Advocacy Groups Call on Armed Services Committees to Preserve Military Whistleblower Rights
Irvin McCullough, June 27, 2016
After both chambers of Congress passed their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2017, twenty-eight public interest organizations and advocacy groups sent a letter to leadership of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and encouraged them to maintain the integrity of the military whistleblower provisions in the bill through conference.
The letter cautions, “While military whistleblowers play an important role in safeguarding our nation from fraud, waste and abuse, speaking out against wrongdoing is particularly challenging for servicemembers.” A 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office found that the military is plagued by widespread whistleblower retaliation, and according to a 2014 government survey, a quarter of Department of Defense Inspector General employees fear reprisal if they disclose a suspected violation of law.
Last week, Ralph Nader hosted hundreds of civic activists for his Breaking Through Powerconference. These activists celebrated the 50th anniversary of the consumer advocate’s book,Unsafe at Any Speed, by listening to panelists describe how they improve civic mobilization and democratic integrity.
The Governmental Accountability Project (GAP) emphasizes whistleblowing as a way to spur action and break through power. Fifty years ago, Ralph Nader coined the term “whistleblower” when he called for civic-minded engineers and technicians to report corruption. And they responded! With the help of those early corporate whistleblowers, consumer-friendly legislation such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act were created and corruption was exposed. Public life improved. If private sector whistleblowers could make so much change, could the same be done in the public sector?
On May 25th, three panelists revealed that it could. Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack, and John Kiriakou shared their stories and discussed the difficulties they faced as whistleblowers.
They briefly outlined their stories throughout the panel: Drake blew the whistle on the National Security Agency’s ineffective Trailblazerprogram that wasted millions of American taxpayers’ dollars; Radack exposed a Federal Bureau of Investigation’s unethical interrogation of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; Kiriakou shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program. All three served their country, all three exposed corruption, and all three suffered reprisal. Their reprisal came at the cost of baseless FBI raids, criminal investigations, an Espionage Act prosecution, and even actual prison time.
The cost of whistleblowing can be high, especially for the unconnected. Breaking through power without power is difficult. While these whistleblowers were punished, they noted “hypocrisy” in the handling of high-ranking officials’ information disclosures, and Drake claimed that “[those with power] get another set of rules.” Kiriakou concurred, citing an instance where Director Petraeus “got a pass” forallegedly revealing sensitive information to the New York Times.
Hide in a far Nothing
at the edge of light. Drift near Far Tortuga in a leaky turtle boat. Melt an
icecap, craft a crop circle, have sex with a virus.
Now, go to the city of Washington and read a few
minds. Pick up a copy of the Washington Post.
Hang out with a drug or weapons lobbyist at a local bar. Try to reconcile the
biases, irrationalities, and politics You encounter into something that makes
sense for the good of all.
In other words, try to un-Babel this city...
You cannot.
It is impossible, even for You. Being all-powerful, You
have “created” a place even You will never sort out.
Short of an alien invasion or flaming snakes from the sky (at least twice a week), two worlds will always prevail in Washington and
trump all Godlike efforts: the World of Idols
and the World of Ideals.
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.
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.”
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
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Although conservatives have recently tried to revive the image of former president and actor Ronald Reagan, his legacy includes details that are a little l
After both chambers of Congress passed their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2017, twenty-eight public interest organizations and advocacy groups sent a letter to leadership of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and encouraged them to maintain the integrity of the military whistleblower provisions in the bill through conference.
Last week, Ralph Nader hosted hundreds of civic activists for his 
