zero Mostel during the McCarthy era, when the FBI and
Congress were looking for “Commies under every table.” The refrain to
Mostel’s parody (paraphased) was: “Who’s going to be the man (or woman)
watching the man (or woman) who’s watching me?”
That’s a good question indeed in a surveillance state
that has creeped across the threshold into a state of fear, one in which you are
legally threatened for reading a public newspaper because of now public
information in it about your government.
In such a nation, as happened in the nations of the
former Soviet empire, we are all “insider threats.” We all have become targets
for spying because the government has superceded the rights and legal
protections of the individual.
The goal has become the protection of the state apparatus
— and the contracting firms receiving billions of dollars for surveillance
consultation — not the security of the people who live in the state —
or in this case the United States.
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