U.S. Government Spending Millions To Investigate Its Own Intelligence Community

By Shannon Jones
The State Weekly

A classified budget document has been leaked for public viewing. The document details how millions of dollars has been spent by the U.S. government on investigating their own employees. The document, which was leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden,also notes how many investigations were being planned and some details of what was found. Of a subset of job seekers, approximately one in five were found to have connections to terrorist organizations.

The most notable of those groups were: Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Nothing further was noted as to how the individuals were connected to the groups or how the government was able to single these individuals out. Thousands of those already employed by the government are also being re-investigated every year. All this is done in order to protect government secrets. Ironically, contractors like Snowden are not a part of the follow-up checks. During this past year, the NSA planned to investigate 4,000 probes.

According to two people familiar with the process, an investigation can ensue simply because an employee views or downloads a document that they do not normally use for work. Yet, the network never took notice to the documents that Snowden was copying. In 2011, Congress ordered the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., to set up an automated “threat detection program.” This was in reaction to the the WikiLeaks scandal in 2010; that has since resulted in a 35-year prison sentence for Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning, who disclosed thousands of military and diplomatic documents.

Over the past few years, the project has subject to multiple delays because of the aftermath of the WikiLeaks scandal and later because the Obama administration pushed the deadlines back a year. Originally, the program was to be installed by October of 2012 and fully operational by the following October.The overall purpose is to have an effective program to identify double agents, leaks, and other abuses. Government secrecy expert Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, has analyzed national security policy.

He has stated that there will be a lot of “false positives” with this type of program; stating that the many of the employees will be flagged for during their jobs. Aftergood does believe that the system needs to be in place; however, he thinks that it should be adjusted. He remarked that, “If the 4,000 cases turn up only two or three actual threats, they need to adjust their detection threshold or they’ll be using a lot of resources for no purpose.” He stated that an intelligence official familiar with insider-threat programs could better calibrate the software and reassess the criteria.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines stated that the investigations are not in place to investigate known threats, only to reduce the risks. Vines also said that the re-investigations are, “conducted as one due-diligence component of our multifaceted insider threat program.” In November of 2012, President Obama also released a statement on the national insider-threat policy defining the problem as, “espionage, terrorism, [or] unauthorized disclosure of national security information, or through the loss or degradation of departmental resources or capabilities.” Many critics of the policy find it worrisome that the policy puts leakers in the same category as terrorists.

Aftergood remarked that, “It’s disturbing, because they are not the same. There are such things as a good leak. Some classified things should be public. The official policy does not admit that distinction.” Also noted in the budget documents are some of the details relating to an expansive new database, code-named WILDSAGE, that has been developed by the NSA. This database, as it is stated in the budget document, “provides a mechanism for cyber security centers to share signatures at the SECRET classification level,” WILDSAGE has not been fully implemented as of yet.

The program did make significant progress in 2011. As with the other program, it is not without its critics who feel that this will create a new security risk and could lead to another Manning scandal. Those in support of this program say that it will help government employees track and disrupt terrorist and cyber plots; and that this information needs to be shared among those on the classified level. As prosecutor Captain Joe Morrow stated in the Manning case, “Military intelligence professionals go to work every day and use the information available to them to do their jobs. We can take all the mitigation steps in the world, but the bottom line is that there is no step we can take as a nation, as a military, that’s going to stop the determined insider.”

Sources :

1. The State Weekly
2. Image Credit

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