‘Insider Threat’ program forces federal employees to spy on coworkers

Government documents have revealed that the Obama administration is implementing a program that requires millions of federal employees to spy on their co-workers as part of a sweeping crackdown on security leaks across the U.S. government.

The program titled “Insider Threat” which has gone almost entirely unnoticed in the U.S. media also presses managers to punish employees who fail to report their suspicions, McClatchy reported Friday after obtaining the documents.

The program spans all federal agencies and mandates employees and their superiors to identify and report behaviors associated with someone who might leak sensitive government information.

Those who fail to expose “high-risk persons” face penalties that include criminal charges, according to the report.

The program was launched in October 2011 after Army Private Bradley Manning blew the whistle on U.S. war crimes, in the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

According to a Pentagon strategy dated June 1, 2012 and written for the Insider Threat Program, leaking sensitive documents is “tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”

The government documents reviewed by McClatchy reveal that some federal agencies are using the unprecedented initiative to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified documents.

As McClatchy reports, the Obama administration is expected to speed up the implementation of the program in the wake of a series of recent leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden who exposed the agency’s top-secret surveillance programs.

Snowden disclosed two major NSA spying programs, one for gathering data on phone calls made by Americans in and outside the U.S. and another, codenamed PRISM, for collecting information on people across the globe via major Internet companies.

Federal prosecutors secretly charged Snowden last week with espionage, theft and conversion of government property.

President Barack Obama has defended the U.S. government’s spying programs as transparent and legal, even though the NSA was authorized to run the surveillance activities in secret.