Whistleblowers Have a Human Right to a Public Interest Defense, And Hacktivists Do, Too<\/p>\n
Posted: 03\/20\/2015 1:58 pm EDT Updated: 05\/20\/2015 5:59 am EDT<\/p>\n
By\u00a0Carey Shenkman<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/carey-shenkman\/whistleblowers-have-a-hum_b_6903544.html<\/p>\n
The United States’ war on transparency is making it an outlier in the international community. Just\u00a0this week,\u00a0a high-level European human rights body “urged” the United States to allow NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to return home and be given a meaningful chance to defend himself.<\/p>\n
International human rights law has been clear for decades: anyone engaged in exposing gross abuses through whistleblowing and publishing is entitled to protection. Yet, the Obama administration has waged war on transparency,\u00a0prosecuting more people for disclosing information\u00a0to the press than Richard Nixon and all other U.S. presidents combined.<\/p>\n
Not a single one of those prosecuted has been allowed to argue that their actions served the public good. Chelsea Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower, exposed human rights abuses worldwide and opened an unprecedented window into global politics. Her disclosures are to this day cited regularly by the media and courts. Thomas Drake exposed massive NSA waste, while John Kiriakou exposed waterboarding later admitted to be torture in the recent Senate CIA Torture Report. The story of Edward Snowden’s disclosures of widespread NSA surveillance recently won an Oscar.<\/p>\n
Whistleblowers cannot argue that their actions had positive effects, known as a “public interest defense.” The United States treats disclosures to the press as acts of spying — no matter what good they lead to. In response, European and international human rights bodies are urging the United States to adopt better protections for whistleblowers.<\/p>\n
These protections should apply not only to insiders who blow the whistle, but also to other transparency advocates such as hacktivists. A public interest defense should have been available to Aaron Swartz, the Creative Commons creator and Reddit co-founder who\u00a0tragically committed suicide\u00a0following an overzealous government prosecution. His crime? Trying to make academic articles accessible to the public.<\/p>\n
The defense could have helped Jeremy Hammond, who in 2013 was convicted for “computer trespass” and sentenced to\u00a010 years\u00a0for exposing that the private intelligence firm Stratfor spied on human rights activists. The Justice Department tried to cast Hammond as a cybercriminal. But Hammond’s supporters, which include human rights organizations and Pentagon Papers whistleblower\u00a0Daniel Ellsberg, recognized that he was motivated to expose government and corporate surveillance.<\/p>\n
In guaranteeing a fair trial for information disclosures, the United States lags behind other jurisdictions, including Canada, Denmark and Germany. Canada’s Security of Information Act offers a public interest defense, as does the Danish Criminal Code on disclosing state secrets. The defenses are not airtight, but they are better than nothing. For hacktivists, at least one German court\u00a0has defended\u00a0a digital sit-in as political speech, acknowledging that ‘hacker’ does not equal ‘cybercriminal.’<\/p>\n
International norms support the human right to a public interest defense. The UN Human Rights Committee, interpreting the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, the world’s farthest-reaching human rights treaty,\u00a0noted\u00a0that governments must take “extreme care” to ensure that laws relating to national security are not invoked “to suppress or withhold from the public information of legitimate public interest.”<\/p>\n
Additionally, the Johannesburg Principles, adopted since 1995 by international legal experts,\u00a0stipulate\u00a0that “No person may be punished on national security grounds for disclosure of information if . . . the public interest in knowing the information outweighs the harm from disclosure.” This principle was\u00a0reiterated\u00a0in 2013 in the Tshwane Principles–agreed upon by UN experts, civil society and practitioners around the world. The Tshwane framework outlined in detail specific categories of disclosures, like corruption and human rights abuses, that should be protected.<\/p>\n
Finally, the European Court of Human Rights, Europe’s high human rights court, has provided for whistleblower protection on numerous occasions. For instance, in\u00a0Guja v. Moldova, the court protected as a matter of free speech a whistleblower’s right to disclose wrongdoing committed by a public prosecutor. In reaching its decision, the court weighed the perceived damage suffered by the public authorities against the public interest of the information revealed.<\/p>\n
This week’s statements from the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe follow a tradition of long-standing norms which consistently support the right to a public interest defense in information disclosures. None of these norms depend on the defendant being a government whistleblower; they can certainly protect hacktivists as well.<\/p>\n
The free flow of information is necessary for a democratic society, and this flow cannot be purely in the hands of government. This is why the rights to expression and a free and open press are among the most widely recognized rights on earth. When those exposing wrongdoing cannot even defend themselves in court, this is ultimately a failure of the rule of law. It means that even judges cannot challenge the basis for government secrecy, undermining the basic tenets of democratic society.<\/p>\n
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Exclusive: Freed CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Says “I Would Do It All Again” to Expose Torture<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/democracy-now\/exclusive-freed-cia-whist_b_6645174.html<\/p>\n
In a broadcast exclusive,\u00a0Democracy Now! airs an in-depth interview\u00a0with John Kiriakou, a retired CIA agent who has just been released from prison after blowing the whistle on the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. He appears on the program live from his home in Virginia, where he remains under house arrest for three months.<\/p>\n
In 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the agency’s use of waterboarding. In January 2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer involved in the torture program to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. In return, prosecutors dropped charges brought under the Espionage Act.<\/p>\n
Kiriakou is the only official to be jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture. Supporters say he was unfairly targeted in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government whistleblowers.<\/p>\n
A father of five, Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA as an analyst and case officer, leading the team that found high-ranking al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in 2002.<\/p>\n
In a wide-ranging interview, Kiriakou says, “I would do it all over again,” after seeing the outlawing of torture after he came forward. Kiriakou also responds to the details of the partially released Senate Committee Report on the CIA’s use of torture; argues NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did a “great national service,” but will not get a fair trial if he returns to the United States; and describes the conditions inside FCI Loretto, the federal prison where he served his sentence and saw prisoners die with “terrifying frequency” from lack of proper medical care.<\/p>\n
Watch the\u00a02013 Democracy Now! interview\u00a0with Kiriakou before he entered prison.<\/p>\n
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Former NSA executive Thomas A. Drake may pay high price for media leak<\/p>\n
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 14, 2010; C01<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2010\/07\/13\/AR2010071305992_pf.html<\/p>\n
F or seven years, Thomas A. Drake was a senior executive at the nation’s largest intelligence organization with an ambition to change its insular culture. He had access to classified programs that purported to help the National Security Agency tackle its toughest challenges: exploiting the digital data revolution and countering terrorism.<\/p>\n
Today, he wears a blue T-shirt and answers questions about iPhones at an\u00a0Apple\u00a0store in the Washington area. He is awaiting trial in a criminal media leak case that could send him to prison for 35 years. In his years at the NSA, Drake grew disillusioned, then indignant, about what he saw as waste, mismanagement and a willingness to compromise Americans’ privacy without enhancing security.<\/p>\n
He first tried the sanctioned methods — going to his superiors, inspectors general, Congress. Finally, in frustration, he turned to the “nuclear option”: leaking to the media.<\/p>\n
Drake, 53, may pay a high price for going nuclear. In April he was indicted, accused of mishandling classified information and obstructing justice. His supporters consider him a patriotic whistleblower targeted by an Obama administration bent on sealing leaks and on having something to show for an investigation that spans two presidencies. Many in the intelligence community, by contrast, view Drake as the overzealous one, an official who disregarded his oath to protect classified information so he could punish the agency for scrapping a program he favored.<\/p>\n
It’s classic Washington: disgruntled officials sharing inside information with a reporter and an administration seeking to rein that practice in. Drake’s attorney maintains he broke no laws.<\/p>\n
The case, whistleblower-rights advocates say, underscores how revealing abuses in the intelligence community is difficult because of the classified nature of programs and the lack of meaningful protections against retaliation.<\/p>\n
An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment for this article, saying the agency cannot discuss an ongoing criminal case. Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said: “We have consistently said that leaks and mishandling of classified information are matters that we take extremely seriously.”<\/p>\n
Whether or not Drake “thought he had a solid argument,” he “made it in the wrong form,” a former NSA official said.<\/p>\n
What led Drake to this point, friends and others say, is a belief that his actions were justified if they forced such a powerful and secretive agency to be held accountable.<\/p>\n
“He tried to have his concerns heard and nobody really wanted to listen,” said Nina Ginsberg, an attorney representing a former Hill staffer who shared Drake’s concerns.<\/p>\n
‘Champions of the little guy’<\/p>\n
Drake, an avid player of three-dimensional-chess who flew on Air Force spy planes and once was a CIA analyst, began working at the NSA in 1989 as a contractor evaluating software. “He always seemed to have a new angle on something,” said Edward Miller, president of Software Research, and a friend of Drake’s since the mid-1990s. “He was bringing the best of what was in the outside world into the insular thinking of a large agency.”<\/p>\n
In 2000, Drake met Diane Roark, a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee who tracked the NSA. She held dim views about agency officials, especially concerning complex technical programs.<\/p>\n
They were friends with shared values, Ginsberg said. “He was very concerned about waste and mismanagement and so was she.”<\/p>\n
The two were impressed by a project called ThinThread, developed in the late ’90s to provide the NSA with a way to sift through the massive volume of digital data the agency could vacuum up, then discern patterns and key pieces of information that would be useful to analysts. Drake and Roark viewed themselves as “champions of the little guy,” said a former NSA official. “The bureaucracy was the bad thing and entrepreneurial grass-roots efforts were the right thing.”<\/p>\n
The people behind ThinThread were the right thing: They included two career employees, William Binney, a mathematician, and J. Kirk Wiebe, a communications analyst. A key component of ThinThread was privacy protection. The program could collect domestic data but would “anonymize” names and other identifying information with encryption codes until evidence was gathered to justify a warrant so that names could be revealed. Inexpensive and designed for off-the-shelf hardware, ThinThread was estimated to cost in the millions, not billions.<\/p>\n
But there was dispute about how much data the program could handle, and anonymized or not, collecting domestic data without a warrant is illegal, NSA lawyers advised. Michael V. Hayden, who was then the new NSA director, decided to center a major modernization effort on Trailblazer, a $1.2 billion program that essentially performed the same functions as ThinThread.<\/p>\n
In 2001, Drake was promoted to senior executive, heading the office of change leadership and communications. His first day on the job happened to be Sept. 11: In the course of hours, al-Qaeda’s attack changed the national conversation about privacy. Suddenly the emphasis was on detecting plots rather than on trying to ensure that the agency never spy on Americans, even inadvertently.<\/p>\n
Drake still believed in ThinThread, that it was needed now more than ever to help find terrorists. However, friends said he began to hear rumors that the agency was embarking on a program that would abandon constitutional safeguards against wiretapping of Americans and engage in data-mining that could raise suspicions about innocent Americans. He thought this was unnecessary because of ThinThread, they said.<\/p>\n
Friends said he took his concerns to senior agency officials but got no results. Three former agency officials said they didn’t recall Drake raising any constitutional concerns, though one recalled that he pushed ThinThread. Roark, Binney and Wiebe shared Drake’s concerns. Friends said that the three tried to alert congressional leaders and that Roark wrote to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. They got no results. Roark also went to her boss, House intelligence Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who referred her to Hayden. Hayden told her, “We’re proud of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”<\/p>\n
Binney and Wiebe retired in October 2001, but the group of self-styled whistleblowers pressed on. In September 2002, Roark, Binney, Wiebe and a colleague — a former NSA technician — filed a complaint with the Defense Department’s inspector general. They charged that NSA ineptly sidelined ThinThread to pursue Trailblazer, a budget-padding program that cost 10 times as much and was less effective.<\/p>\n
The four did not ask Drake to sign the complaint because they did not want him, as an NSA employee, to face retaliation, but they named him as a key source. For the next 2 1\/2 years, Drake provided information to Defense investigators, friends said. That probe spawned two criminal fraud inquiries, they said. The inspector general’s office said it does not confirm or deny investigations.<\/p>\n
Drake also testified before two congressional inquiries into the Sept. 11 attacks, detailing his concerns that NSA had information that could have helped prevent them and that it ignored programs such as ThinThread that could have turned up more clues and protected Americans’ privacy. But friends said he told them his input was not reflected in the final classified reports.<\/p>\n
The still-classified inspector general report on ThinThread and Trailblazer was completed in December 2004. Drake saw no response to the findings from the Hill or the agency.<\/p>\n
“What do you do when the established avenues are shut down?” a friend asked. “Just look the other way?”<\/p>\n
A risk worth taking<\/p>\n
Roark, friends said, suggested to Drake in November 2005 that he might contact Siobhan Gorman, a reporter who covered intelligence agencies for the Baltimore Sun.<\/p>\n
A month later, the New York Times revealed that the NSA had been eavesdropping on Americans without court approval since shortly after 9\/11. Drake, friends said, felt emboldened. Others who shared his concerns had gone to the media. He knew the risk — a leak investigation had already begun.<\/p>\n
Still, he thought the risk was worth it, they said.<\/p>\n
In February 2006, according to the government indictment, Drake e-mailed Gorman. He used Hushmail, a service that allowed him to keep his identity secret. For months, the two communicated via Hushmail, but Drake set conditions, including that Gorman would never use him as a single source. After a year, he showed up at her office and finally revealed who he was, friends said.<\/p>\n
The government alleged, among other things, that Drake obtained classified documents from NSA networks that would be useful to Gorman’s articles and that he scanned and e-mailed to Gorman copies of classified documents, at least two of which he retained on his home computer. An attorney for Gorman declined to comment for this article.<\/p>\n
Drake’s lawyer, public defender Jim Wyda, said the allegations are “wrong, both as a factual matter and because of the important principles diminished by such a prosecution.” He added: “Throughout, Tom Drake has tried as best he could to do the right thing in service of his country. His motives in this important matter are completely pure.”<\/p>\n
Former NSA officials disagree. “What he did was unforgivable and clumsy, in my view,” said one, “and could only have been driven by hubris.”<\/p>\n
Throughout 2006 and 2007, Gorman wrote a series of articles critical of NSA’s management of major programs, citing multiple sources. In May 2006, she produced a piece questioning NSA’s rejection of ThinThread, noting its rivalry with Trailblazer. The headline read: “NSA rejected system that sifted phone data legally; Dropping of privacy safeguards after 9\/11, turf battles blamed.”<\/p>\n
By then both projects were history: Hayden had acknowledged that Trailblazer was a failure and hundreds of millions over budget, an NSA inspector general report in 2003 concluded that it had been mismanaged, and Congress in 2003 had stripped the agency’s authority to handle major contracts. Former NSA officials say Trailblazer was not a total bust, that some elements survived and are still in use.<\/p>\n
One government official said that the Sun article reflected “warring parties continuing their religious war” over the projects’ respective virtues, but that it was “probably a public service to have NSA embarrassed by these acquisition failures that otherwise, because they’re classified, get swept under the rug.”<\/p>\n
No plea-bargaining with truth<\/p>\n
In September 2006, the NSA transferred Drake to the National Defense University, where he taught a class on strategic leadership. Ten months later, on a Thursday morning in July 2007, teams of FBI agents descended simultaneously on the homes of Roark, Wiebe, Binney and the former analyst who also complained to the inspector general. In Binney’s case, a friend said, the agents came in with guns drawn. They hauled away boxes of documents, even taking the computers from renters in Roark’s basement in Stayton, Ore., where she had moved after retiring from the Hill.<\/p>\n
On Nov. 28, 2007, shortly before 5:30 a.m., FBI agents knocked on Drake’s door in Glenwood, Md. His wife, an NSA contractor, was about to leave for work and to take their son to school. They took computers, photos, books on the NSA, materials for a dissertation he was finishing.<\/p>\n
Drake met three times with federal investigators in what friends said he termed his “cooperative” period. He thought that he could make them see that crimes had been committed. Instead, in his final meeting with them, in April 2008, it became clear that the government believed that he was the one who had committed a crime. A prosecutor pressed him to plead guilty or go to prison, a friend recalled.<\/p>\n
That month, Drake resigned from the NSA rather than be fired. He also hired a private attorney.<\/p>\n
“I will never plea-bargain with the truth,” friends said he told them.<\/p>\n
Throughout 2009, Drake’s attorney appealed to the prosecution to dismiss the case, arguing that Drake had violated no law. But in November, with a new prosecutor at the helm, it became clear that the case would move ahead.<\/p>\n
That month, Drake ran into Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, in Bethesda. Drake, who knew of Hersh’s work uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, began talking to him and mentioned he was under investigation. He began sharing with Hersh what he had told congressional investigators years earlier, about the NSA’s pre-9\/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. The story, Hersh told journalists in Geneva in April, was “much more devastating, much more important” than what was reported in the Baltimore Sun. Neither man followed up with the other.<\/p>\n
Around that time, Drake called a friend, who said he could feel “the fear . . . the dread, the forlornness” in Drake’s voice. “They’re after me,” he told the friend. “I can smell it.”<\/p>\n
Staff writer Greg Miller and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.<\/p>\n
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http:\/\/www.businessinsider.in\/Now-that-Snowden-claimed-his-whistleblower-crown-3-outstanding-questions-come-into-focus\/articleshow\/47508675.cms<\/p>\n
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Business insider<\/p>\n
Now that Snowden claimed his whistleblower crown, 3 outstanding questions come into focus<\/p>\n
Michael B Kelley0 Jun 2, 2015, 07.43 AM<\/p>\n
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Edward Snowden, who is in Moscow, on a screen in Paris December 10, 2014.<\/p>\n
REUTERS\/Charles Platiau<\/p>\n
REUTERS\/Charles Platiau<\/p>\n
Edward Snowden, who is in Moscow, on a screen in Paris December 10, 2014.<\/p>\n
Former NSA contractor Edwards Snowden’s first leak is coming full circle.<\/p>\n
Last month\u00a0a\u00a0US appeals court ruled\u00a0the NSA’s post 9\/11 dragnet of millions of Americans’ phone call records is illegal, noting that a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order “leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden” and published by The Guardian served as the catalyst for the decision.<\/p>\n
The FISC order directed Verizon to produce to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis … all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”<\/p>\n
The US government had justified the program by saying that it was covered under\u00a0Section 215\u00a0of the USA Patriot Act, but the court ruled that “the bulk telephone metadata program is not authorized by 215.”<\/p>\n
And on June 1, Section 215 and two other provisions of the Patriot Act\u00a0expired\u00a0– at least temporarily.<\/p>\n
So for the first time since 9\/11, partly thanks to Snowden, 31, the phone call records of US citizens are not being scooped en masse under a law ruled illegal.<\/p>\n
But the order is one of as many as 1.77 million NSA documents Snowden\u00a0allegedly\u00a0stole while working at two consecutive jobs for US government contractors in Hawaii between March 2012 and May 2013. And he only gave an estimated 200,000 documents to American journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.<\/p>\n
Snowden in an interview published on June 9, 2013.<\/p>\n
On June 9, 2013, four days after The Guardian\u00a0published\u00a0the Verizon order, Snowden revealed himself in a video before going underground to seek asylum.<\/p>\n
Snowden’s epic heist and search for asylum spans more than 10,000 miles, and there are a lot of blanks to fill in after Snowden decided to expose NSA spying.<\/p>\n
The mysteries include his “carer” in Hong Kong and how exactly he disposed of as many as 1.7 million documents before getting stuck in Moscow.<\/p>\n
Now that Snowden’s first leak is vindicated, here’s a look at three of the outstanding questions about his journey:<\/p>\n
Who did Snowden meet with in Hong Kong?<\/p>\n
Snowden says he “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no assistance from anyone” – at least until Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
“When Mr. Snowden came to Hong Kong from Hawaii in late May, he looked up a person whom he had met on a previous vacation here,” The New York Times reported on June 23, 2013, the day after Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow.<\/p>\n
Albert Ho, one of Snowden’s Hong Kong lawyers, told The Times the person was a well-connected Hong Kong resident and became Mr. Snowden’s “carer.”<\/p>\n
Snowden\u00a0told the Guardian\u00a0that after the “very carefully planned and orchestrated” theft of NSA information, he didn’t cover his traces in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
“I only tried to avoid being detected in advance of travel … on the other side I wanted them to know where I was at,” Snowden said. “I wanted them to know.”<\/p>\n
In his\u00a0book, Glenn Greenwald wrote that the Snowden “arrived in Hong Kong from Hawaii on May 20, checking into the Mira Hotel under his own name.”<\/p>\n
Where did Snowden spend the first 11 days in Hong Kong?<\/p>\n
However, Edward Jay Epstein of The Wall Street Journal\u00a0went to Hong Kong\u00a0and reported that Snowden didn’t check into the Mira Hotel until June 1, a couple of days before he met Poitras and Greenwald.<\/p>\n
“Mr. Snowden would tell Mr. Greenwald on June 3 that he had been ‘holed up’ in his room at the Mira Hotel from the time of his arrival in Hong Kong. But according to inquiries by Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen, Mr. Snowden arrived there on June 1,” Epstein reported.<\/p>\n
“I confirmed that date with the hotel’s employees,” Epstein wrote.” A hotel security guard told me that Mr. Snowden was not in the Mira during that late-May period and, when he did stay there, he used his own passport and credit card.”<\/p>\n
Epstein also cited a source familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency report on the Snowden affair, writing that “U.S. investigative agencies have been unable to find any credit-card charges or hotel records indicating his whereabouts” between May 20 and June 1.<\/p>\n
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What exactly happened to the documents Snowden didn’t give to journalists?<\/p>\n
After checking out of the Mira Hotel on June 10, Ho said that Snowden\u00a0accepted\u00a0an invitation to stay in the home of one of his carer’s friends.<\/p>\n
On June 12, Snowden\u00a0showed\u00a0The South China Morning Post (SCMP) an unknown number of\u00a0documents revealing “operational details of specific [NSA] attacks on [Chinese] computers, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely.”<\/p>\n
Snowden\u00a0told\u00a0Lana Lam of SCMP that he possessed more NSA intel.<\/p>\n
“If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.”<\/p>\n
Eleven days later, Snowden got on a plane to Moscow.<\/p>\n
In October 2013, James Risen of\u00a0the Times reported\u00a0that Snowden told him over encrypted chat that “he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong.” (ACLU lawyer and Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner subsequently told me that the report was inaccurate.)<\/p>\n
Snowden would later\u00a0tell\u00a0NBC that he “destroyed” all documents in his possession before he spoke with the Russians in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
“The best way to make sure that for example the Russians can’t break my fingers and – and compromise information or – or hit me with a bag of money until I give them something was not to have it at all,” he told Brian Williams in Moscow in May 2014. “And the way to do that was by destroying the material that I was holding before I transited through Russia.”<\/p>\n
More to come<\/p>\n
Snowden, who appears via video conference\u00a0semi-frequently, has not explained these discrepancies yet.<\/p>\n
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Edward Snowden, Traitor, Whistleblower or defector?<\/p>\n
By Lindsey Boerma \/\u00a0 CBS News\/ August 12, 2013, 6:00 AM<\/p>\n
The United States has “poisoned the well, so to speak” for Edward Snowden’s chances of receiving a fair trial, his father worried Sunday, shortly after\u00a0declaring\u00a0he has secured travel documents to visit his son in Russia, where he has taken asylum.<\/p>\n
“As a father, I want my son to come home if I believe that the justice system… is going to be applied correctly,” Lon Snowden said on ABC’s “This Week.” Federal prosecutors have filed three criminal complaints against Edward Snowden – two of which were brought under the Espionage Act – for leaking information in May about top-secret National Security Agency programs designed to track potential terrorist activity by culling metadata from U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n
Snowden’s dad: U.S. has “poisoned the well” against son<\/p>\n
NSA debate: Will reforms ease public concern or compromise safety?<\/p>\n
During his trip, the elder Snowden said he plans to convey to his son that he’s “not open” to a plea deal with U.S. authorities. He cited his doubts that the “absolutely irresponsible” descriptions of Edward’s actions by lawmakers and President Obama’s administration would not sway a future jury.<\/p>\n
Stateside, though, U.S. officials seem uncertain how to even classify Snowden. “Traitor” was the favorite in the immediate, fiery aftermath of his revelations – brandished by everyone from Secretary of State John Kerry to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. But it wasn’t fired once on this week’s Sunday show circuit.<\/p>\n
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King, Ruppersberger on NSA, Snowden, al Qaeda<\/p>\n
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Appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Gen. Michael Hayden – former CIA and NSA director – while defending the NSA programs as being effective and legally sound,\u00a0argued: “Traitor is narrowly defined in the Constitution. …We used to have a word for somebody who stole our secrets, who got the job to steal our secrets, and then he moved with those secrets to a foreign country, and made those secrets public. It wasn’t a whistleblower; it was defector. And I actually think that’s a very good word for him.”<\/p>\n
But that term, “whistleblower,” has been wielded since the beginning by Snowden supporters like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who remains holed up in fear of extradition over his own release of classified U.S. documents. This weekend, Assange\u00a0trumpeted\u00a0what he perceived to be concession by the president that Snowden indeed fits the “whistleblower” mold.<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama on Friday\u00a0laid out\u00a0a series of steps to reform NSA transparency and oversight – and in the same breath, preempted the idea that Snowden single-handedly jumpstarted debate over government surveillance. “I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks,” he said. “My preference – and I think the American people’s preference – would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws; a thoughtful, fact-based debate.”<\/p>\n
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Obama: Snowden is no “patriot”<\/p>\n
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Assange in a statement\u00a0scoffed\u00a0at that assessment, opining that “the President and people of the United States and around the world owe Edward Snowden a debt of gratitude” because “without Snowden’s disclosures, no one would know about the programs and no reforms could take place. …His biggest concern was if he blew the whistle and chance did not occur. Well, reforms are taking shape.”<\/p>\n
Hayden on Sunday tried to bolster the president’s point, arguing that “clearly,” the debate about government surveillance overreach “was coming,” and Snowden acted simply as a catalyst.<\/p>\n
Snowden, he said, “accelerated it; he didn’t inform it. He made it more emotional. And so, you know, there are some real downsides to what he’s done. I’ll give you an example. You and I witnessed Katrina, right? I’m telling you right now… the levees around Lake Pontchartrain are the strongest they’ve been in a century, but Katrina was still a bad thing and that’s how I view Mr. Snowden.”<\/p>\n
One GOP lawmaker, though, rallied to Assange’s side, saying the president wouldn’t have rolled out “window dressing” reforms to lawful, working surveillance programs had it not been for Snowden.<\/p>\n
“I think Snowden came out, leaked this information, and the White House has been backtracking ever since,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The problem fundamentally is he’s failed to explain these programs, which are lawful, which have saved lives, which have stopped terrorist plots. He has not adequately defended them.<\/p>\n
Play Video<\/p>\n
Hayden: More comfort with privacy standards can mean less safety<\/p>\n
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“And now he’s in a bit of a mess,” McCaul continued, “because on the heels of the IRS scandal, where peopled don’t trust this government, this administration, with their tax records, they sure don’t trust this administration with their phone records.”<\/p>\n
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., a member of the House Intelligence Committee,\u00a0agreed\u00a0on “Face the Nation” the president’s primary fault has been staying “silent for the past two months.”<\/p>\n
“He allowed the Edward Snowdens and others in the world to dominate the media, and now we have people thinking the NSA is spying on people, is listening to our phone calls,” he said. “The president of the United States as commander-in-chief had the obligation to be aggressively and effectively defending his program, and he really didn’t do it.”<\/p>\n
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md.,\u00a0offered up\u00a0his own take on Snowden, which he said “speaks for itself”: “When you work for the intelligence community, first thing you take an oath not to violate classified information. This individual now has said that he went in for the purpose of getting information. He turned his back on his country and where did he go once he got this information? He went to China and then he went to Russia.”<\/p>\n
Still, though the NSA surveillance methods in no way violate Americans’ privacy, Ruppersberger qualified, with details of the programs circulating internationally thanks to Snowden, reforms may be necessary, if only to placate public perception.<\/p>\n
“We in politics have to deal with perception, not just reality,” he said. “And we need to do better in educating our public so they are not fearful that we, the government, are violating their privacy – that’s very important.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n
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Petraeus gets probation for leaking secrets to mistress<\/p>\n
Rad Berky, WCNC-TV, Charlotte, N.C.\u00a07:27 p.m. EDT April 23, 2015<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/nation\/2015\/04\/23\/petraeus-sentencing\/26235127\/<\/p>\n
CHARLOTTE, N.C. \u2014 David Petraeus, the retired four-star general leader who once commanded military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,\u00a0pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court\u00a0to leaking classified information to his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, and was sentenced to two years probation and fined $100,000.<\/p>\n
The sentence did not include any prison time, but the fine was $60,000 higher than the tentative terms reached in a plea deal two months ago.<\/p>\n
U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler, who was not obliged to follow the plea agreement, said the larger fine was necessary “to promote respect for the law and adequate deterrence.”<\/p>\n
Petraeus pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of eight highly secret “black book” binders that he had improperly retained from his time as top military commander in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whistleblowers Have a Human Right to a Public Interest Defense, And Hacktivists Do, Too Posted: 03\/20\/2015 1:58 pm EDT Updated: 05\/20\/2015 5:59 am EDT By\u00a0Carey Shenkman http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/carey-shenkman\/whistleblowers-have-a-hum_b_6903544.html The United States’ war on transparency is making it an outlier in the international community. Just\u00a0this week,\u00a0a high-level European human rights body “urged” the United States to allow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-96417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}