Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists notes that a Department of Defense report on the Obama Administration’s ‘Insider Threat’ programme was released last month, charting the programme’s progress forward. Afterood writes that the DOD is constantly monitoring “‘approximately 100,000 military, civilian and contractor personnel’ in an effort to identify potential insider threats.”
The Insider Threat programme was launched in October 2011 in response to Chelsea Manning’s 2010 disclosures to WikiLeaks. Under the programme, employees across the US government are monitored in order to prevent leaks, equate criticisms of wrongdoing with spying and engender a culture of tight-lipped secrecy. As McClatchy reported, one DOD document emphasized, “leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”
Courage has previously written about problems with the programme, when it was revealed that the CIA was spying on its own “internal channels” for whistleblowers.
Kevin Gosztola, at Shadowproof, writes this week that “Twenty-two organizations, including whistleblower advocacy groups, recently sent a letter to the inspector general for the “intelligence community”, registering concerns about the programme’s threat to civil liberties. The organisations warn, “This kind of wanton misuse of the term ‘threat’ demonstrates that this program fails to distinguish between those who want to fix problems from those who wish to do harm to our national security.”