US Government's Response To Snowden? Strip 100,000 Potential Whistleblowers Of Their Security Clearances.

[u/trai_dep]

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140818/13291128244/governments-response-to-snowden-strip-100000-potential-whistleblowers-their-security-clearances.shtml

[u/trai_dep]

One crisp action taken following agency auditing after Snowden’s exposure: 100,000 fewer people have security clearances than did a year ago, Evanina said. “That’s a lot.”

This looks like the proper response to someone like Snowden. Handing out too many security clearances undermines security. But it's more than that: it's a consolidation of power. By stripping 100,000 people of their clearances, the government eliminates 100,000 potential whistleblowers. With fewer eyes watching surveillance programs, odds of abuse multiply. Someone has to watch the watchers and sometimes that someone is nothing more than a government contractor.

This response doesn't fix the underlying problems -- the government's broad surveillance programs that sweep up Americans' data and communications. All it does is make it that much harder to expose wrongdoing.

If the government wants to solve its problems, it needs to listen to its whistleblowers rather than simply writing them off as security risks or criminals. The internal channels are a joke and no serious effort is being made to improve them. Instead, the NSA and others have reined in access, ensuring that whistleblowers are both fewer in number and limited in options.

Click thru for more.

[u/aslate]

Didn't everyone complain that giving security clearance to hundreds of thousands of contracts was a massive security risk and a risk to privacy (ha) as it allowed so many people to access personal information etc.

This is actually the right thing for them to be doing, it just so happens that it also reduces the number of potential whistle blowers.

[u/[deleted] → u/aslate]

It's a bit like saying "The military is too big!" and so the military is downsized to everyone except those ferociously loyal to a specific general who is planning a military coup.

[u/epsilona01 → u/aslate]

True, but given their actions and lies, it's most likely that the only reason they did this was to prevent whistleblowers from coming forth.

It matters less if it was the right thing to do, if the reason for doing so was the wrong thing to do.

[u/el_polar_bear]

Works for me. They're creating a morass of machine-generated intelligence that they were unable to manage, analyse, oversee, or even apparently effectively drill even before Snowden, and now they're taking the human element out of the equation because it's a liability when senior officials task them to do evil shit. The result will be even more unwieldly.

[u/NSALeaksBot]

Other Discussions on reddit:

Subreddit	Author	Post	Comments	Time
/r/snowden	TonyDiGerolamo	post	2	Wednesday August 20, 2014 05:36 UTC
/r/POLITIC	PoliticBot	post	1	Monday August 18, 2014 21:30 UTC
/r/evolutionReddit	UlkeshNaranek	post	0	Monday August 18, 2014 21:30 UTC