Le McCarthysme globalisé de BHO

Le McCarthysme globalisé de BHO

Dans le tourbillon extraordinaire de révélations et de mises en cause globales de toute l’infrastructure de la communication et de l’informatique du Système (des USA) qu’est en train de provoquer la crise Snowden, on s’attache ici à ce qu’on pourrait nommer le “McCarthysme globalisé” de l’administration Obama. Il s’agit des consignes officielles diffusées auprès de millions de fonctionnaires, essentiellement les fonctionnaires accrédités pour l’accès aux données confidentielles (sorte de “secret défense”), d’avoir à se surveiller les uns et les autres pour déterminer des comportements suspects qui pourraient conduire à repérer, non pas les whistleblower effectifs, mais les whistleblower potentiels dans les différents services gouvernementaux.

(Nous avons récemment donné [le 21 juin 2013] des indications concernant le nombre de fonctionnaires accrédités pour des données confidentielles, donc ces personnes qui forment le noyau des hauts fonctionnaires touchés par la politique McCarthyste de l’administration Obama : «On notera la constance de ce rapport souvent retrouvé de 1%-99%, qui apparaît ainsi d’autant plus symbolique, même dans des cas moins apparentés à ce qu’on veut décrire ici. Un exemple est celui des personnes bénéficiant aux USA de l’“accréditation officielle” aux informations classées secrètes : leur nombre se rapproche de ce rapport 1%-99%. Les chiffres disponibles les plus récents donnent 4,8 millions de personnes disposant de cette accréditation aux USA [selon FAS Project on Government Secrecy, le 23 juillet 2012]. On voit que le chiffre de 4,8 millions, comparé à une population US qui avoisine les 313 millions en 2012 n’est pas loin de ce rapport 1%-99%, d’un gros demi-point : on se trouve dans le même ordre de grandeur.»)

Cet extraordinaire programme retrouve comme naturellement la technique de la dénonciation qui fonctionna à plein durant le McCarthysme des années 1947-1955. Cette fois, il porte sur une masse d’individus considérable et il devient, non plus un témoignage sous serment avec dénonciation publique en principe sans conséquence légale comme dans la version initiale (sorte de lynch social par la réputation et l’“anormalité” par rapport au conformisme, dans l’esprit puritain des débuts du peuplement européen/anglo-saxon de l’Amérique du Nord) ; il s’agit d’une obligation “légale” de dénonciation assortie de poursuites légales, avec inculpations criminelles possibles, pour qui ne s’y soumet pas. Ce programme kafkaïen et paranoïaque a été lancé en 2011 et sa substance vient d’être largement documentée par le groupe McClatchy, de McClatchy Newspapers (l’un des seuls groupes de presse US à avoir une politique d’information avec de nombreux aspects antiSystème), le 9 juillet 2013. Le très long texte de McClatchy détaille les procédures envisagées et appliquées par les différents agences, ministères, etc., et, d’une façon générale, les effets et les résultats souvent schizophréniques et ridicules auxquels l’on parvient. Le titre le dit clairement en termes mesurés : « Experts: Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven, unlikely to work»

«In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents. The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

»Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

»Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms. [...]

»But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations. “There is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research Council report on detecting terrorists. “Doing something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,” Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that wrote the report, told McClatchy.

»The emphasis on individual lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors comes at a time when growing numbers of Americans must submit to extensive background checks, polygraph tests and security investigations to be hired or to keep government or federal contracting jobs. The U.S. government is one of the world’s largest employers, overseeing an ever-expanding ocean of information.

»While the Insider Threat Program mandates that the nearly 5 million federal workers and contractors with clearances undergo training in recognizing suspicious behavior indicators, it allows individual departments and agencies to extend the requirement to their entire workforces, something the Army already has done. [...]

»Although agencies and departments are still setting up their programs, some employees already are being urged to watch co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.

»When asked about the ineffectiveness of behavior profiling, Barlow said the policy “does not mandate” that employees report behavior indicators. “It simply educates employees about basic activities or behavior that might suggest a person is up to improper activity,” he said. “These do not require special talents. If you see someone reading classified documents they should not be reading, especially if this happens multiple times and the person appears nervous that you saw him, that is activity that is suspicious and should be reported,” Barlow said. “The insider threat team then looks at the surrounding facts and draws the conclusions about the activity.” [...]

»But some current and former U.S. officials and experts worry that Obama’s Insider Threat Program could lead to false or retaliatory accusations across the entire government, in part because security officials are granted access to information outside their usual purview. These current and former U.S. officials and experts also ridiculed as overly zealous and simplistic the idea of using reports of suspicious behavior to predict potential insider threats. It takes years for professional spy-hunters to learn their craft, and relying on the observations of inexperienced people could lead to baseless and discriminatory investigations, they said.

»“Anyone is an amateur looking at behavior here,” said Thomas Fingar, a former State Department intelligence chief who chaired the National Intelligence Council, which prepares top-secret intelligence analyses for the president, from 2005 to 2008. Co-workers, Fingar said, should “be attentive” to colleagues’ personal problems in order to refer them to counseling, not to report them as potential security violators. “It’s simply because they are colleagues, fellow human beings,” he said.

»Eric Feldman, a former inspector general of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that oversees U.S. spy satellites, expressed concern that relying on workers to report colleagues’ suspicious behaviors to security officials could create “a repressive kind of culture.” “The answer to it is not to have a Stasi-like response,” said Feldman, referring to the feared secret police of communist East Germany. “You’ve removed that firewall between employees seeking help and the threat that any employee who seeks help could be immediately retaliated against by this insider threat office.”»

• Parallèlement, sur cette question du “ McCarthysme globalisé”, Russia Today a interviewé, le 11 juillet 2013, David Lindoff, du site ThisCantBeHappening. Interrogé sur les pratiques générales d’espionnage domestique et de surveillance aux USA, Lindoff donne une interprétation des mesures gouvernementales à l’égard de ses propres fonctionnaires. Pour lui, il s’agit d’abord de dissimuler les politiques véritables du gouvernement dans les domaines de l’espionnage et de la surveillance, domestiques et internationaux. Il est évident que le programme Obama/NSA renvoie la Stasi et toutes les autres références du domaine (stalinisme avec la GPU puis le NKVD, nazisme, etc.) au rang des petits amateurs. Les USA sont aujourd’hui les maîtres du totalitarisme, montrant en cela qu’ils sont complètement le Système lui-même, et exécutant effectivement une politique de “rationalisation de la folie” dont les effets contre-productifs type-blowback vont, à partir de la crise Snowden, s’accumuler d’une façon impressionnante (cycle surpuissance-autodestruction).

Russia Today : «When President Obama was a Senator he said: “No more spying on citizens, who are not suspected of a crime”. It seems that things have changed now. What happened?»

David Lindoff : «He meant citizens except those who work for the federal government. Aside from the fact that, actually, we are spying on all the citizens, he’s also got this program now where the administration wants all federal employees in all agencies of the federal government to become spies reporting on the people who work next to them, in the next cubicle or in the next office. It’s an incredible extension of this Stasi like approach to life in America. At the same time it’s a completely inefficient and failed way to try to run a government bureaucracy. The worst thing about it, it has nothing to do with national security, because he is talking about every department of the government: the Department of Labor, the Food and Drug Administration, the health department. All these departments they have nothing to do with national security, he is telling people that they should rat out their neighbors and co-workers if they think they are doing something wrong.»

Russia Today : «Is it safe to say that the government is getting a little paranoid? All of this didn’t stop Edward Snowden from actually “blowing the whistle”.»

David Lindoff : «Let’s be clear, this is not about national security; it’s about preventing people from telling the truth about problems within government, about corruption, about failed policies and so on. What it really is that the Obama administration has gone even beyond the Nixon administration in the 70s in its fear of leaks and in its effort to control the story. It’s trying to prevent the press from getting access to people inside the government, who would tell them the truth about what’s going on. All they get is public relations handouts from the government and its trying to prevent the government from being embarrassed.»

Russia Today : «How do you then work for a government who doesn’t trust you, who wants to spy on your every move, not only where you work but, possibly, at home too. Isn’t this why Edward Snowden thought “we can’t continue like this, we have to break the silence whether it’s for civil liberties or within the people we work together with”?»

David Lindoff : «Absolutely. The minute that that policy got announced a lot of people changed their plans about wanting to make a career in the government. If you have a policy like that you are eliminating the best people who you would like to work in a government bureaucracy and you are attracting the ones who would do that kind of thing, and, probably those are the ones who are corrupt, the ones who would do any evil thing that the administrators tell them to do. It is just an invitation to massive corruption and abuse.»

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