White House moves to remove disgruntled, untrustworthy employees
By ANIThursday, January 6, 2011
WASHINGTON - The White House has instructed every US government department and agency to create “insider threat” programmes that will ferret out disgruntled or untrustworthy employees who might be tempted to leak the sort of state secrets recently made public by the website WikiLeaks.
According to The Independent, the 13-page memo urges senior civil servants to beef up cyber security and hire teams of psychiatrists and sociologists who can “detect behavioural changes”.
They will then monitor the moods and attitudes of staff who are allowed to access classified information.
The move is designed to prevent further embarrassing disclosures of the sort which have dominated the news in recent months.
The author of the leaked document, Jacob J Lew, is the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He seems particularly anxious to prevent the media from getting its hands on embarrassing information.
The memo suggests that staff should even be monitored once they leave the Civil Service:
The dump of diplomatic cables which ended up in the hands of WikiLeaks is believed to have been the work of Bradley Manning, a relatively junior soldier who nonetheless had access to the computer network used by the US Department of Defense and Department of State to transmit classified information.
Manning, currently in military custody awaiting a court martial, is believed to have been motivated by his experiences in Iraq, which left him disillusioned with US foreign policy. (ANI)
