“Every activity, in complete detail,” SpectorSoft’s Web site says about its best-selling product, Spector 360, which the company says it has sold to dozens of federal agencies.
Government workers have long known their bosses can look over their shoulder to monitor their computer activity. But now, prompted by the WikiLeaks scandal and concerns over unauthorized disclosures, the government is secretly capturing a far richer, more granular picture of their communications, in real time.
Federal workers’ personal computers are also increasingly seen as fair game, experts said.
Nonintelligence agencies spent $5.6 billion in fiscal 2011 to safeguard their classified information with hardware, software, personnel and other methods, up from $4.7 billion in fiscal 2010, according to the Information Security Oversight Office. Although only a portion of the money — the amount is not specified — was spent on monitoring for insider threats, industry experts say virtually every arm of the government conducts some form of sophisticated electronic monitoring.
“It used to be, to get all of an agency’s records out you needed a truck,” said Jason Radgowsky, director of information security and privacy for District-based Tantus Technologies, which evaluates monitoring systems for the Federal Aviation Administration, the Export-Import Bank and the National Institutes of Health. “Now you can put everything on a little USB thumb drive.”
The stepped-up monitoring is raising red flags for privacy advocates, who have cited the potential for abuse. Among other concerns, they say they are alarmed that the government has monitored federal workers — including the FDA scientists, starting in 2010 — when they use Gmail, Yahoo or other personal e-mail accounts on government computers.
Although the FDA has said it acted out of concern that the scientists were improperly sharing trade secrets, the scientists have argued in a lawsuit that they were targeted because they were blowing the whistle on what they thought had been an unethical review process.
At least two other agencies, the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Maritime Commission, are under congressional scrutiny for seeking and using employee monitoring software that critics say is intrusive.
Federal agencies generally decline to elaborate on their monitoring practices or what activity might trigger them to closely watch an employee’s communications. But officials defend the push for more aggressive surveillance, noting that the federal workforce is more mobile and wired than ever — and more vulnerable to leaking sensitive information by accident or design.
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