Author: Nathan
Luxemburger Wort reports that Antoine Deltour, PricewaterhouseCoopers employee, along with another employee and French journalist Edouard Perrin, will be tried regarding the LuxLeaks scandal beginning on 26 April.
Deltour came forward in December 2014 as a source of the ICIJ’s Luxembourg release, saying, “I copied training documents, but while searching the PwC database, I also came across these famous tax rulings. Without any particular intention or precise plan, I copied these also because I was appalled by their content.”
Wort reports that the trial will last five days, and Deltour and the other unnamed employee will face charges of “robbery, professional confidentiality violations, laundering and fraudulent access to a database”, and Perrin will face charges as an accomplice.
Antoine’s support site is here. As of this writing, more than 60,000 people have signed a petition supporting protection, not penalty, for Deltour.
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists notes that a Department of Defense report on the Obama Administration’s ‘Insider Threat’ programme was released last month, charting the programme’s progress forward. Afterood writes that the DOD is constantly monitoring “‘approximately 100,000 military, civilian and contractor personnel’ in an effort to identify potential insider threats.”
The Insider Threat programme was launched in October 2011 in response to Chelsea Manning’s 2010 disclosures to WikiLeaks. Under the programme, employees across the US government are monitored in order to prevent leaks, equate criticisms of wrongdoing with spying and engender a culture of tight-lipped secrecy. As McClatchy reported, one DOD document emphasized, “leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”
Courage has previously written about problems with the programme, when it was revealed that the CIA was spying on its own “internal channels” for whistleblowers.
Kevin Gosztola, at Shadowproof, writes this week that “Twenty-two organizations, including whistleblower advocacy groups, recently sent a letter to the inspector general for the “intelligence community”, registering concerns about the programme’s threat to civil liberties. The organisations warn, “This kind of wanton misuse of the term ‘threat’ demonstrates that this program fails to distinguish between those who want to fix problems from those who wish to do harm to our national security.”
The Courage Foundation is excited and grateful to announce that we have been nominated for Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award, in the Campaigning category, which honours “activists and campaigners who have had a marked impact in fighting censorship and promoting freedom of expression.”
Courage is named alongside dozens of brave and innovative activists and free expression advocates. Also nominated are fellow digital campaigners Electronic Frontier Foundation, artists like Ai Wei Wei, media activists like Journalism is Not a Crime, reporting outlets like Fijileaks, and many more in each category. Browse the lists of other nominees here.
Winners will be celebrated at an awards gala on 13 April 2016 at the Unicorn Theatre in London.
Free expression and literary organization PEN America released a new report called ‘Secret Sources,’ criticizing the US government for its failure to properly protect whistleblowers and advocating for a public-interest defence for those who disclose national security wrongdoing.
After “ interviews with leakers, lawyers, scholars, journalists, and government representatives,” PEN argues that gaps in whistleblower protection put potential leakers at risk and undermine the journalism that source documents enable.
Read the full report here.
PEN lists its key recommendations:
1) Ensure strong, clear protections for government whistleblowers that apply across agencies and to all categories of workers, including contractors;
2) Reform the impenetrable Espionage Act to allow defendants to raise a public interest defense in cases of disclosure to the public, and limit prosecutions under the Act to offenders intending to harm U.S. national defense;
3) Implement protections against employment retaliation and criminal prosecution of whistleblowers, including access to courts for recourse.
Last year, Harvard Law Professor Yochai Bencher outlined a “public accountability defence” that would allow people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning to properly defend themselves in court.
To accompany the report, PEN is hosting a discussion on whistleblowers and the laws ostensibly designed to protect them with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, whistleblower lawyer Jesselyn Radack, and New York Times reporter James Risen.
That event begins at 2:30pm EST and will stream live here.