Anyway, not much to report. Survived meeting yesterday, need to work more, and am having a pretty good time. Ate at Pizz'a Chicago and took a looong nap yesterday. ...Need to do Berlitz again, run more figures in SAGE, and start exercising. Well, I have the excuse that I took yesterday night off, at least...

HabitRPG STILL has a horrendous habit of attempting to crash whatever browser it's in (including Safari on my iPhone), so... I really wonder when they're going to get around to fixing memory-leak issues. Come on, pressing a single button should not make Mozilla lock up for thirty seconds.

On FE: Awakening, I obtained Galeforce!Severa, FINALLY promoted Gaius, and am going to go get Kjelle soon. I'm just attempting to give the Galeforce-ladies Galeforce before anything else. (And yes, Brill, the Ylissean Royal Family are doing hideous things to their enemies. *nod*)

I've added the "spork" tag to all of the Great Justice Sporking items.
More importantly, however, it reminded me of an old sporking commitment. One which I've neglected for a bit...

*ominous cackling*

YOU again?!
Blame LiveJournal. It made me remember I had a Little Miss Mary tag. :D

Disclaimer: Nergal (both versions) and Ninis belong to Nintendo and Intelligent Systems. The fic belongs to Athea. Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling. Only the spork (and the other sporkers that drop in occasonally) belongs to me.

ONE FOR THE MONEY!
TWO FOR THE SHOW!
THREE TO GET READY!
AND HERE! WE! GO!

( *in best Lindsay Lohan voice* I'm bored! I'm SO BORED! )

Welcome to 1984: US Government Employee Edition.

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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
All departments and agencies involved in the program must closely track their employees’ online activities. The information gathered by monitoring, the administration documents say, “could be used against them in criminal, security, or administrative proceedings.”
[...]
“We have not found any silver bullets,” said Deana Caputo, the lead behavioral scientist at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit company working on insider threat efforts for U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “We don’t have actually any really good profiles or pictures of a bad guy, a good guy gone bad or even the bad guy walking in to do bad things from the very beginning.”
[...]
A report by the Deloitte consulting firm identifies “several key trends that are making all organizations particularly susceptible to insider threat today.” These trends include an increasingly disgruntled, post-Great Recession workforce and the entry of younger, “Gen Y” employees who were “raised on the Internet” and are “highly involved in social networking.”
[...]
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.”

So the government thinks we're out to get them, even though they admit to not knowing what the heck a "bad guy" looks like in the first place, and they think it's perfectly permissible to set up a turn-in-your-coworkers surveillance state in their ranks. Never mind that it's probably going to be used to get revenge on coworkers far more often than it's used even for its (revolting) intended purpose in the first place, and that any spy with brains is going to get in the habit of framing coworkers in order to get a good reputation with the head honchos and throw suspicion off of himself or herself. Nope, this is totally going to solve all their problems.

Has it occurred to them that their lunatic attitudes are driving the leaks?!