The government's not ticked that the Underwear Bomber II ("undie-bomber") plot got out, they're just pissed about the sputtering, messy, and misleading way in which it got out.

The National Journal has a piece on how "New FBI Probe of Bomb Plot Highlights Administration's Tough Stance on Leaks." As evidence of Obama's crackdown on leakers--which, until now, has been primarily a war on whistleblowers--it offers the fact that the FBI has launched a criminal probe to identify the government officials who leaked the undie-bomb plot as

the latest indication of the Obama administration's unrelenting push to find and punish those sharing classified information with the media.

But I distinguish this "leak," which appears to have come from the administration for political gain, from those by whistleblowers trying to expose government wrongdoing--some of whom are my clients mentioned in the National Journal article. In the case of the undie-bomber, the leak appears to be government self-aggrandizement--not a government employee trying to disclose evidence of wrongdoing--at the expense of sources, methods and possibly an undercover intelligence agent's identity.

In the initial Associated Press version (which turns out not to have been the original since the L.A. Times did an earlier version), the Underwear Bomber II ("undie-bomber") plot was initially spun as

[t]he CIA thwarting an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen [AQAP] to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden . . . The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It's not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a powerful letter supporting my client, whistleblower Peter Van Buren. Van Buren authored a book (We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People), which exposed the massive reconstruction fraud he observed while serving as the leader of two Provincial Reconstruction Teams teams in Iraq.

Beginning around the time his book was to be published, the State Department engaged in a series of retaliatory actions including suspending Van Buren's security clearance, barring him from accessing the State Department building, monitoring all of his online activities taken on personal time using his personal computer, placing him on administrative leave, transferring him to a makeshift telework position, and finally, proposing firing Van Buren. The ACLU said it best in Monday's letter to the State Department's Under Secretary for Management, Patrick Kennedy:

We believe that the State Department's actions constitute a violation of Mr. Van Buren's constitutional rights . . . This proposed termination for Mr. Van Buren's speech raises substantial constitutional questions and creates the appearance of impermissible retaliation for Mr. Van Buren's criticism of the State Department. The Supreme Court has long made clear that employees are protected by the First Amendment when they engage in speech about matters of public concern.

(emphasis added).

The ACLU's Ben Wizner elaborated on the State Department's likely motivation for targeting Van Buren in Wired:

“There’s nothing he has done that would trigger his firing had he not been a vocal critic of the State Department’s policies,” Wizner told Wired. “He’s coming to the end of his career. It calls into question why they’re going to the trouble of firing this guy except to send the message to other government employees that they should stay in their lane.”

National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis, and Diane Roark have been through enough. They were targeted with a federal criminal investigation and subjected to armed FBI raids in July 2007. Binney had a gun pointed to his head as he stepped out of the shower. Drake has the dubious distinction of being the fourth person in U.S. history (and first by the Obama administration) indicted under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information.

They have since been forced to sue NSA in an attempt to recoup property the government took in 2007. First, NSA claimed it would take an inordinately long time to perform the "arduous process" of reviewing the seized materials for classified information. (A brief pause to consider the ridiculousness of our nation's massive spy agency needing extra time to go through a few hard drives it has had for over four years). Perhaps the difficulty came because NSA's process involved essentially "word searching" the computers for key terms like "NSA" and "TOP SECRET" to find supposedly classified information.

When the Court tired of NSA's excuses and ordered NSA to actually respond to the whistleblowers' lawsuit, NSA moved on May 11th to dismiss the lawsuit claiming that all the property NSA still has is classified.

NSA's latest claims of secrecy are especially incredible considering NSA couldn't find a single shred of classified information in Drake's home in order to make their Espionage Act case against him stick. The case collapsed in spectacular fashion days before trial when the government dropped all felony charges in exchange for Drake pleading to a minor misdemeanor not involving classified information. Bush's former classification czar (J. William Leonard) said about the Drake case that he had never seen a "more deliberate and willful example of government officials improperly classifying a document." Yet, NSA bizarrely continues to stubbornly claim that there is classified information on Drake's computers.

Have we learned nothing from the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping scandal that once threatened the near collapse of the Executive Branch?

WaPo reports on the latest merger of telecom and private industry in sharing customers' information with government agencies:

The Pentagon predicts that as many as 1,000 defense contractors may join a voluntary effort to share classified information on cyberthreats under an expansion of a first-ever initiative to protect computer networks.

After a pilot program that involved 36 contractors and three of the biggest U.S. Internet providers, the Obama administration approved a rule letting the Pentagon enlist all contractors and Internet providers with security clearances in the information exchange . . .

As I pointed out on Twitter: Government Spy Agencies + Telecoms = unholy partnership Americans ought to approach with the greatest skepticism.

Of course it is couched with nice-sounding goals like protecting "national security" and protecting us from vicious "cyber attacks," but approaches to reforming cyber-security too often include over-broad privacy-threatening measures. Privacy and civil liberties groups (like GAP) have repeatedly voiced their concerns with overreaching cyber-security measures, like the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA), which the House passed last month. The broad coalition of advocacy groups warned: