New McCarthyism or neo-fascism? Either terms seems equally appropriate, but this is what it looks like: the United States government treating anyone who questions U.S. foreign policy as a national security threat.

The CIA claims that one out of every five of its job applicants had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” and the Washington Post reports this as though the CIA’s greatest problem is in spotting “insider threats”. The “multimillion-dollar hunt for insider threats has suffered from critical delays in recent years,” the paper warns.

The report acknowledges:

The policy puts leakers of classified information on par with terrorists and double agents, an equivalency that critics of government secrecy find worrisome.

But that’s really Kafkaesque reporting because in the eyes of the U.S. government, critics of government secrecy who work for or seek employment in the federal government would of course be regarded as insider threats!

Is the current witch-hunt for “insider threats” only worrisome to critics of government secrecy, or might it perhaps be a concern to a much wider constituency that escapes the attention of reporters for the Washington Post: ordinary Americans who fear that their own government is becoming a threat to democracy?