The House has passed legislation to establish a program to prevent crimes from people in federal agencies who at one point were deemed trustworthy.
The bill, authored by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., and passed on Monday, would create an “insider threat program” in the Department of Homeland Security intended to help employees “identify, prevent, mitigate, and respond to insider threat risks.”
The legislation further directs the Homeland Security secretary to appoint a steering committee within the department to develop the program, conduct a baseline risk assessment, and track metrics on the success of the program.
King said that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, and contractor Aaron Alexis were examples of why the legislation was needed. Alexis killed 12 people in a shooting at Washington’s Navy Yard in 2013, while the former two leaked classified information.
“Unfortunately, all three were able to conduct their traitors’ work undetected because the government had at one time vetted and granted them access to secure facilities and information systems,” King said.
Insider threats, particularly in reference to Snowden, have been a hot topic for Congress this week. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, former NSA chief Keith Alexander, the retired general who led the agency from 2005-2014, said Snowden had inspired an overhaul of government practices.
“I was surprised that a person who we had entrusted to move data from one server to another really wasn’t trustworthy,” Alexander said. “We came up with 42 different series of things that could be done and we shared those with the rest of government and industry … on how to stop insider attacks.”
“[Prevention] is all in the behavioral analytics and modeling that would go on to stop that,” he added.
Alexander was appointed to lead the NSA by President George W. Bush in 2005. He resigned in 2014, four months after Snowden’s revelation that the agency was engaged in greater surveillance than authorities had acknowledged.
