by Jack Davis
on June 18, 2013
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2013 )
The Guardian: NSA Whistleblower Answers Reader Questions Photo: The Guardian
Yesterday, NSA/PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden participated in an online question-and-answer session through The Guardian. Questions came from both supporters and skeptics, reflecting the public’s desire for clarification on certain points about surveillance, his motivation, and his future. Snowden remains in Hong Kong (and his future largely in the hands of the local legal system there) as the US government examines its options for prosecution. In one of his answers, Snowden criticizes some responses by saying, “Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”
This follow-up Guardian article and this Salon article reviews the Q&A session, highlighting some of the most important takeaways.
In related news, last night President Obama sat down with Charlie Rose, with a large portion of the discussion devoted to NSA surveillance. About 27 minutes in, the President insists that Amercians do not have to sacrifice freedom to ensure security, while continuing to emphasize the trade-offs necessary for that security, also saying that the NSA ‘cannot and have not’ listened to Americans’ telephone calls.
Related Article: Associated Press
Viewpoint: Former NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake and Attorney Jesselyn Radack – Expect to See ‘A Lot More’ Disclosures
GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack and NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake discuss the reaction to Snowden’s disclosure and the great likelihood of more serious impending disclosures concerning the agency’s intrusive worldwide wiretapping programs.
Key Quote: “If after seeing what Bradley Manning went through, someone like Snowden is still willing to come forward, that says volumes that there are still people out there who are moral vertebrates, who have their moral compass pointed in the right direction and have a clear conscience about what they are doing in this country. I’ve seen more people coming out leaking despite that the government’s treatment comes out harsher and harsher and harsher.” – GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack
The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer: NSA Whistleblower’s Dramatic Story
GAP continues to be featured in a number of articles, television programs and radio shows concerning the Edward Snowden disclosure and the NSA domestic surveillance program. GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack was a featured guest on Airtalk after her appearance with GAP clients yesterday on USA Today and she is also quoted here and here.
In addition, Radack’s appearance on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer along with GAP client and NSA whistleblower Bill Binney is now available for viewing online.
Read more »
by Jack Davis
on June 17, 2013
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2013 )
USA Today: 3 NSA Veterans Speak out on Whistleblower – We Told You So
USA Today featured a front-page article today based on a roundtable discussion with GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack and three GAP clients/NSA whistleblowers – Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe – covering how the disclosures of Edward Snowden have vindicated their struggle to raise concerns about the government's secret surveillance of Americans.
The roundtable, available on video in several parts throughout the online version of the article, details how Drake, Binney and Wiebe went through several internal government channels (producing no effective change) before reaching out to the news media. They are defending Snowden's decision to utilize the media from the start.
This multi-media piece is one of the most in-depth articles about the troubling state of national security whistleblower protections since the Snowden disclosures came to light. Radack expanded on the article in her own piece today.
Key Quote: "We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government, trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that, and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress – we couldn't get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general's office, [they] didn't pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand." – William Binney
"Not only did [the three whistleblowers] go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted – and it was for blowing the whistle." – Jesselyn Radack
"[Edward Snowden] is by all definitions a classic whistleblower and by all definitions he exposed information in the public interest. We're now finally having the debate that we've never had since 9/11." – Thomas Drake
"I don't want anyone to think that he had an alternative. No one should (think that). There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered." – J. Kirk Wiebe
Associated Press: Secret to PRISM Program – Even Bigger Data Seizure
An article over the weekend from the Associated Press confirms that the PRISM revelations are indeed – as many have warned, including GAP staff and clients – only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it comes to intrusive government eavesdropping. Dozens of secret interviews with communications company employees reveal that, in the weeks, months and years following 9/11, the FBI and NSA have been gathering metadata on a more massive scale than previously understood in a progression of surveillance tactics leading up to the PRISM program.
More disconcerting even than PRISM, which takes "large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information," is the fact – revealed in the article – that the NSA has been tapping the worldwide network of fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet, effectively monitoring all information that enters and leaves the US. This information, in conjunction with the already disclosed collection of metadata by the NSA, indicates that the agency is stockpiling a vast library of users’ online interactions – one that may be accessed and replayed endlessly at intelligence analysts’ will. More frightening still is that the amount of information concerning the NSA’s capabilities to do this largely remains unknown.
Another article from the Washington Post reveals more about how this all-encompassing spy effort developed over the course of the last decade. This spans from the often criticized Stellar Wind program – which GAP clients William Binney & J. Kirk Wiebe have been warning about for years – to PRISM, including the surveillance court ruling that interpreted the collection of a company’s “business records” (Patriot Act Section 215) to include the entirety of a telephone company’s call database. The article also reveals the existence of NUCLEON – a program that collects spoken-word content rather than metadata. While the intelligence community maintains that the data is subject to rigorous Congressional and legal oversight, the ongoing slew of controversial revelations begs an unreasonable amount of trust from American citizens.
GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack analyzes these articles in a recent blog post and calls for widespread reform.
FireDogLake: Going Through the ‘Proper Channels’ to Blow the Whistle on Secret Surveillance Programs
This article deals with the argument being made by numerous journalists, politicians, academics and members of the public at large saying that Snowden should have taken his complaint through the ‘proper channels’ – going up the chain of command at Booz Allen Hamilton and the NSA rather than going public and supposedly jeopardizing national security. Unfortunately, the cases of the GAP clients and NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe illustrate the ‘black hole’ that lies at the end of this idealistic path. Within the national security and intelligence communities, whistleblower protections are anything but ideal.
Key Quote: We provided information to the same effect of what PRISM does," [GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn] Radack said, "We briefed them and they politely listened and kind of nodded their heads. And didn’t disagree and listened for hours and it was a long meeting and nothing happened because they obviously were only willing to go so far in saying there’s a secret legal interpretation that’s really dangerous
…
What most people don’t know is the normal whistleblower protection laws specifically exclude national security and intelligence employees. That includes the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which was passed under President Obama."
Read more »
by Jesselyn Radack
on June 17, 2013
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2013 )
Three of my clients, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake are featured in a front-page USA Today article discussing the latest disclosures on NSA's massive domestic spying operation from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Q: You three wouldn't criticize him for going public from the start?
J. Kirk Wiebe: Correct.
Binney: In fact, I think he saw and read about what our experience was, and that was part of his decision-making.
Drake had this to say about Snowden:
He is by all definitions a classic whistle-blower and by all definitions he exposed information in the public interest. We're now finally having the debate that we've never had since 9/11.
Binney, Drake, and Wiebe have warned for years that the NSA is collecting millions of Americans domestic communications - metadata AND content.
Speaking from their incredible experience, both having worked for decades at NSA and having been subjected to years-long retaliatory criminal investigations, and in Drake's case prosecution under the Espionage Act, Drake and Wiebe explained the dire situation for whistleblowers in the intelligence community:
Drake: I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.
Wiebe: Well, I don't want anyone to think that he had an alternative. No one should (think that). There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered.
My organization, the Government Accountability Project, echoed Wiebe's assessment of the internal non-options for intelligence community whistleblowers, who have no meaningful protection but who are the whistleblowers the public needs to hear from most. In a statement last week, GAP said:
By communicating with the press, Snowden used the safest channel available to him to inform the public of wrongdoing. Nonetheless, government officials have been critical of him for not using internal agency channels – the same channels that have repeatedly failed to protect whistleblowers from reprisal in the past. In many cases, the critics are the exact officials who acted to exclude national security employees and contractors from the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012.
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by Jesselyn Radack
on June 17, 2013
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2013 )
Last night, AP had a blockbuster story on the recently-revealed NSA Prism program, disclosed by Amerian whistleblower Edward Snowden, We knew that Prism seizes records from the 9 biggest Internet companies--massive secret domestic surveillance that goes far beyond what Americans know. But it turns out that Prism is really a relatively small part of a much broader, even more intrusive domestic surveillance effort.
Soon after the AP story broke, the Washington Post had another blockbuster article on how the U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet and phone metadata. It's breathtaking.
Instead of trying to prosecute Mr. Snowden, we should be prosecuting the government officials who turned the U.S. into a massive surveillance state. And instead of letting the government use fear-mongering about faux terrorism plots to justify every new illegal and unconstitutional intrusion we find out about, Americans should instead be afraid of how wiling the government has been to engage in illegal, unconstitutional dragnet surveillance of its own people under the guise of protecting them.
Would you give your house an car keys, and all your computer passwords, to a stranger?
Then why are you willing to give them to the government?
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by Jack Davis
on June 14, 2013
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2013 )
GAP Statement on Edward Snowden & NSA Domestic Surveillance
GAP released a statement earlier today on Edward Snowden’s exposure of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. The statement makes clear our stance on the disclosure, and Snowden's role as a whistleblower who exposed wrongdoing and illegality at the very highest levels of government.
Huffington Post Live: Whistleblowing and Journalism Post PRISM
How will Snowden’s disclosure affect the future of whistleblowing and journalism? That is the question at the center of this discussion between GAP National Security Director Jesselyn Radack, Academy Award winner Alex Gibney and Dirty Wars writer and producer Jeremy Scahill. Since Snowden’s disclosure there have a plethora of perspectives on the current state of Americans' privacy and the level of domestic surveillance being employed by the US government. GAP continues to remain a resource for reporters and the public as the country ponders this issue.
Key Quote: (Huff Post Live): We have a First Amendment that allows freedom of the press. I have been saying for years that the war on whistleblowers is a back door war on the press … In terms of the actual information in terms of Snowden, my clients ... have been saying this for years. It’s already happening that the government is monitoring metadata and content. The idea that a politician is going to threaten a journalist like Glenn Greenwald is going to become more common. – GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack.
(WND): “The NSA wants to collect data on all U.S. persons … Information is the currency of power … My four NSA clients have been warning about this for three years and no one paid attention. There are other programs besides PRISM. I do think there is more to come – GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack
(FAIR): If everybody already knew about it then why was the information classified? Whether or not it was legal is another question. Of course the government is going to claim that what they were doing was legal … For example, section 215 of the Patriot Act … It seems almost impossible to argue that collecting every Americans’ phone records would be related to an international terrorist or clandestine terrorism intelligence activities. Obviously, that’s what the Justice Department has argued in secret to a secret court … All of this secrecy … is antithetical to democracy. – GAP National Security & Human Rights Counsel Kathleen McClellan
(Maryland Gazette): I’ve never met the man, but I had an instant connection to him … You need to think about what you’re about to give up … You have to be prepared for a life of loneliness.” – NSA Whistleblower/GAP Client Thomas Drake
Al Jazeera: US Government Department Under Scrutiny?
While the debate centers around Snowden, another government whistleblower has come forward making serious allegations of State Department wrongdoing involving prostitution, drug rings and the investigation into those complaints. A controversial report from the Inspector General’s office is also under consideration. Here, GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack joins the studio discussion.
Key Quote: My client Tom Drake did go through every proper channel including the Inspector General … which substantiated his claims… and the government turned around and prosecuted him for Espionage … They put the whistleblower through a living hell and that’s the judge's words, not mine.” – GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack.
WHPTV: Feds Considering Changing the Nature of Many Government Jobs
As this article neatly points out, the Snowden disclosure comes at a time when the Obama administration is already pushing for ‘national security sensitive’ job supervisors to have the ability to fire nearly anyone working under them without the possibility for an employee appeal – all under the guise of national security.
Key Quote: "All of their legal rights, all of their free speech principles would turn into a mirage, they’d disappear,” commented Tom Devine, Legal Director of the Government Accountability Project … All the government would have to do is to say you’re no longer eligible for a sensitive position, … When the government is behaving incompetently, when the government has its own hidden agenda hidden within bureaucratic fiefdoms, we have to have whistleblowers who are the eyes and ears of the public," Devine continued
Read more »
by Bea Edwards
on June 14, 2013
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2013 )
Information about the diminishing authority and capabilities of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Global Fund continues to surface. Indications are that the Board of the Global Fund, through its Audit and Ethics Committee, is responsible for the reduced scope of OIG work and authority. It was the Board that sacked John Parsons as the head of the OIG in November 2012, and since then, GAP has received documents that show:
- The number of country audits completed dropped to zero in the first six months of 2013;
- OIG now assigns top priority to risk management assessments rather than to on-site, in-country work, where major risks are typically found;
- Contracts for long-term, competent, productive investigative consultants are being terminated;
- OIG staff and consultants have filed an increasing number of complaints with the Staff Council, the Ombudsman and the Department of Human Resources about current OIG management;
- The OIG has lost the authority to investigate matters involving the Secretariat staff of the Global Fund.
- The OIG has lost the authority to calculate losses and recoverable resources.
According to sources in the OIG of the Global Fund, the work-plan for this year contemplates only three country audits, selected from a grant portfolio that encompasses some 150 countries. Thus, only two percent of grantee countries will be covered, assuming that the work-plan goals are met. Moreover, not a single country audit has been completed during the first six months of 2013. Preliminary indications are that grants for Pakistan and South Africa and one multi-country grant program will be audited, but no final determination has been made. Further, the interim IG has told auditors that future country audits will take no longer than two weeks, and will focus only on finance issues. Heretofore, OIG sources say, four-to-six weeks was the amount of time required by a team auditing a detailed country grant program. In addition to finance, the audit teams also examined procurement and supply management, where fraudulent practices are most common, but this focus has now been curtailed.
The OIG Progress Report (December 2012 – May 2013) explains that a shift in priorities has occurred:
The [work] plan ensures that the OIG’s assurance function concentrates its work on those critical activities that are likely to have the greatest impact on the internal controls of the Global Fund. To achieve this, the plan is focused largely on reviewing internal Secretariat processes and the work of other assurance providers, and to a lesser extent on reviewing the risk and control environment at country level (para. 38).
by Government Accountability Project
on June 14, 2013
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2013 )
Recently, the American public learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) has conducted, and continues to conduct, wholesale surveillance of U.S. citizens through a secretive data-mining program. The program collects the phone records, email exchanges, and internet histories of tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise have no knowledge of the secret program were it not for the disclosures of recent whistleblowers. The latest of these whistleblowers to come forward is former Booz Allen Hamilton federal contractor employee, Edward Snowden.
As the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) would like to be clear about its position on each of the following points that relate to these significant revelations:
I. SNOWDEN IS A WHISTLEBLOWER.
Snowden disclosed information about a secret program that he reasonably believed to be illegal. Consequently, he meets the legal definition of a whistleblower, despite statements to the contrary made by numerous government officials and security pundits. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), Sen. Mark Udall (D-Co), Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Ca), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) have also expressed concern about the potential illegality of the secret program. Moreover, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) who is one of the original authors of the Patriot Act – the oft-cited justification for this pervasive surveillance – has expressed similar misgiving.
II. SNOWDEN IS THE SUBJECT OF CLASSIC WHISTLEBLOWER RETALIATION.
Derogatory characterizations of Snowden‘s personal character by government officials do not negate his whistleblower status. On the contrary, such attacks are classic acts of predatory reprisal used against whistleblowers in the wake of their revelations.Snowden’s personal life, his motives and his whereabouts have all been called into question by government officials and pundits engaged in the reflexive response of institutional apologists. The guilty habitually seek to discredit the whistleblower by shifting the spotlight from the dissent to the dissenter. Historically, this pattern of abuse is clear from behavior towards whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg, Mark Felt, Frank Serpico, Jeffrey Wigand, Jesselyn Radack, and recent NSA whistleblower Tom Drake.
III. THE ISSUE IS THE MESSAGE AND NOT THE MESSENGER.
As a matter of course, whistleblowers are discredited, but what truly matters is the disclosure itself. Snowden’s revelations have sparked a public debate about the balance between privacy and security – a debate that President Obama now claims to welcome. Until Snowden’s disclosures, however, the government had suppressed the facts that would make any serious debate possible.
IV. PERVASIVE SURVEILLANCE DOES NOT MEET THE STANDARD FOR CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.
Many have condemned Snowden for disclosing classified information, but documents are classified if they reveal sources or methods of intelligence-gathering used to protect the United States from its enemies. Domestic surveillance that is pervasive and secret is only a valid method of intelligence gathering if the country’s enemies include most of its own population. Moreover, under the governing Executive Order it is not legal to classify documents in order to cover up possible misconduct.
V. THE PUBLIC HAS A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO KNOW.
In a democracy, it is simply not acceptable to discover widespread government surveillance only after a whistleblower’s revelations. Because of Snowden’s disclosures we now know that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper deliberately misled the Senate Intelligence Committee when he stated on March 12, 2013 that the NSA did not purposefully collect any type of data from millions of Americans. Regardless of the justification for this policy, the public has a Constitutional right to know about these actions.
Unfortunately, the responsibility has fallen on whistleblowers to inform the public about critical policy issues – from warrantless wiretapping to torture. Whistleblowers remain the regulator of last resort.
VI. THERE IS A CLEAR HISTORY OF REPRISAL AGAINST NSA WHISTLEBLOWERS.
By communicating with the press, Snowden used the safest channel available to him to inform the public of wrongdoing. Nonetheless, government officials have been critical of him for not using internal agency channels – the same channels that have repeatedly failed to protect whistleblowers from reprisal in the past. In many cases, the critics are the exact officials who acted to exclude national security employees and contractors from the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012.
Prior to Snowden’s disclosures, NSA whistleblowers Tom Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe, all clients of GAP, used internal mechanisms – including the NSA chain of command, Congressional committees, and the Department of Defense Inspector General – to report the massive waste and privacy violations of earlier incarnations of the NSA’s data collection program. Ultimately, the use of these internal channels served only to expose Binney, Drake and Wiebe to years-long criminal investigations and even FBI raids on their homes. As one example, consider that Tom Drake was subjected to a professionally and financially devastating prosecution under the Espionage Act. Despite a case against him that ultimately collapsed, Drake was labeled an “enemy of the state” and his career ruined.
VII. WE ARE WITNESSING THE CRIMINALIZATION OF WHISTLEBLOWING.
During the last decade, the legal rights for whistleblowers have expanded for many federal workers and contractors, with the one exception of employees within the intelligence community. The rights of these employees have significantly contracted. The Obama administration has conducted an unprecedented campaign against national security whistleblowers, bringing more Espionage Act indictments than all previous administrations combined.
Moreover, at the behest of the House Intelligence Committee, strengthened whistleblower protections for national security workers were stripped from major pieces of legislation such as the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (for federal employees) and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 (for federal contractors). If those protections existed today, Snowden’s disclosures would have stood a greater chance of being addressed effectively from within the organization.
The actions already taken against Snowden are a punitive continuation of what has become a "War on Whistleblowers." Through a series of retaliatory measures, the federal government targets federal employees who speak out against gross waste, illegality, or fraud, rather than prosecuting individuals engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors. So far as we know, not one person from the NSA has yet to suffer any consequences for ordering, justifying or participating in the NSA’s domestic spying operation.
It is the opinion of GAP that recent events suggest the full might of the Department of Justice will be leveled at Snowden, including an indictment under the Espionage Act, while those who stretched their interpretation of the Patriot Act to encompass the private lives of millions of Americans will simply continue working.
VIII. IN THE SURVEILLANCE STATE, THE ENEMY IS THE WHISTLEBLOWER.
If every action has an opposite and equal reaction, the whistleblower is that reaction within the surveillance state. Dragnet electronic surveillance is a high-tech revival of tactics used to attack the civil rights movement and political enemies of the Nixon administration. Whistleblowers famously alerted the public to past government overreach, while helping to defend both national security and civil liberties.
In contrast, secrecy, retaliation and intimidation undermine our Constitutional rights and weaken our democratic processes more swiftly, more surely, and more corrosively than the acts of terror from which they purport to protect us.
Contact: Bea Edwards, Executive Director
Phone: 202.457.0034, ext. 155
Email: BeaE@whistleblower.org
Contact: Louis Clark, President
Phone: 202. 457.0034, ext. 129
Email: LouisC@whistleblower.org
Contact: Dylan Blaylock, Communications Director
Phone: 202.457.0034, ext. 137
Email: DylanB@whistleblower.org
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