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Program Insider Threat

by Beeline
Program Insider Threat requires any federal employee to turn in a fellow employee for any behavior that might possibly lead to an information leak. If an employee fails to report a suspected violation then he/she must turn themselves in. Seriously folks, I did not get this from a cartoon show!!
McClatchy news at http://www.mcclatchydc.com recently posted an article entitled "Obamas Crackdown, views leaks as aiding enemies of the US".

It sounds like what one would read right out of a fascist government manual on employee behavior. Federal employees at every level are now required to report any strange behavior on the part of their co workers because odd behavior may be a signal that an employee might leak information. If they fail to report a co workers odd behavior then they are required to step forward and turn themselves in. Adolph Hitler must be smiling from his grave. Spy versus spy in the office environment. The ultimate fascist scenario.

I can't think of anything that would create stress, discontent, paranoia and inefficiency any better than "Program Insider Threat". Lets go back a few years. During the Nixon administration federal employees in the Dept. of Interior were prohibited from giving speeches to public groups unless the Washington office received, read and sent back their permission to give the speech. During the Reagan/Watt period employees could not make telephone calls in the line of regular duty without their supervisors permission. And even if a federal employee wanted to give a speech which was completely unrelated to the agency, he/she was supposed to get permission first. Now Obama has topped the competition for the most over regulated, paranoia breeding bureaucracy.

So what do these agencies have to hide? Watergates of biblical proportions-maybe.

McClatchy news goes on to point out that the Dept of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have shown their employees a training film entitled 'Treason 101' to teach employees to recognize the behavioral profile of a spy.

We can make jokes about this kind of policy but in a democracy (if there still is one) this is not funny. I have been told that folks in the UK now refer to the U.S. as the "the 4th Reich". Maybe they see what some of our whistle blowers are seeing. Simply stated, "Whistle Blowers" do not wish to be complicit in the hypocritical and probably illegal actions of management.

Hannah Arendt a survivor of Nazi tyranny had this to say about hypocrisy.

"As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core".

Is our government really rotten to the core?
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