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US Intelligence Officials To Monitor Federal Employees With Security Clearances
First time accepted submitter Trachman writes in with news about a monitoring program designed to help stop future leaks of government documents. "U.S. intelligence officials are planning a sweeping system of electronic monitoring that would tap into government, financial and other databases to scan the behavior of many of the 5 million federal employees with secret clearances, current and former officials told The Associated Press. The system is intended to identify rogue agents, corrupt officials and leakers, and draws on a Defense Department model under development for more than a decade, according to officials and documents reviewed by the AP."
I can't imagine why they wouldn't monitor people with access to secret clearances. I know they polygraph them all the time and regularly perform spot checks for law enforcement violations, etc.
Don't want the government knowing everything about you? Don't request secret clearance from it.
...for posting on Slashdot during work hours for many.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
But who monitors the monitors?
Having a three-tiered system of government employability effectively bars countless Americans from serving in government and *ensures* it is nonrepresentative. In effect, you have cleared employees, non-cleared employees, and ex-cons, in decreasing order of government employability.
Glad I got out years ago and let my clearance expire. I could put up with the polygraph tests, and background checks every 5 years...as well as the initial SSBI. However, constant hidden monitoring is too much for me. What happens when you get a false positive?
They check all that stuff before you're cleared, and every time your clearance is renewed. I find it hard to believe that this isn't already at least partially true already.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The best way to prevent leaks like those that have happened lately is to have a REAL, RESPONSIVE, FUNCTIONAL whistle blower program so people do not have to take the law into their own hands.
This would be a massive project after the cost and screwups of "Obamacare" webportal (over 1 Billion, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/03/analysis-finds-cost-of-obamacare-website-is-way-more-than-anyone-predicted/) I think your pretty safe for awhile, Not only will it not work for a long time but the US taxpayer is looking at a massive, massive bill for somthing that is unnessary. Lets fight surveillance with more!
Good job US another Knee Jerk reaction!
Don't want the government knowing everything about you? Don't request secret clearance from it.
It is absurd that we have five *million* people in the country whom the government has forced to waive their right to be free from *unreasonable* search in order to qualify for their jobs.
If the government inquiries are reasonable, why would they need to make people sign the waiver?
Might as well toss out most of DC.
Surveillance is like violence, if it's not working, you aren't using it enough.
I'd like my government back, please.
Yo dawg! I heard you liked monitoring people so we got some monitoring people to monitor your monitoring people so you can monitor your monitoring people while you monitor people!
Yo dawg! I heard you like policing your state so we got you some police to police your police so you can police your police while you police your state!
"The Feds have a fetish for loyalty..."
...you try your utmost to prevent it from happening again?
At first glance monitoring employees with clearance seems to make sense, but in actual fact it's terribly self-serving and not at all in the interest of the people.
Meaingfully monitoring five million people is going to be very difficult. Perhaps we should re-evaluate what is classified and what jobs need classified status. If you have less people with secrets, it's much easier to keep them.
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Who is monitoring them? Without significant oversight of the monitors, then the whole thing is set up for a mess. Close the monitoring loop, Whoever is monitoring employees of another department should be monitored by a group from the department being monitored.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Have the government have no secrets.
I remain unconvinced that doing so actually results in a net benefit to the citizens, considering the costs and inevitable "intelligence arms races" with other countries, which are as predictable as an effect of our expenditures as night follows day.
What's the actual benefit to this when considering the moral hazard of having government institutions systematically pursuing actions which by definition cannot be "by the people, for the people" since "the people" don't even know what they are?
So, other countries might know where our bombs are. They probably already do, and that does not mean they have any possibility of getting to them. So, they might access our networks. That's a standard IT security competence issue, not an "intelligence" issue.
Really, outside of inflated budgets for the military, what net benefit is gained by creating and securing "secrets"?
First: federal employees with security clearance
Next: all federal employees & all foreign nationals in the US
Next: all those working in "sensitive" industries
Next: all those working in "economically-vital" industries.
Next....
See where this is going?
In private enterprise, I would not be surprised if such a system fell foul of legislation protecting whistleblowers. Should the same whistleblowing protections should apply to government agencies?
Sean Ellis
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Who watches the watchers watching the watchers watching the watchers?
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
so baddies have been warned, they have plenty of time to apply corrective actions. And employees with nothing to hide will be only ones affected by this.
To encourage whistleblowers? To have a more open goverment?
- get rid of as many sysadmins as possible .. but, but.. we sort of hoped you'd cut back on the surveillance schemes! You know, mend your ways?
- screen sysadmins for libertarian tendencies and for caring too much about the constitution
- make sure information is less widely accessible
- increase monitoring of everyone who accesses information
- prepare to make a few token concessions for public consumption
Do what? Hm no, we didn't think of that. Why would we have to do that then ?
I can see a real drop off in the number of job applicants. The new monitoring may be necessary, but it will sure feel oppressive.
Only the people who see nothing wrong with such monitoring would be doing the job.
This program is probably focused on members of the bureaucracy, but I wonder if they're going to cover another very significant group of government officials with security clearances: Members of Congress and their staffs. A lot of your leaks happen over on Capitol Hill after all. Then again, I'm going to take a guess that they will very vocally and aggressively oppose this action and play the separation of powers card to shield themselves from this new effort.
They should monitor politicians for corruption.
The price tag, Clapper conceded, “is going to be costly.”
am I the only one thinking this smells an awful lot like the porn scanners?
I'd imagine if I were an employee with security access I'd get at least a random audit once one a while. I mean, it stands to reason, no? Otherwise what is the point?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Better idea - don't let them have our data in the first place.
Civil rights never go out the window. As a cleared government employee I have not waived my civil rights and would never do so. I have agreed to allow some intrusive inspection of my life but I still have and will always have my civil rights.
Idiots like you who think that national security trumps all are what is wrong with today's national security infrastructure.
Or, you could just actually use the access controls already built into your systems and train your people to not share their credentials.
No, it's much better to go from criminally negligent and sloppy to overreacting and stomping all over everybody's freedoms.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think Shakespeare covered it in Othello as well. Minority Report for that matter.
The war on terror is a boxing match with ourselves. If we couldn't pay our bills without borrowing money from Russia & China before, just wait until the people with clearances start requiring higher paying salaries to compensate for the "Gestapo treatment". We're losing the "War on Terror" in the most epic way possible: self-destruction while the enemy sits back and eats popcorn. Asymmetrical warfare is all about bleeding your opponent's resolve to fight. I don't think even the most ambitious Fantasy of Osama Bin Laden ever imagined he could succeed in financially ruining our capability to do so! Talk about David vs. Goliath!
I reported myself, too, just for good measure.
Making a report automatically gets you reported.
Self-reporting in such a situation is viewed as suspicious. At the very least, you will be logged as a brown-noser.
Of course being aware enough to realize this is even more suspicious, and will get a note in your dossier as a potential troublemaker.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you asked most people with a TS clearance if they'd rather this or face a periodic lifestyle polygraph they'd probably call this a no-brainer alternative to the latter.
Lots of federal employees means lots of chances for leaks. Therefore we need fewer federal employees.
(Also, the government shouldn't have too many secrets. They are suppose to be working for the people.)
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You forgot after the ex-cons...Hard working honest Americans. They don't stand a chance of being left alone and getting a good paying job. It's just another attempt for Washington to HIDE from "We the people" while stealing the tax payer blind. Also, they would never hire an honest person. /RANT
JH
so we'll end-up with a government that consists of only Republicans. That is the real driver behind this hateful new policy. They know that no self-respecting person, in other words not one of their kind, will put-up with this. If this gets enacted, it will destroy our country.
One measure of incompetence is that it typically swings from one extreme to the other, never displaying balance or good sense. Failure to monitor the in-house behavior a few thousand people (at most) with high-level access to NSA files has led to monitoring some five-million people in every aspect of their lives with "a sweeping system of electronic monitoring that would tap into government, financial and other databases."
It's easy to suspect that the real goal isn't to track those who leak secrets that ought to be leaked, but politically embarrassing whistleblowers. Also, don't forget that monitoring federal employees with a secret clearance (no big deal, I once had one) will also result in monitoring those in their families. That five million targeted is likely to mean closer to fifteen or twenty million people exposed.
And all to catch a Snowden who could have easily been caught by far simpler and far less intrusive means? I think not. Behind that incompetence lie schemes far more dangerous. Thus far the Obama administration has been able to use the IRS to target a few Republican friendly companies and limited government non-profits. This give them information about the political views of millions of ordinary citizens, who could also be covertly targeted.
For their job, they have lost all civil rights. Thats why snowden had to defect, Baby Bush changed the rules.If you are government, you have to obey their rules. Or lose your job, as a contractor, you have your rights guaranteed to a point, of employment. After that, you can be sanctioned for blowing your nose at the wrong time. But a security contractor can piss off the big boss, and not be touched, And his clearance cannot be touched without cause, even if the clearance was not granted but still in process. Sorry it sounds wierd, but that paper you signed into the government with, means you are their eyes, ears and whatever else they dream up. That paper means you give up your rights to defend your pratice, to do things that they say are necessary. Or you don't work for them.
That they have to announce they plan to is rather astonishing.
EXACTLY. Such information is incredibly hazardous to the system and needs more protections than the security clearance system itself!
In the hands of the wrong managers, politicians, appointees... this information could be used to target the honest and promote the corrupt. Somebody cheating on their wife could be let go while another selling out their country to a multinational gets ignored.
The trick to MODERN spying is to do it for a multinational corporation who can indirectly give it to their government. Nobody seems to care about corporate ties. Look at the CIA and Valerie Plame, she did her work thru a corporation and her contacts could just appear as doing legitimate business (which can be quite illegitimate, because it's just business as usual.)
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What a fucking nonsense. Instead addressing culture of corruption and criminal behaviour acceptance, they will be looking for the people with integrity.
It's fucking boys club when bribery, swiping under the floor is the government agencies mantra.
Instead of monitoring their ranks to punish people who are actually serving the public interest, maybe our Federal government could stop doing illegal stuff that needs to be covered up and swept under the rug.
Naw, let's just persecute the messengers instead.
To nicely quote from the Demolition Man movie... "Why don't you just stick a leash up my ass?!?"
Honestly, the government is looking at lo-jacking everyone with chipsets so they can track your every movement.
Coming Soon: Real ID Chipset -- located under your skin! All transactions done via chipset. Money obsolete!
This was supposed to be going the other way....
Lots of federal employees means lots of chances for leaks. Therefore we need fewer federal employees.
President Reagan's efforts to reduce the size of the Federal Government included both actions to reduce the number of federal employees and specific actions to reduce the number of clearance holders. Ironically he was one of the last Presidents to deliberately reduce that number.
No they don't. They don't detect lies. They detect changes in the subjects physiology, which has no connection to if the subject is lying. If the subject is nervous about the questions being asked because, say, they are worried about failing the test and losing their job
Moreover, because they are relied upon as a method to detect lies, the real professional spies know how to defeat them. There were a couple of famous cases of Russian spies a decade or so back who passed all the polygraph tests they were administered, and got into quite a bit of classified material.
Trusting them for anything is foolish. They will give you false positives and they don't catch the people who they really need to catch lying. You may as well just brun some chicken bones and read the ashes.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Actually, they may have more to lose from this policy than others. Specifically, the socially conservative ones.
With the elimination of policies like "don't ask, don't tell", people with alternative lifestyles no longer represent blackmail risks if they are not ashamed of coming out of the closet. Members of more conservative social groups who participate in such alternative lifestyle activities (and there are quite a few of them) will still be at risk from being ostracized by their community.
Security services have come to understand this. They have found that people with things to hide and pressures other than a threat to their employment to keep them hidden are ongoing risks. The tendency will be to identify such people and block them from sensitive areas of the government.
Have gnu, will travel.
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Who will monitor the monitors monitoring the monitors that are monitoring more monitors that are monitored, yup, by more monitor?.
...and not your own. Do you give to the EFF?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Forget about the stated purpose. This screams over-budget IT project. Hell you could spend the rest of your life as a govt contractor on this one. Scope change, over budget, pipe-dream functionality. And the extra bucks for it being Top Secret.
and murderers, who want to protect each other.
and the real surveillance systems are not being disclosed, ie satellite and radar mind reading technology, which they use to keep us in the dark and to cover up their crime and knowledge of crime going on amongst their ranks.
whatever they're actually implementing is some type of cover story to hide their illegal programs and abuses, making the public think they're all clean when there's really been no validation of that.
http://www.oregonstatehospital...
How many of these five million people with security clearances work for or are related to an elected member of Congress, a state government employee, or someone in the federal court system?
Will Congress ignore the executive branch spying on them? I suppose they will, they don't seem to be doing much of anything to keep the federal government from growing out of control.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Well, if they have nothing to be afraid of...
Someone once told me it is best to avoid classified work. I've taken it a step further and try to avoid all government work. The pay isn't that great, and who wants to put up with stuff like this and government shutdowns?
I used to think it would be great to work for NASA or work on interesting classified government projects. The government has all the big expensive toys, right? Unfortunately, NASA isn't what it used to be, and now I realize classified work just a headache. I was actually a little baffled the first time I heard the phrase "good enough for government work" (as a college freshman from a professor), but now I get it.
False. They do not polygraph the majority of people with clearances. If you have a clearance you are required to report any adverse information (arrest, mental illness etc.) I don't believe they check in general, at least in the past.
I am actually completely astounded they don't already do this. I am highly against the excessive use of monitoring of citizens, But once you have a security clearance I would have though this would be standard practise and an accepted tradeoff in order to get your clearance. I know when I got my security clearance I had to sign off on permission for them to dig and monitor all sorts of information about me and I was actually surprised with some of the things they discovered and questioned me on.
So what about those of us who have had secret clearance in the past, are we now going to be monitored too? I didn't agree to give up my constitutional rights beyond what the UCMJ specified and now evidently since I had secret clearance at one point I'm going to lose my 4th amendment right, and I don't believe for a second that this will only be used on "current" employees.
Who is going to watch the people monitoring the government officials.
Polygraphs do not test for nervousness. They measure baseline physiological stats and monitor for changes. Anything conclusions you draw from that data is pure conjecture. What would it mean if respiration slowed 3%, perspiration increased 2% and blood pressure held steady? Are they nervous? Starting to relax, but feeling warm? Starting to tense up? Having a mild attack of angina?
I mock your claims further:
I can burn chicken bones to detect lies. To claim that the ash patterns could never detect a lie is just flat out wrong.
Sure. That means they are imperfect. It does NOT mean their results have "no connection" to lying. Burned chicken bones are not perfect. Their accuracy is far below the "reasonable doubt" threshold needed for evidence in court. But to extrapolate from that and claim that they don't work at all is nonsense. They are "good enough" for preliminary screening.
Hey, flipping coins will get you 50% accuracy, so a polygraph is at least that good, right? Can you at least find a study that that proves that?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!