From the NYT - Ongoing Persecution of Whistleblowers

Whistle-Blower, Beware

By MARK HERTSGAARDMAY 26, 2016

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SHOULD it be a crime to report a crime? Many top officials in Washington seem to think so, at least in the case of Edward Snowden.

June 6 will be the third anniversary ofThe Guardian’s publication of top-secret documents provided by Mr. Snowden that showed that the National Security Agency was collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans.

Outraged by this assault on the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure, Tea Party Republicans and progressive Democrats joined to block reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions last year. Only after the N.S.A. was required to obtain warrants to examine such records was reauthorization approved.

But Mr. Snowden, the whistle-blower who set this reform in motion with his disclosures, is persona non grata in the nation’s capital. Democrats and Republicans alike have denounced him as a traitor.

President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have also been unyielding. Mr. Snowden, now in Russia, deliberately broke the law and should not “be brought home without facing the music,” Mrs. Clinton said in a Democratic presidential debate.

“He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistle-blower,” she said. “He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that.”

Thomas Drake would disagree. So would John Crane.

Their intertwined stories, revealed this week, make clear that Secretary Clinton’s and President Obama’s faith in whistle-blower protections is unfounded, and cast Mr. Snowden’s actions in a different light.

Mr. Snowden has expressed his debt to Mr. Drake. “If there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake,” he told Al Jazeera, “there couldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”

Mr. Drake was a senior N.S.A. official who had also complained, 12 years earlier, about warrantless surveillance. As a career military man, he followed the course later advocated by President Obama and Secretary Clinton. Joining others with similar concerns, he went up the chain of command, finally ending up at the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General.

Things did not go well.

[ MORE ]

A Good American Treated by White House Like A Criminal

The Government’s Criminalization of “A Good American”

Shanna Devine, April 25, 2016

Friedrich Mosers’ new documentary, A Good American, details the courage and struggle of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Bill Binney and his partners in committing the truth. Before there was Edward Snowden, there existed a team of senior NSA employees who devised a surveillance program called ThinThread that effectively identified terrorist threats and protected the privacy rights of innocent individuals. When it was replaced by a costly, ineffective and unconstitutional mass surveillance program, they resigned and blew the whistle through designated channels. As the film reveals, however, they were ultimately treated as if they committed a crime for reporting a crime.

A recent letter by prominent good government groups calls on the Obama Administration to put an end to that practice by “prohibiting managers from pursuing or threatening prosecution of whistleblowers who use protected channels.”

- See more at: https://www.whistleblower.org/blog/110925-government%E2%80%99s-criminalization-%E2%80%9C-good-american%E2%80%9D#sthash.phO48289.dpuf

"Insider Threat Program" of Obama is a Threat to Whistleblowers

Dissent is Dangerous: Insider Threat Defense and “The Snowden Affair”

Matt Fuller, April 06, 2016

Foreword

In the aftermath of classified disclosures to Wikileaks, the Obama administration created an Insider Threat Program tasked with identifying the “malicious insiders.” In practice, however, we have found that the Insider Threat Program is really a threat to insiders who commit the truth – whistleblowers.

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “An insider threat arises when a person with authorized access to U.S. Government resources… uses that access to harm the security of the United States. Malicious insiders can inflict incalculable damage. They enable the enemy to plant boots behind our lines and can compromise our nation's most important endeavors.”

The initial creation of the Insider Threat Program included an explicit exemption for whistleblowers covered under the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) and Intelligence Community WPA. However, in the years since the program’s inception, government agencies and congressional officials have used insider threats and whistleblowers as interchangeable identities, causing an irreversible chilling effect amongst public servants who are considering reporting waste, fraud, abuse and other misconduct. Further, the whistleblower exception has vanished from official training materials and guidance on how agencies should implement the Insider Threat program.t

- See more at: https://www.whistleblower.org/blog/031006-dissent-dangerous-insider-threat-defense-and-%E2%80%9C-snowden-affair%E2%80%9D