Albeit they all shared certain money-hungry, capitalistic tendencies. And Ames had an exceptionally bad drinking problem. But OMB knows if it was to put alcoholism down as one of its "insider threat" warning signs, the false positives in Washington DC alone could decimate the US government. Just looking at their photos, however, OMB would have a hard time seeing the grumpy, despondent traitor who lurked behind the smiling faces with one notable exception, the rather glum Pitts (who everyone acknowledged was weird in just quietly doing his job and keeping to himself). But even Pitts ostensibly enjoyed a happy marriage to a female FBI agent--an early form of the "co-pilot policing" mentioned in the OMB memo?!
Banishing grumpiness could be Mission Impossible
So outing all the grumpy government workers is not going to be easy! But OMB has set its sights not only on current employees but all prospective government employees, like the college kids majoring in political science, history, law or international relations. Our bureaucrats want to find ways of detecting those unduly curious college kids who may already have peeked at WikiLeaks. WikiLeak peekers and critical thinkers undoubtedly would pose some questions about (if not an actual "insider threat" to) the massively expansive and expensive national security apparatus and government hierarchies that rely on blind obedience.
Even worse, OMB says agencies should monitor their retirees, too! As most recipients of government pensions are well aware, any number of creative pretexts are constantly bandied about to reduce the funding that goes into government pensions. So that part of Lew's Memo mentioning retirees like ourselves who might have seen a WikiLeak or two caught our attention. As people who depend on our little government pensions, we admit to nothing but how many government retirees have found it hard to immediately press "delete" whenever a mention of WikiLeaks has come up in Google News or while channel surfing these last few months?!
To be sure, a real issue may exist as to the top level elite government "retirees," the three or four star generals and above and the "Senior Executive Service" high level "retirees" who simply go through revolving doors from government "public service" to privatized national security corporations. News articles report that it only takes these head honchos one hour after public "retirement" to pick up their new private jobs, albeit at several times the pay-grade, doing the same thing. Those "retirees" never lose their security clearances or any access to their top secret info, so the Lew Memo security provisions should logically apply to that type of "retiree." Instead we worry Lew (himself in the high level revolving door category) is probably siccing his dogs on real retirees like ourselves who did indeed sever all of our prior agency ties and did give up our classified access but still sometimes feel compelled to write a letter to the editor and/or an opinion piece to try and engage more of our fellow citizens about the problems of the day. Are we going to be lumped into the new "insider threat"?! Is Lew threatening real government retirees with losing our pensions if we publish our opinions in support of WikiLeaks and more transparency in government?
What's the answer? Will OMB call on Martin "Dr. Happy" Seligman to expand his testing and "learned optimism" training?
Adhering to these pages of new paranoid-driven security procedures and instituting wide-spread monitoring of government employees, students and retirees, just because some Washington DC officials got embarrassed by WikiLeaks, is likely to quickly prove a big drag in more ways than one. The massive internal searching and monitoring will undoubtedly bring morale down the very first time a good Homeland Security Warrior is stopped and gets his lunch pail searched on his or her way out the door after the bell rings for the day. Even the most loyal of the "us" in "us versus them" may come to see how the tables have been turned. That is apt to produce even more grumpiness!
The potentially demoralizing situation that awaits the civilian government agencies is therefore ripe for the pop psychology answer: the "power of positive thinking." Already the US Military has given Seligman's "Soldier Fitness Tracker and Global Assessment Tool", which purports to measure soldiers' "resilience" in five core areas: emotional, physical, family, social and spiritual. Soldiers fill out an online survey made up of more than 100 questions, and if the results fall into a red area, they are required to participate in remedial courses in a classroom or online setting to strengthen their "resilience" in the disciplines in which they received low scores. More than 800,000 Army soldiers have already served as guinea pigs, having taken the CSF "test" thus far and the Military has successfully inculcated 2,000 "Master Resiliency Trainers." So it's not a stretch to predict expansion of Dr. Happy's pop psychology onto the civilian side of government. This screening might even eventually be used to root out the more independent thinkers in the US population as a whole.
Seligman's earlier findings on how easy it is to instill "learned helplessness" may end up combining with his newer beliefs on instilling "learned optimism." Whether it turns out that easy to evaluate and manipulate people's emotions, we doubt the OMB guidance or any pop psychology would have deterred true insider threats like Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, or any of the other national security agent spies. Given the underlying ills, it remains to be seen whether such costly therapy can somehow alleviate PTSD, reduce soldiers' suicides, prevent grumpiness in Government employees and/or keep whistleblowers from trying to reveal wrongdoing.
Linda Lewis worked for thirteen years for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a planner and analyst specializing in weapons of mass destruction before retiring in 2005.
Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI's pre 9-11 failures. She retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.
(This article first appeared on the Huffington Post: click here)
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