This post also appears on GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack's Daily Kos blog.

The government used to fire, blacklist and bankrupt whistleblowers. But now the government has upped its ante: it is prosecuting them.

Three weeks ago, former NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was indicted for "leaking."

In today's Washington Post, there's a great article on financial whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld. He complied with a whistleblower incentive law and ended up in jail.

This is a toxic trend that must stop.

Bradley Birkenfeld is a former banker with UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, who shattered 75 years of Swiss bank secrecy by blowing the whistle on American tax dodgers who hid money in Swiss bank accounts.

Birkenfeld's story is more than a cautionary tale. It is a glaring stop sign for any potential financial whistleblower. The new IRS Whistleblower Reward Program enticed him to come forward with a law that turned into virtual entrapment.

This post was written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack for her Daily Kos blog.

The timing of Bradley Birkenfeld's petition for clemency should be lost on no one. Today is tax day--the day that honest, hardworking Americans file their tax returns.

Bradley Birkenfeld is the whistleblower who exposed the $20 billion offshore illegal tax fraud scheme of UBS, Switzerland's largest bank. The U.S. thanked him by sending him to prison. In other words, the person solely responsible for the recovery of billions of U.S. tax dollars is the same person who has served more time than anyone connected to the UBS scandal.

I urge you to join a sign-on letter to President Obama urging clemency for Mr. Birkenfeld. My organization, the Government Accountability Project, has done so.

Today is tax day, the day that honest hardworking Americans file their tax returns. But on tax day this year a great injustice continues:

Today is also the day that President Obama can fix this injustice by issuing a full presidential pardon or commuting Mr. Birkenfeld's sentence to time-served immediately. Mr. Birkenfeld put tax money back in the hands of every American. We must return the favor and demand the he be released from prison.

This op-ed was written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack, and has also appeared in the Moultrie Observer (GA) and on CommonDreams.org.

The government’s treatment of UBS banking whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld, who is credited with shattering Swiss bank secrecy and revealing massive tax evasion by Americans, has alarmed government accountability advocates nationwide.

Birkenfeld is the only person in the scandal (which resulted in the Treasury’s recouping $780 million) to be sentenced to prison. Not a single one of the 52,000 American tax cheats who had UBS accounts faces jail time. Other countries, meanwhile, are taking the opposite view with financial whistleblowers — European nations realize that the information is so valuable that they are willing to pay for it.

An IRS whistleblower award law went into effect in 2006. It theoretically provides monetary awards to financial whistleblowers. Although an award has never been given, the IRS Whistleblower Office is supposed to pay people who expose tax cheats — possibly awarding whistleblowers up to 30 percent of collected amounts. Whistleblowers are eligible even if they participated in the wrongdoing, as long as they weren’t involved in planning or initiating the scheme.

Some people disagree with this approach, feeling that informants shouldn’t “profit” from their own wrongdoing. Birkenfeld, after all, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and is currently serving a 40-month sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

But deals with these types of financial workers — who have inside knowledge and dirty hands — are exactly what’s needed when governments strive to reform murky industries. And guess what? Other countries realize this. Germany has signaled that it will purchase such information from Swiss bank whistleblowers.

A US judge in Florida denied two motions to postpone and reduce the prison sentence of Bradley Birkenfeld, a former UBS employee who blew the whistle on the Swiss banking behemoth’s illegal offshore banking practices. Defense attorneys had argued that prosecutors at the Justice Department misled both the judge and Birkenfeld. GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack was quoted in the article (Law.com):

Jesselyn Radack, homeland security director for the Government Accountability Project in Washington, said Birkenfeld is a victim of a power struggle between two branches of government."What appears to be the case is that the Department of Justice got upstaged by the Senate and is punishing the whistleblower," she said.

In environmental news, the CIA is sharing information with top U.S. climate scientists (NYT) to evaluate the effects of climate change around the world. This partnership was initially shut down by the Bush administration, but has been restarted of late. Some of the information shared includes satellite images. Also, world leaders issued many directives at the Copenhagen climate summit in December; however, none of the follow up work necessary to ensure the realization of the major directives was finished by the end of the conference (ClimateWire). Many are unsure when and how the directives will play out, including the major concern of funding to poor nations for climate change adaptability.