Doc: US reinvestigates intelligence employees
Iran Press TV
Mon Sep 2, 2013 2:10PM GMT
The US government suspects that roughly one out of every five individuals applying for jobs in the US intelligence community has connections with “hostile” groups, according to a classified budget document.
The US intelligence agencies reinvestigated thousands of employees in a bid to minimize the risk of disclosure of secrets, according to the document, which was provided to The Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Last year, the NSA planned to launch around 4,000 investigations of potentially suspicious employees, who downloaded multiple documents or accessed classified databases they did not normally use for their work, the newspaper said citing two people familiar with the software used to monitor employee activity.
Despite their multimillion-dollar effort to hunt for potential insider threats, the spy agencies’ detection systems did not notice that Snowden was copying highly classified documents from different parts of the NSA’s networks, the Post pointed out.
Snowden, who in June revealed NSA’s spying activities on American citizens and foreign nationals, managed to flee to Hong Kong and then to Russia, where he remains after being granted temporary asylum.
The intelligence community’s emphasis on potential insider threats came in the wake of disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010. The anti-secrecy group revealed hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents it had received from former Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.
According to the budget document, the US government’s effort was delayed several times because the intelligence community was preoccupied with handling the fallout from Manning’s leaks.
ARA/ARA
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