Author: Nathan
The Courage Foundation’s Advisory Board, already comprising whistleblowers, tech experts, scholars, and activists, continues to grow. Earlier this week we announced Slavoj Žižek joined our board, and today we are excited to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges aboard.
Hedges, a former war correspondent for the New York Times, now writes a column for Truthdig, where he covers various topics surrounding threats to our civil liberties and champions those fighting against those threats.
In a debate about Edward Snowden’s actions, Hedges said, “If there are no Snowdens, if there are no Mannings, if there are no Assanges, there will be no free press.”
In February, Hedges wrote ‘Edward Snowden’s Moral Courage,’ a speech praising the NSA whistleblower’s conscientious efforts, and expanding on why we need whistleblowers if we want a free press:
There is no free press without the ability of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. Those few individuals inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance have been charged as spies or hounded into exile. An omnipresent surveillance state—and I covered the East German Stasi state—creates a climate of paranoia and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.
In 2013, Hedges lauded Courage beneficiary Jeremy Hammond for exposing the state’s plan to criminalise democratic dissent. He attended and reported on Hammond’s sentencing, which he called “draconian.”
Earlier that year, Hedges attended and reported on Chelsea Manning’s trial, and wrote in solidarity of the US Army whistleblower here and condemned the “judicial lynching” of Manning here.
The Courage Foundation is excited to announce and welcome internationally renowned philosopher and author Slavoj Žižek to our Advisory Board. A senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, and the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, in London, Žižek has written more than eighty books, and he’s written and starred in several documentaries about his own philosophy.
In June 2014, Žižek wrote “How WikiLeaks opened our eyes to the illusion of freedom”, in which he said:
Not only have we learned a lot about the illegal activities of the US and other great powers. Not only have the WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in motion legislative acts to better control them. WikiLeaks has achieved much more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is rendered problematic.
In September 2013, Žižek wrote an op-ed declaring Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange “our new heroes” and whistleblowing “an essential art.”
He explains why he supports these truthtellers:
…whistleblowers play a crucial role in keeping the “public reason” alive. Assange, Manning, Snowden, these are our new heroes, exemplary cases of the new ethics that befits our era of digitalised control. They are no longer just whistleblowers who denounce the illegal practices of private companies to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they engage in “private use of reason”.
Žižek says we “need Mannings and Snowdens in China, in Russia, everywhere,” and foresaw the need for an organisation like Courage:
…we need a new international network to organise the protection of whistleblowers and the dissemination of their message. Whistleblowers are our heroes because they prove that if those in power can do it, we can also do it.
This article was first published here by the EFF, with whom we’re collaborating for their week of action around the Necessary and Appropriate Principles
by Sana Saleem, Courage Foundation Advisory Board
During the Stockholm Internet Forum this year, a State Department representative was quick to flaunt reforms put in place by the US Government to ‘counter US mass surveillance programmes.’ However, he was unwilling to respond when faced with the simple question “If you are willing to reform laws and mend things, why not honor the man who triggered it, why not bring Edward Snowden home?”
Too often, whistleblowers aren’t valued for the reforms they instigate. Even as government worldwide are considering new ways to limit mass surveillance, there is scant discussion about the need to honor and protect whisteblowers.
The world needs more whistleblowers because those in positions of power are often expert at hiding corruption from the public. People with integrity and a desire for truth and justice within the political system are often our best hope for bringing light to this corruption.
But as much of the world’s press extensively reports on Wikileaks and the Snowden revelations, we must not dismiss the trepidation that comes with reporting the truth and exposing misuse of power. This trepidation will not dissipate unless there is a collective effort to protect and defend whistleblowers, and reform laws that allow for prosecuting them.
There’s also the pressing need to keep using the information provided by whistleblowers to push for necessary reforms and protections. Today is Day 4 of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ‘Necessary and Proportionate’ week of action. The EFF is calling on governments to ensure surveillance law reform is guided by key principles. Today we focus on principle 4: the ‘Integrity of Communications and Systems, Safeguards Against Illegitimate Access, Protection on Whistleblowers, and Right to An Effective Remedy’.
What is meant by the ‘Integrity of Communications and Systems’ in practice? The NSA, or any other government for that matter, should not be able to compel service providers or hardware or software vendors to build surveillance or backdoors into their systems. These companies also should not collect or retain particular information purely for state surveillance purposes.
We now have confirmation that governments are going above and beyond compelling companies to build backdoors into their services. In an article posted on the Intercept this week journalist, documentary maker and Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras documents how the NSA is tapping into Germany’s largest telecommunications providers by accessing the passwords of the system administrators. This revelation was greeted with both shock and deep anger by the telco engineers. Governments need to go beyond merely not forcing companies to comply with backdoor requests, they must put an immediate stop to the accessing whole systems covertly. This point addresses the second element of principle 4, when state authorities illegitimately access personal data.
There is no possibility of protecting against this when it’s happening behind the backs of service providers and hardware and software vendors. This leaves the onus on governments, who, in democratic societies, are accountable to their citizens. The third part of this is an onus on government to protect their whistleblowers. The Obama administration, in what the Nieman Reports has labeled the “Big Chill”, is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know
Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson:
Several reporters who have covered national security in Washington for decades tell me that the environment has never been tougher or information harder to dislodge,
Abramson said
One Times reporter told me the environment in Washington has never been more hostile to reporting.
Protection of whistleblowers is critically important for the protection of a just society. But it’s not just whistleblowers under attack: it is also increasingly difficult to advocate for whistleblowers given the government and the media’s treatment of those who seek to protect whistleblowers.
The Courage Foundation was set up to provide legal and policy support for those who have made a decision to stand up to the abuse of power, risk their career and, in some cases, family life, so that our liberties are protected. It is for this reason that the need to provide stronger protections for whistleblowers, in such a difficult climate, is incredibly important.
Finally, what happens when the state conducts illegal and warrantless surveillance against its citizens? Snowden’s revelations have revealed state intrusion into the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans and citizens around the world, without proof for suspicion. Does the legal system allow us to challenge such surveillance in court? If it does, what would happen to the US government if they were found guilty of illegally surveilling you or me? The Necessary and Proportionate principles argue for civil and criminal penalties imposed on any party responsible for illegal electronic surveillance and those affected by surveillance must have access to legal mechanisms necessary for effective redress.
Tomorrow is Friday, day 5, in which the EFF and its supporters around the world will call on governments to improve safeguards for International Cooperation and Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Law. The Courage Foundation stands beside the EFF’s campaign and calls on all rights groups and activists seeking to preserve an Internet free from surveillance to support this campaign.
It was little over a year ago when Edward Snowden performed an act of remarkable conscience. Snowden’s actions have empowered a generation of us to stand up to abuses and to do the right thing, even when it’s not convenient. With the increasing power and resources of state surveillance programs, the world is in dire need of more whistleblowers to continue this fight.
The Courage Foundation is proud to announce our support and involvement with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Necessary and Proportionate Week of Action, leading up to the first year anniversary of the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, which were first launched at the 24th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on 20 September 2013. The full text of the principles is here.
The EFF has a series of articles and campaigns for various subcategories of the week, on secrecy, transparency, public oversight, combating surveillance and whistleblower protections. Join discussion of the week of action on Twitter with the hashtag #privacyisaright
The Courage Foundation is the predominant partner on today’s topic: ‘Integrity of Communications and Systems, Protection on Whistleblowers, Safeguards Against Illegitimate Access and Right to An Effective Remedy,’ advancing the tenet that “strong protection should be afforded to whistleblowers who expose surveillance activities that threaten human rights.” The United States government has cracked down on those who expose wrongdoing more than ever under the Obama Administration, with Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond in prison, Thomas Drake fired and prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and Edward Snowden in Russian asylum, all for revealing important truths in the public interest about what their government does in secret and against our will.
Courage steps in to protect these conscientious people who deserve our support. We fund legal defense teams for truthtellers, keep their cases in the public light, and advocate for the public’s right to know and whistleblower protections generally. Stay tuned for Courage Advisory Board member Sana Saleem’s article: “Why the World Needs More Whistleblowers.”
In the Atlantic, Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler contends that reforming the National Security Agency requires immunity for public-accountability leakers like Edward Snowden. Benkler, who testified to WikiLeaks’ journalistic value at whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s trial, recently published his proposal for a legal defence that such whistleblowers could use in court, arguing that they should be able to show that their disclosures are in the public interest and necessary for democratic progress.
In his new piece, Benkler observes how the Pentagon Papers, COINTELPRO and Watergate leaks of the 1970s “helped cement the role of unauthorized public disclosure as a systemic check on the predictable cycles of error in the national-security system.” While those erstwhile leakers are now championed for exposing wrongdoing, whistleblowers of the the new millennium have been subject to prosecutions, retaliations and prison sentences.
America’s post-9/11 security state ballooned and ensured its worst policies were kept secret, precluding any accountability, save for conscientious disclosures to the press. “Without the men and women of conscience who have come out over the past 12 years and disclosed aspects of the abuses, the system would have kept on grinding,” Benkler writes.
Echoing his preface to his public-accountability defence proposal, Benkler explains,
All large systems suffer from these kinds of failures as they age, as new conditions challenge old practices, and as the rationale for processes once cherished is lost in the humdrum of bureaucratic routine… Whistleblowing is a central pillar of the way American law deals with these dynamics of error, incompetence, and malfeasance in large organizations.
However, in the national security realm, whistleblowing is not acknowledged and applauded but rather pathologised, condemned, and criminalised. Benkler says, “Only piercing the echo chamber can lead to meaningful reform in such cases, so it’s here, where the risks of error and distortion are greatest, that unauthorized disclosure is most important. We saw it with the Pentagon Papers in 1970, and we saw it again with Snowden.”
In conclusion, Benkler explains how immunity for Snowden would pave the way toward a culture of accountability that welcomes whistleblowing as necessary, inevitable, and vital.
Retroactive immunity would build constitutional culture rather than a permanent legal solution. Our (fuzzy) memories of the 1970s teach us, collectively, that unauthorized national-security leakers who expose substantial wrongdoing were heroes, and that respect, not a prison term, was their due. That is the lesson that immunity for Snowden would reinforce. It will not make leaking a low-risk activity, nor will it erase the dread of repercussions like Manning’s 35-year prison sentence. But immunity will be a strong statement to insiders that if the system has gone badly enough off track, and if public disclosure can lead to genuine benefits, then a conscientious individual can do the right thing. Even if the leak is illegal, the public will support bona fide whistleblowers who expose significant abuses, and the whistleblowers will not be forced to spend their lives in prison or exile while those whose misdeeds they exposed profit on the speaking circuit.
Read Benkler’s full article here.
Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler has published ‘A Public Accountability Defence for National Security Leakers and Whistleblowers,’ highlighting the value that leaks of national security information bring to American democracy and emphasizing the need for a legally permissible defence for those who bring this information to light. He outlines such a defence for what he calls “accountability leaks”, acknowledging that current law defines the term “whistleblower” too narrowly. If Benkler’s proposed defence were practiced today, Chelsea Manning might have avoided such a harsh prison term, and Edward Snowden might feel safe to return home.
Benkler has previously explained how WikiLeaks, as a legitimate journalistic outlet, helped other media outlets perform a vital check on government in ‘A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the Battle for the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate.’ He expanded on that article while testifying at Chelsea Manning’s trial.
In his new piece, Benkler argues that rather than technological change, a legitimacy crisis has spurred the last decade’s spate of national security leaks documenting systemic abuse:
The post-9/11 War on Terror and its attendant torture, rendition, indefinite detention, civilian collateral damage, and illegal domestic spying created a crisis of conscience for some insiders in the national security establishment. A consideration of the actual cases of
the past decade suggests that it is this loss of legitimacy of decisions that likely underlies the increase in these kinds of systemic leaks.
Although “[c]riminal liability for leaking and publishing classified materials is usually discussed in terms of a conflict between high-level values: security and democracy”, Benkler proposes “that the high-level abstraction obscures the fact that “national security” is, first and foremost, a system of organizations and institutions, subject to all the imperfections and failures of all other organizations.” Therefore, “it would be naïve beyond credulity to believe that the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Pentagon are immune to the failure dynamics that pervade every other large organization.”
Benkler explains how secrecy precludes accountability, rendering whistleblowing essentially inevitable — and necessary to keep massive organizations in check.
Secrecy insulates self-reinforcing internal organizational dynamics from external correction. … Some leaks, however, provide a critical mechanism for piercing the national security system’s echo-chamber, countering self-reinforcing information cascades, groupthink, and cognitive biases that necessarily pervade any closed communications system. It is this type of leak, which exposes and challenges core systemic behaviors, that has increased in this past decade, as it did in the early 1970s. These leaks are primarily driven by conscience, and demand accountability for systemic error, incompetence, or malfeasance. Their critical checking function derives from the fact that conscience is uncorrelated with well-behaved organizational processes. Like an electric fuse, accountability leaks, as we might call them, blow when the internal dynamics of the system reach the breaking point of an individual with knowledge, but without authority. They are therefore hard to predict, and function like surprise inspections that keep a system honest. By doing so, these leaks serve both democracy and security.
Rather than embrace these disclosures as vital and valuable, the government has cracked down harder than ever before on leakers and, to some extent, journalists who publish secret information. Benkler encourages countering this crackdown with a defence that whistleblowers could use in court:
To address this threat, I propose that Congress adopt a new Public Accountability defence as a general criminal defence, on the model of the necessity defence. The defence would be available to individuals who violate a law on the reasonable belief that by doing so they will expose to public scrutiny substantial violations of law or substantial systemic error, incompetence, or malfeasance even where it falls short of formal illegality. It is most important to the leakers themselves, but would also be available to journalists and others who participate in disseminating the leaked information.
He details what this defence would require:
(a) reasonable belief that exposure discloses a substantial violation of law or substantial systemic error, incompetence, or malfeasance,
(b)mitigation to avoid causing imminent, articulable, substantial harm that outweighs the benefit of disclosure, and
(c) communication to a channel likely to result in actual exposure to the public
Perhaps recognizing how the Espionage Act has been interpreted in the US to allow potential for harm to monopolize courtroom debate to the exclusion of discussion of the documents’ value, Benkler notes: “The significance of the disclosed violations is the most important factor, and could dominate the outcome even where other elements, in particular harm mitigation, are weaker.”
Benkler realises that such a defence is just one part of a range of necessary support measures: “full whistleblower protection would require more robust protections to avoid “punishment by process,” most importantly a private right of action against abusive prosecutors and an attenuation of the prosecutors’ qualified immunity.”
In the full article, Benkler explains in more detail how valuable national security leaks are, using bulk data collection since 11 September 2001 as an example. He further details his proposed whistleblower defence, and, finally, recounts 22 instances of leak prosecutions since World War II.
Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union have published a joint report highlighting the chilling effects that US surveillance instills in journalists and lawyers, concluding that “surveillance is undermining media freedom and the right to counsel, and ultimately obstructing the American people’s ability to hold their government to account.” The EFF writes that the report “adds to the growing body of evidence that the NSA’s surveillance programs are causing real harm.”
As the ACLU explains:
The report is drawn from interviews with some 50 journalists covering intelligence, national security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and NPR.
The U.S. has long held itself out as a global leader on media freedom. However, journalists interviewed for the report are finding that surveillance is harming their ability to report on matters of great public concern.
Surveillance has magnified existing concerns among journalists and their sources over the administration’s crackdown on leaks. The crackdown includes new restrictions on contact between intelligence officials and the media, an increase in leak prosecutions, and the Insider Threat Program, which requires federal officials to report one another for “suspicious” behavior that might betray an intention to leak information.
The HRW/ACLU report is part of a growing body of evidence that journalists and lawyers feel their ability to protect sources and clients is threatened. In an interview with the Guardian last month, Edward Snowden recommended that professionals start to use encryption:
An unfortunate side effect of the development of all these new surveillance technologies is that the work of journalism has become immeasurably harder than it ever has been in the past. Journalists have to be particularly conscious about any sort of network signalling, any sort of connection, any sort of licence plate reading device that they pass on their way to a meeting point, any place they use their credit card, any place they take their phone, any email contact they have with the source because that very first contact, before encrypted communications are established, is enough to give it all away.
No matter how careful you are from that point on, no matter how sophisticated your source, journalists have to be sure that they make no mistakes at all in the very beginning to the very end of a source relationship or they’re placing people actively at risk. Lawyers are in the same position. And investigators. And doctors.
While professional associations have taken part in international investigations and legal challenges resulting from the Snowden revelations, as the HRW/ACLU report describes, there is a lack of consensus about what best practice should be for journalists and lawyers in a post-Snowden world.
NFA Report on Surveillance Costs
Just a day after the HRW/ACLU report, the New America Foundation published ‘Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom & Cybersecurity,’ an attempt to “quantify and categorize the costs of the NSA surveillance programs since the initial leaks were reported in June 2013.” The NFA finds that “the NSA’s actions have already begun to, and will continue to, cause significant damage to the interests of the United States and the global Internet community,” focusing on economic costs to US businesses, the harm done to US credibility and the “serious damage to Internet security through [the NSA’s] weakening of key encryption standards.”
Series of Reports on Surveillance Impact
The reports continue a series of investigations into the many ways that US surveillance infringes on Americans’ rights and privacy. In October 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists published ‘The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America,’ a look at how the current crackdown on whistleblowers and the journalism they enable is dissuading officials from speaking to the press.
CPJ writes:
U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists.
New York Times reporter Scott Shane told CPJ:
Most people are deterred by those leaks prosecutions. They’re scared to death. There’s a gray zone between classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that gray zone. Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone. It’s having a deterrent effect. If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government.
CPJ shows that though 9/11 was a “watershed moment” that led to the vast expansion of secrecy and surveillance, the Obama Administration has been even more closed off to the press than previous presidents.
PEN America
In November 2013, PEN America released a report on a less-discussed sector of surveillance targets: writers. PEN concludes that “freedom of expression is under threat and, as a result, freedom of information is imperiled as well.”
Recounting their findings, PEN writes:
Fully 85% of writers responding to PEN’s survey are worried about government surveillance of Americans, and 73% of writers have never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today. PEN has long argued that surveillance poses risks to creativity and free expression. The results of this survey—the beginning of a broader investigation into the harms of surveillance—substantiate PEN’s concerns: writers are not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship as a result.
PEN says that writers showed a “reluctance to write or speak about certain subjects; reluctance to pursue research about certain subjects; and reluctance to communicate with sources, or with friends abroad, for fear that they will endanger their counterparts by doing so.”
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
Finally, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board published, on 2 July 2014, a ‘Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.’ The NSA has broadly interpreted section 702 to sweep up massive amounts of data on both foreign citizens and Americans.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents several inmates at Guantanamo Bay, criticises some aspects of PCLOB’s focus, but writes:
Deeply troubling, the report found that attorneys’ legally-privileged communications are used and shared by the NSA, CIA and FBI unless they are communications directly with a client who has already been indicted in U.S. courts, which strongly suggests that the contents of privileged attorney-client communications at Guantanamo are subject to NSA warrantless surveillance. This raises serious concerns about the fairness of the military commission system and would seem to violate court orders entered in Guantanamo habeas cases that protect attorney-client privilege.
US government officials have told CNN that it believes a new, post-Edward Snowden whistleblower is providing national security information to journalists. The claim comes after the Intercept published secret documents detailing the government’s expansion of the terrorist-tracking system that lands people on the no-fly list. As Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux report, “the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system.”
The Intercept reports that the documents were “obtained from a source in the intelligence community.”
But as the Huffington Post reports, the government leaked the newsworthy information to the Associated Press just before the Intercept was set to publish, “spoiling the scoop” after the Intercept had given government officials time to comment for its forthcoming report.
If the Obama Administration doesn’t mind spilling this information to AP just to reward its more favorable reporting, why did it need to be classified in the first place?
The government will now likely investigate the Intercept’s source with the hopes of silencing future disclosures. Whoever leaked to AP will, of course, face none of the repercussions that whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have experienced.
This is a double standard the Obama Administration has employed for years. Back in March, John “Chris” Inglis leaked major details about the NSA’s data collection capabilities in Iraq, just after retiring, despite the agency’s claims that such disclosures could lead to deaths. Similarly, in 2012, government officials leaked top-secret details to the New York Times about the Obama Administration’s “kill list” for targeted assassinations. When congressmembers suggested the disclosures should be investigated, the White House responded that their claims were “grossly irresponsible.”
In contrast, the Obama Administration has reacted to whistleblowers, particularly within the intelligence community, with an unprecedented string of Espionage Act prosecutions and an Insider Threat programme that aims to identify potential whistleblowers before they act. It is significant that, despite the penalties that could follow, the Intercept‘s source still decided that the information needed to be brought to public attention.
6:30pm GMT
- As Edward Snowden’s year of temporary asylum in Russia expires, German, UK, US and Russian governments are asked to take action
- US will be asked to drop its charges against Snowden
- Supporters across 39 countries have joined the call from Snowden’s defence fund, Courage, for Snowden’s asylum and protection
- Germany, UK and US supporters lead Courage’s ‘Stand With Snowden’ campaign, calling for Snowden’s continued protection
Today, on the final day of Edward Snowden’s year of temporary asylum in Russia, members of Courage, the organisation that has run his official defence fund for the past year, write to those governments where support for Snowden has been greatest. Since June this year, Courage has been running a campaign asking members of the public to submit photos showing they “Stand With Snowden.” As his asylum ends, Courage asks the governments of countries where the support was greatest to “ask them to respond to this call.”
Today it was announced that Edward Snowden has applied for permanent political asylum in Russia, a year after he was awarded temporary asylum by the Russian Federation after one month stranded in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, following a decision by the US State Department to announce the cancellation of his passport. As his temporary asylum expires today, he is formally an asylum-seeker once again. It is therefore paramount at this critical time that governments around the world respond to their citizens’ wishes and help protect Edward Snowden. Courage will also be writing to President Putin to encourage Russia to renew Mr Snowden’s asylum.
Over the last year, Edward Snowden has been able to actively participate in the debate he began. Thanks to the protection Russia has afforded him, he has been able to lead a relatively normal life in that country. In the letters to be delivered tomorrow, Courage sets out for each government the impact and importance of Snowden’s revelations. Courage asks that governments around the world support his courageous action in showing how their citizens’ rights were being violated by the NSA and GCHQ, and to support his legal right to asylum to allow his continued participation in the debate on mass surveillance. Courage will also ask the United States to drop its charges against Snowden.
Tomorrow, 1st August, Courage will deliver letters calling for Edward Snowden’s protection to elected representatives in Germany, Britain, the US and to Russia. In the UK and Germany, Members of Parliament Hans-Christian Ströbele and Caroline Lucas will be accepting these letters. Letters will also be delivered to US Senator Ron Wyden and the Russian Government. Please follow @CourageFound and this page for updates on the deliveries.
Sarah Harrison, Acting Director of Courage said:
Whilst it is heartening to see so many members of the public standing up in support of Snowden, most governments around the world, with the exclusion of Russia a year ago, have done little to protect this legal asylum-seeker. As we reach the time of his asylum renewal, I hope that more governments will have the courage and conscience to do what their own citizens tell them is right. Snowden faces decades in prison in the US, due to Obama’s war on whistleblowers. Last year military whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Earlier this week Amnesty called on President Obama to grant Manning’s immediate release. The United States’ political persecution of whistleblowers must stop. Governments around the world should not allow for another Manning: protect Snowden whilst he’s still free.
Although letters are being delivered tomorrow, Courage will keep its Stand With Snowden campaign page open to allow the public around the world to continue to show their support. So far, photos have been submitted from 39 countries around the world, with support mapped from as far afield as Brazil, India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Japan and Egypt. The diverse spread of photos demonstrates how Edward Snowden’s revelations resonate with people around the world.
Courage originally began in August 2013 as The Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund and has run Edward Snowden’s defence fund since that time. Courage’s official Edward Snowden support site is located at https://edwardsnowden.com and the related twitter account at @CourageSnowden.
In addition to running the official defence fund for Edward Snowden and preparing to do the same for others in the future who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record, Courage advocates for the protection of journalists’ sources and the public’s right to receive their information as guaranteed in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Read more about donating to Courage, its funding and its mission at https://staging.couragefound.org