National Security Agency (NSA) expert and author Jim Bamford has a another explosive article in Wired Magazine:

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

Bamford's latest piece – which features NSA whistleblowers and GAP clients – describes how 6 employees of a "mom-and-pop company," Technology Development Corporation (TDC), constructed the center for Stellar Wind - the NSA's illegal domestic spying program (remember they had to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and give the telecommunications companies retroactive immunity). TDC was owned by two brothers - one of whom is described as "unstable," "weird," "robotic," a tax dodger, and "changing his name to Jimmy Carter, and later Alfred Olympus von Ronsdorf." TDC didn't just build the Stellar Wind center, the bizarre company ran the Stellar Wind operation.

For a description of Stellar Wind, check Bamford's first blockbuster Wired Magazine article of the year, which described not only a gargantuan data storage facility NSA is building on the taxpayer's dime, but that the American people are paying NSA to collect massive amounts of their private data: 

[Bill] Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts.

Bradley Manning's attorney (David Coombs) requested that charges against Manning be dismissed because the prosecution had so badly bungled discovery obligations.

Josh Gerstein of Politico reported in detail:

At a hearing last month, prosecutors in the case against Pfc. Bradley Manning noted that they didn't receive the messages but could not explain why. Chief prosecutor Capt. Ashden Fein said at a hearing Thursday that the messages had been "blocked by a spam filter for security." However, it fell to defense attorney David Coombs to explain precisely why the e-mails about evidence issues in the Manning case never made it.

"Apparently, they were blocked because the word 'WikiLeaks' was somewhere in the e-mail," Coombs said.

The government's own WikiLeaks policies are now hampering the prosecution's work in the case against Manning. Yesterday's Manning hearing also revealed that the U.S. claims that Manning aided al-Qaeda by allegedly giving documents to WikiLeaks. What about the New York Times, which also posted the WikiLeaks documents? Neo-con Gabe Schoenfeld, who suggested using the Espionage Act to target news sources, which the Obama administration had done in record numbers, also believes that news organizations should be held criminally liable for alleged leaks of classified information.

Speaking of absurd WikiLeaks policies, I blogged yesterday about the State Department's attempt to fire whistleblower and author Peter Van Buren based on his linking – NOT leaking – to a Wikileaks document on his personal blog. Van Buren was on Democracy Now! this morning:

The Washington Post reports:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday plans to provide the most detailed account to date of the Obama administration’s legal rationale for killing U.S. citizens abroad, as it did in last year’s airstrike against an alleged al-Qaeda operative in Yemen, officials said. . . . his speech Monday will mark a new and higher-profile phase of the administration’s campaign to justify lethal action in those rare instances in which U.S. citizens, such as New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, join terrorist causes devoted to harming their homeland.

But when GAP (and other civil liberties groups) request the legal memo justifying the killing of al-Awlaki from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), OLC maintains that the "existence or non-existence" of the memo is classified.

To review the Justice Department's completely ridiculous and indefensible position on the assassination memo:

• Days after the Obama administration engages in the targeted killing of an American citizen without due process, anonymous "administration officials" leak the existence of the legal memo rationalizing the assassination to the Washington Post.  
• When the "don't worry, we've got a legal memo" excuse fails to satisfy civil libertarians questioning the expansion of Executive power to killing American citizens without affording a bunch of fundamental Constitutional rights (due process, jury trials, right to confront accusers, etc.), details of the memo appeared on the New York Times front page, including when the memo was written, who authored the memo, the memo's legal reasoning, and even the memo's number of pages in the memo.
• Now, the Attorney General is going to give a public speech at Northwestern University Law School important enough to warrant more anonymous leaks to WaPo further detailing the "logic" of assassinating Americans.

Thanks to Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, we have another example of hypocrisy and disparate treatment associated with the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers. Hamsher analyzes an e-mail exchange that suggests that former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official James Casey leaked to Stratfor chief Fred Burton that the Justice Department had a sealed indictment against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange:

Burton clearly felt jimcasey58@aol.com was his own little Wikileaks window into the DoJ.  So on 1-26-2011 when Burton sent an email to secure@stratfor.com saying he had intelligence that the DoJ had a “sealed indictment” on Assange, you have to wonder where it came from.

Even if Casey didn't leak the indictment, someone did. Hamsher is right on explaining the disparate treatment:

Moral of the story:  Bradley Manning gets charged with “aiding the enemy” for potentially leaking information that was available on the SIPRNET to hundreds of thousands of people. This guy gets a gold watch and no investigation for potentially leaking the existence of a sealed DoJ indictment of Julian Assange that I imagine almost nobody knew about.

Hamsher's article comes on the heels of hard-hitting questions from ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper on the Obama administration's policy of using the Espionage Act to prosecute so-called "leakers," who are usually whistleblowers.

Ellen Nakashima of WaPo reports today:

The National Security Agency has pushed repeatedly over the past year to expand its role in protecting private-sector computer networks from cyberattacks but has been rebuffed by the White House, largely because of privacy concerns. . .

The NSA-fueled hysteria about cyber-threats has yielded several privacy-threatening legislative proposals, some which would legalize massive real-time domestic surveillance by NSA. The White House deserves credit for its rejection of this latest attempt to legalize NSA domestic surveillance, and for not buying into NSA's fear-mongering.

. . . the White House and Justice Department argued that the proposal would permit unprecedented government monitoring of routine civilian Internet activity . . . White House officials cautioned the NSA that President Obama has opposed cybersecurity measures that weaken personal privacy protections.

The Obama administration certainly chose a significant issue on which to take a desperately needed stand against the powerful intelligence agency. Giving NSA additional power to conduct domestic surveillance would further erode the already disappearing privacy rights of American citizens.

White House Press Secretary had an almost unbelievably lame non-response when ABC's Jake Tapper asked how the Obama Administration squared lauding freedom of the press and internet freedom abroad while engaging in a record-setting campaign to silence "leakers" a.k.a. sources a.k.a. whistleblowers.

Carney refused to answer the questions, referred Tapper to the Justice Department, and said "I'm not making the assumption" that the Espionage Act prosecutions suppress whistleblowers. The Justice Department is using the prosecutions for exactly that purpose. In the now-failed case against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake, Justice Department prosecutor William Welch II requested a harsh sentence for Drake specifically to "send a message" to other Intelligence Community employees.

But speaking at the Conference on Internet Freedom at the Hague, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

[T]he right to express one’s views, practice one’s faith, peacefully assemble with others to pursue political or social change – these are all rights to which all human beings are entitled, whether they choose to exercise them in a city square or an internet chat room.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. the Justice Department is doggedly pursuing Espionage Act prosecutions against whistleblowers, thereby labeling them spies and traitors. Not to mention the State Department's retaliation against author Peter Van Buren.

No wonder Carney had a difficult time explaining the glaring hypocrisy. For those who want the visual:

This weekend, University of California-Berkeley will be celebrating President's Day by celebrating whistleblowers. Seems apropos, no? After all, most government whistleblowers are patriotic civil servants who are extremely dedicated to the welfare of our country, and blow the whistle at great personal risk.

As our third president (Thomas Jefferson, if you don't recall your American history lessons) said, "There is no truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world." The conference itself used this quote and it fits. We can only hope that more and more people start to take this view.

The university will be hosting Occupy the Truth: Whistleblowers Conference this weekend, February 17-19. It will feature well-known whistleblowers as well as a "participant-driven environment" for networking and whistleblower support strategies.

GAP National Security & Human Rights Director (and Department of Justice whistleblower) Jesselyn Radack and GAP client (and National Security Agency whistleblower) Tom Drake will be speaking on Saturday. Also featured are Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, former State Department official (and Iraq war critic) Ann Wright, and former CIA agent and intelligence activist Ray McGovern, all three of whom will be discussing the plight of Bradley Manning – the solider accused of giving classified information to WikiLeaks – in a panel this (Friday) evening.