Fed Goes Hunting For Malcontents 193
snydeq writes "The wake of State Department document leaks to WikiLeaks may have the unhappy rousted from government agencies' 'privileged insiders' ranks, thanks to a recent memo from the US OMB asking agencies to spell out their strategies for minimizing insider risk. 'It's likely that federal contractors and government suppliers will also find themselves responding to this list of questions (PDF) and the central issue of preventing the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified materials. In a key section of the memo, the OMB requests information on whether organizations are measuring the "trustworthiness" of their employees and whether they use a psychiatrist or sociologist to measure the unhappiness of an employee as a measure of trustworthiness.'"
White House Plumbers? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like this sort of thing hasn't been tried before [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure it will work about as well now as it did then.
Sometime (Score:3, Informative)
an article will come up in /,. abuot something I know fairly well. This is one of those times.
It's a stark reminder that you're mostly a bunch of ignoramuses that spout off about crap you know nothing about.
What the majority of posters think this is, it's effectiveness, and out come would be laughable if those ideas didn't spread ignorance about the US government; which despite it's flaws is one of the best governments in the world.
It treats the peple it works for well, it works to protect the rights of it's people, and has almost no corruption.
Its not perfect, and of course there are exception, but look at the whole and it's pretty good. We can do better, and we will.
Re:Happy Workers! (Score:2, Informative)
Tell them to stop spending so much time watching Fox News.
Oh, there's plenty of legitimate reasons to be dissatisfied with the government. Fox News just happens to provide all the non-legitimate ones.
Re:petition...Government for...redress of grievanc (Score:4, Informative)
You miss the point (which is actually the focus of the headline).
The violation of rights is demonstrated in the criteria used to exclude people.
Selecting against pyromaniacs when granting access to the gasoline is a false analogy.
A better analogy would be an employer (government or private) preventing anybody from distributing any sort of non-work-related literature while at work. That's permitted.
But the emloyer could NOT specifically prevent people from distributing political literature that was pro-union.
Note again that the violation is not in the prohibition, but in the criteria for selecting what's prohibited.
By selecting against malcontents, you are specifically excluding those who would seek to exercise the right to petition for redress.
The right to petition does not stop at "If the carefully selected lies we choose to present to you piss you off, you can say something. Because we have already prepared glib answers to shut you down, and, really--if we cared what you say about those issues, we wouldn't have let you know in the first place."
The right to petition also includes "You get to see what we're doing and judge for yourself whether you have a grievance."
A completely separate argument "it's an issue of national security" is code for "we've told a different lie to everyone involved. We would be quite embarrassed if you people got together to compare notes." God help us if you actually found out what we do here--you'd be pretty angry about it.