Snowden investigator slams leaker-detector background checks A former top US Government investigator looking into classified document leaks by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden has criticised the effectiveness of background checks - saying such checks will not prevent further leaks. Keith Lowry, formerly US chief of staff to the deputy under secretary of defense for Human intelligence …
Right, because employees NEVER feel their employers are acting like jerks without good reason. No sir.
The levels of naivity here are pretty depressing. It's like the world is splitting into Brexiters and Trumpiteers vs. massed armies of Polly Toynbee clones. God help us...
you can't predict whether humans, once get into a job that stinks of shit, will swim, or decide the smell's too much.
Solution 1: clean the shit
Are you f... kidding?! You're FIRED!!!!
Solution 2: Big a deeper pit with steeper, more slippery walls. And electrify them!
Yeah!
Solution 3: Use background checks and psychometric testing to only employ people who are sympathetic to the organisation's core beliefs. Give them a smart uniform to wear and regular pep talks and rallies for morale and team building. Get their families involved, especially the children.
"brainless obedience"
Yes, how stupid to expect people to do what they're paid to do, rather than attack their employer.
If you don't like what your employer does, leave.
Otherwise, you can expect employers to start treating all staff as potential company-killers who must be obsessively monitored and surveilled at all times. That's not a world I want to live in. (Not that there would be many, as the costs would shut down most of the economy.)
"Yes, how stupid to expect people to do what they're paid to do, rather than attack their employer.
If you don't like what your employer does, leave.'
I think you have to make an accommodation for this:
In this case the employer was the United States government, and much of what the employees were being told to do was illegal. The US has a constitution with a Bill Of Rights that government employees are expected to respect - many are required to take an oath to that effect.
Otherwise, you can expect employers to start treating all staff as potential company-killers who must be obsessively monitored and surveilled at all times. That's not a world I want to live in. (Not that there would be many, as the costs would shut down most of the economy.)
I suspect it's the other way around. Someone in HR gets a bit paranoid and starts pushing policies. They become a little Fuhrer as management goes along with them. Next thing you know, every employee is scum that just sucks profit (salary) from the bottom line. The little Fuhrer needs to be stopped early.
Once upon a time, employers did the "family" thing. They looked out for their well-being and in return were rewarded with loyalty, hard work, and profits from the good. At some point, they started slipping into the "screw the employees... they're just a cost center and not a profit center" and things have gone downhill from there.
This has spread through corporates and government like a bad plague. Nothing and no one is safe from PHB's, beancounters, and HR types. At the bottom of the pile are the employees who do the work. They end up disillusioned and beaten.
And you're not paid to be moral and uphold the Constitution. You're paid to do what you are told. If you see evil, keep your mouth shut and ignore it or leave. You are not a citizen.
They say ignorance is bliss. None of those hard decisions to make - especially the kind that put your life and liberty in jeopardy.
Precedents?
yeah, get their children involved. Like: if you disappear, what's gonna happen to those poor kids in our care... See? Good boy!
p.s. there's a (usually) slight discrepancy between the rosy image an organization presents to an outsider-wanting-to-become insider, aka "core beliefs" (you will help us to protect AMERICAN LIVES!) with what it REALLY means once they're "in".
Perhaps a pre-entry test: would you be willing to work for us if we told you we break the law, and you will too? No, please, don't try to call the police, they're OK with it...
"Background checks and polygraphs only say who they someone is, what they have done, not what they will do."
Actually, background checks only tell you part of who someone says they are and part of what they have done. Polygraphs are flippin useless and only work on those intimidated enough by all the bells and whistles that they come clean off their own free will. There is no scientific evidence they are anything more than a good way for some scheisters to make money off of easily impressed/fooled people/companies/governments
"As a taxpayer, it made me angry … whenever someone stabs you in the back, from a professional standpoint it is a hard thing to endure."
But he still manages to work for the American government... I guess they call it "Front-stabbing" so he's fine with it?
Empire will always have its authoritarian sycophants, it depends on them...
*of course* it will *never* occur to him that he is on the wrong side of the police state, and that manning, snowden, kiriakou, etc are the heroes... too much cognitive dissonance to go there... (not to mention a cushy job at stake)
Maybe they're overlooked because they're not really a threat...
Step back a bit from the political side of things and apply this line of reasoning to business. There is a reason that retailers all have loss prevention employees. Insiders are a potential threat simply because they have access. They have, by definition, been allowed inside the organization and can get into much more than outsiders. They are in position to do a lot of damage and often do. Don't confuse motivation with action or methods. An inside job is the hardest to defend against and can do the most damage, no matter the reasons for doing so.
Two parts to this problem:
1. The orders ultimately come from above, i.e. from actual polticians (elected reps) or people who act like politicians (political appointees; chancers; ambitious mediocrities; people of fundamentally bad character). An eternal human truth is that people who have what you might call 'political character' are inclined to be deceitful, manipulative and self-aggrandizing; to lack morality, honour and principle (though often mistaking it for the instinct to form alliances of convenience with others of similarly squalid character); to lack, and often not even recognise, intellectual honesty; to seek power without accepting reponsibility; to blame others for their own failings and seek credit for others' successes; and to value style over substance.
In environments where objective truths are a life-and-death matter, where hard evidence and rational thought cannot be sidelined, such people are marginalised to the point where they cannot do too much damage. Thus on the whole, people poisoned by political character don't last long in, say, the military, or as engineers, or in commercial aviation operations. (Note that when such people do get to call the shots, tragedy follows: viz, Shuttle; early DC-10 cargo door problems; endless other examples.)
Unfortunately national security is infested by political characters from top down at least as far as middle-management. So you have ill-considered, unrealistic demands; empty, impractical promises; ludicrous expectations; lots of fantasy 'thinking', and a rampant culture of blame¹.
So we have bosses and bosses' bosses believing in, or at least demanding, miraculously reliable lie detectors, infallible psych assessments and perfectly reliable and comprehensive behavioural science analysis².
Thus even the most highly skilled vetting personnel recognise the limits of what can realistically be achieved, while their idiot bosses and the politicians who direct them remain resolutely, destructively clueless.
2.The leaders' aforementioned squalor of character tends to create ethical and moral conflicts. No amount of laws, rules, sanctions or expectation of blind obedience will ultimately overcome the stress between bad orders issued by bad people on the one hand, and what is humane, decent and morally right on the other. Individuals, especially non-political ones, absolutely do recognise that what is right is more important than the letter of the law.
If an organisation has bad policy and does amoral and even wicked things, sooner or later one or more people will crack, blow the whistle, go public or whatever. Thus Mr Snowden, arguably Manning, and many others before and since. (And thus the drone pilot, who honestly believes in eliminating threats to his country, nevertheless becomes morally sickened after discovering s/he has murdered yet another wedding party in Waziristan.)
As so many other reasonable people have pointed out: if organisations didn't pursue bad, dirty policies or execute rotten, even evil operations, their members would be less likely to break ranks.
The problem is at the top. If even an intelligent and half-decent man like Obama—a professed Christian!—can look in the mirror after ordering the remote-controlled extra-judicial killing of an unconvicted, untried suspect in a foreign country, your society has a far worse moral cancer than evidenced merely by the occasional whistle-blower.
¹ No points awarded for those who also recognise exactly the way large corporations are mismanaged.
² And 'good guys only' backdoors in crypto. The Dumb List is a long one.
In the USA most of the lower ranks of security are outsourced, but since Snowden, et al, they have been examining their procedures.
The US government keeps files on people that include juvenile 'criminal' offences.
A colleague at a US company was 'government security cleared' and was a trouble shooter on sophisticated computer equipment. He was called out to sort out a problem at some nuclear facility that was guarded by the Secret Service.
In order to enter he had to be positively identified (fingerprints) and a computerised check run on him. As he waited in the parking lot for the OK, he was approached by two armed Secret Service types who told him to leave.
His employer was advised he had 'had a juvenile criminal record' - which are supposed to be sealed court records. He had broken some greenhouse windows. His employer said it was my friend or no one, who could fix their problems.
Two days later the plant called up and said my friend could return, and be admitted, as the problem had bee 'expunged'!
So much for security!
A friend who designed encryption chips used in secure terminals was awarded a contract for some government work.
He had lived aboard a well appointed boat bought with the proceeds of an earlier venture. He queried what answers to give on the 'vetting' form vis-a-vis employment, addresses resided at, etc. Since he was essentially self-employed, a high tech "rolling stone", he was advised to have a friend say that he was employed by them.
I, the 'employer' friend, was later contacted by some form of Plod who started asking various questions. I cut the man short and said instead of wasting my time, just e-mail me the questions and I'll check my records.
A couple of weeks later, after an appropriate delay, I emailed my response: "Looks good to me".
My friend has been working away and is now on the fourth extension of the contract.
The whole exercise was bureaucratic bullsh*t, they were buying his knowledge and skills and could hardly fail him, a single source vendor!
It seems pretty clear to me that Snowden and Manning are actually patriots who understand the US Constitution and stood up for what they saw as right - they released data showing the the US Government was breaking its own laws and the world's laws.
No amount of background checks will help them detect true patriots in their midst.
Isn't at least one of the goals of a background check to find out if a person is a stand up citizen?
When such a person is faced with evidence of criminality on the part of their employer shouldn't we demand that they go public? I find it laughable that anyone would consider the incredible costly venture of using the courts to expose the problems.
Perhaps the issue isn't that the background checks failed to identify them. Rather the background checks succeeded, it's just that the bad guys are so entrenched in their beliefs that they don't even realize that they are on the wrong side of the fence...
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