The Huffington Post’s Matt Sledge recently introduced readers to “Hema,” a character in an online training given to Pentagon employees to teach them how to identify “insider threats.”
Writes Sledge:
A security training test created by a Defense Department agency warns federal workers that they should consider the hypothetical Indian-American woman a “high threat” because she frequently visits family abroad, has money troubles and “speaks openly of unhappiness with U.S. foreign policy.”
As you can imagine, reading that line caused all of us here in The Aerogram’s headquarters to have a “Hey! That sounds like me!” moment.
Sledge goes on to say that the training was designed to help catch future Bradley Mannings and Edward Snowdens, who are both white men. (Editor’s note: We think the training would have been much more true-to-life if Hema had been the child of a Welsh immigrant a la Manning.)
Because the training is declassified, anyone can now take it here. Examining the slides, we were struck by the fact that a character that regularly plays high-stakes poker was considered less of a threat than Hema, and that Hema’s propensity of travel made her as much of a risk as a recently divorced man mired in debt who openly worries about paying child support. Hema’s foreign travel, the slide notes, is a threat because it “gives foreign agents a chance to contact foreign intelligence services. She also demonstrates possible divided loyalty and financial difficulties. She is a high threat.”
Emphasis ours. Let’s break down exactly why labeling Hema as a threat to security is problematic. Using this training’s criteria, in order to be classified as low risk (0 indicators) by the Defense department, one would have to:
1) Estrange oneself from family and friends, not to mention cultural connections and heritage by not going back to India regularly. (Besides, who needs grandparents or your aunties when you have Uncle Sam?)
2) Be politically apathetic or somehow always support U.S. foreign policy, even though that policy could vary wildly from administration to administration. But never mind that. U-S-A! U-S-A!
3) Be financially well off. (But don’t you dare spend any of that money on foreign travel or political causes, like other well-off people do. Always remember: brown-skinned individuals have to be extra careful.)
For us, the strangest part of seeing someone like the fictional Hema classified as a high risk threat is that traveling internationally, exercising the rights to free speech and having political opinions are generally indicators of a well-rounded, actively involved citizen. Couldn’t the government use more inspired young people who know that the world is a big and complicated place? Why are these traits considered undesirable and threatening when the person possessing them is a South Asian American woman?
I’m not sure those threats are considered particularly undesirable and threatening based on the person’s ethnicity. I have a white friend who is about as all-American as possible (has ancestors who fought in Revolution and both sides of Civil War), the child of two Foreign Service Officers, worked in government her entire life. She’s having her security clearance reviewed now and they are grilling her about foreign travel she took to France, to meet someone who lived in Germany. As it happens, the person she was meeting was a member of the US military and also super-white all-American, but the security clearance people didn’t know that. As soon as they saw “went to a foreign country to meet someone coming from another foreign country,” even though both the foreign countries are whiter than America, they went into Probe Mode, asking a lot of very personal questions about her relationship with the person she was meeting, what they did in France, what they talked about, etc.
The federal government is feeling punked by recent leaks and it’s overreacting, much as it did by banning more than 3 oz of liquid after a failed UK attack. But I don’t think this post has made the case for the concern being racially biased, such that if the woman were Russian-American, traveling back to Russia twice a year, there wouldn’t be the same concern. Furrin is furrin.
Geeze us feds tons of americans disagree with U.S. foreign policy, IMHO the usa needs help its bankrupt due to Bush and Obama spending far more than what we the tax payers put in i feel the us at least the trolls are jealous of India. I was born here in Santa Barbara and every time I fly back from India or England i get grilled by the feds and am asked why did you after college go away to fly for the RAF. when we needed you to fly in southeast asia IMHO this goverment needs to be tossed and a Parlament needs to go in no more damme presidents. wasting our hard earned hell obama is a rascist.