Category: Whistleblowing

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Call to Action Journalism Legislation News Whistleblowing

Trump’s re-election and the war on journalism

Donald Trump is poised to return to the White House as the 47th president of the United States, and press freedom groups are sounding the alarm early about what his election means for the state of journalism in the U.S. and around the world. Courage joins these groups in standing up for truthtellers, for journalists’ right to publish, and for your right to know, regardless of which party is in power.

Trump’s record on media freedom in his first term was infamously bleak. Beyond calling the press “the enemy of the people,” Trump viciously attacked news outlets and individual journalists whose coverage he didn’t like and weaponized the state in an effort to silence them. He surveilled reporters, banned outlets from press briefings, and persecuted leakers. In 2017, Trump called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the licenses of ABC, NBC, and other news stations, a threat he renewed in the 2024 campaign. 

And of course the biggest assault on press freedom at least since the 1972 Pentagon Papers was the Trump Administration’s indictment of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. In 2019, Trump’s Justice Department levied 17 counts under the Espionage Act against Assange, including charges for soliciting, possessing, and publishing classified documents in the public interest, escalating the Obama Administration’s war on whistleblowers to a full-blown war on journalism.

Campaign threats foreshadow dangerous second term

It appears we can expect more of the same in Trump’s second stint in office. Defending Rights & Dissent writes about the policy plans of Trump and his associates:

 “[Trump’s] close supporters have put together a plan to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters, surveil journalists, and jail whistleblowers. And Trump has made clear he wants to violate the First Amendment by criminalizing flag burning and deporting activists.

They have declared their intent to abuse laws like RICO to silence those who support Palestinian rights and hire more FBI counterintelligence agents to spy on journalists so the government can unmask and imprison whistleblowers.”

When Trump’s CIA went so far as to draw up plans to kidnap and even assassinate Assange while he was detained in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Mike Pompeo was at the helm. Trump brought Pompeo along for several major rallies at the close of the 2024 campaign, and initial reports suggested his name was floated for another cabinet position. Just days after being reelected, however, Trump announced preemptively that Pompeo (as well as fellow neocon and former Ambassador Nikki Haley) will not be in his new administration — though he praised Pompeo’s work in Trump’s first term.

More explicitly, Reporters Without Borders found that Trump has verbally threatened the press more than 100 times on the campaign trail, including suggesting he wouldn’t mind if journalists at his rally were shot.

The Committee for the Protection of Journalists, reporting on the massive increase in attacks on the press in the last year, “found that the hostile media climate fostered during Donald Trump’s presidency has left a legacy that poses great risks to media inside and outside the country.”

While the Biden Administration has made some important changes in the intervening years, including Attorney General Merrick Garland’s revision of the DOJ’s policies to prohibit subpoenas for journalists (with narrow exceptions), they have done nothing to truly protect sources and journalists more permanently. The Assange case ended in a plea deal under Biden and Garland, rather than a dropped indictment, instilling a chilling effect on investigative journalists around the world, and the Espionage Act remains at Trump’s disposal, with no public interest defense available to protect defendants in court.

Furthermore, both administrations fully support funding and arming the ongoing killing of Palestinian journalists at an unprecedented rate amid Israeli’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon.

Biden could still pass the PRESS Act

Biden’s lame-duck Congress could still enact policy changes to protect reporters. Chief among them is getting the Senate to pass the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act, which passed in the House unanimously and which would severely curtail the government’s ability to surveil reporters. The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Trevor Timm said,

“The Senate should immediately pass, and President Biden should sign, the bipartisan PRESS Act to stop Trump from spying on journalists, as he repeatedly did in his first term, and from throwing them in jail for refusing to reveal their sources, as he has threatened in the most disgusting terms.

Congress must make good on promises to fix dangerous and sloppily drafted mass surveillance legislation passed earlier this year that gives the U.S. government extraordinary power to spy on its own citizens.

And lawmakers must take a vocal stand against abusing anti-terrorism laws to punish free speech. It’s imperative the White House reverses its spineless position on Israel’s unprecedented attacks on press freedom and pressure its ally to stop using U.S. weapons to kill journalists.”

Support press freedom and those defending it

Whether the Biden Administration and the outgoing Congress pass these protections or not, press freedom groups will continue to fight back in the war on journalism throughout Trump’s second term. Courage has been partnering with many of these groups on a range of issues — from the prosecution of Julian Assange to the widespread killing of Palestinian journalists — in an effort to speak out en masse, our collective voices louder than each of us on our own. We encourage you to support these organizations as you’re able, as the need for solidarity will only grow.

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Whistleblowing WikiLeaks

Fishrot Files

On 12 November 2019 and 26 November 2019 WikiLeaks published batches of tens of thousands of documents it obtained from Mr. Jóhannes Stefánsson, a whistleblower within SAMHERJI, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland. They expose corrupt schemes by the company in Namibia to gain access to rich fishing grounds off the African country’s shores.

Mr. Stefánsson is the former Managing Director of SAMHERJI´s operations in Namibia. He has decided to come forward as a whistleblower and testify about the activities of the company. He is also cooperating with anti-corruption authorities and police in Namibia, who have been investigating the case for more than a year.

Part 1

The documents are dated from 2010 to 2016, the period during which the company gained its foothold in Namibia. SAMHERJI has now become the biggest single recipient of fishing quotas in the country. The documents (which include agreements, e-mails, internal reports, spreadsheets, presentations and photos) expose how the company spent millions of dollars in pay-offs to senior Namibian officials and politicians in order to ensure growing and continued access to the country’s resources.

It also exposes that lofty promises by SAMHERJI, to build infrastructure in the country and create jobs, were never fulfilled. On the contrary, the company used its international corporate structure to transfer proceeds from the operations straight out of the country. This was done through intermediaries it controls in Cyprus and in the tax-haven of Mauritius.

Today’s released files also demonstrate how these same tools were used to transfer funds to a secret account, set up by SAMHERJI in Dubai, for the sole purpose of transferring kick-backs to the corrupt entities in Namibia.

Part 2

WikiLeaks releases documents pertaining to the Fishrot case that have come to light as a result of investigation into bribes, money laundering and tax evasion. These investigations have been launched by several institutions across Norway, Iceland and Namibia as a result of WikiLeaks’ Fishrot publication earlier this month.

The first document details internal exchanges between staff at DNB, Norway’s largest bank, from April 2018 to 2019, discussing how to respond to AML flagging (anti-money laundering) from Bank of New York Mellon. Specifically it relates to payments from the international fishing company Samherji to JPC Ship Management (Cyprus), a crew management company supplying services to Samherji.

The second document outlines how DNB (the Norwegian bank) carried out a detailed assessment in 2017 of JPC Ship Management in accordance with KYC principles (Know Your Customer) and did not seem to find anything wrong, despite being classified as a high-risk customer. Another company associated with Samherji financial transactions, Cape Cod FS (Marshall Islands), however was evaluated using the very same principles and its accounts were closed as the bank could not determine who the owner was.

The third document shows how DNB finally decided to terminate its accounts with JPC Ship Management only after receiving AML flagging from Bank of New York Mellon:

“Conclusion: The client is not in need of Norwegian account or within LCI strategy. The client does not have AML Policy and there is considerable risk related to transactions to Russia and Ukraine. The necessary resources to manage the sanction risk will be too high and the client has already disrespected instruction regarding resend once. Our recommendation is offboarding the client. “

Fishrot Files – Part 3 will be released soon with the addition to the searchable database.

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News Whistleblowing

PEN releases whistleblower protection report

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.

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News Whistleblowing

UN Rapporteur calls for whistleblower and source protections in new report

The UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has released a new report in which says “sources of information and whistle-blowers” “deserve the strongest protection in law and in practice” and outlines a framework for their protection. Earlier this year, Kaye issued a report on encryption and surveillance, which he called “the first attempt to create a legal framework for digital security.”

In the new report, Kaye writes,

“A common thread ties together the right of access to information, the protection of sources of information and the protection of whistle-blowers: the public’s right to know. Basic protections [in these areas] are critical to an effective right to freedom of expression, accountability and democratic governance.”

Kaye outlines what’s needed for dissemination of information to the public: “a person with knowledge who is willing and able to shed light on what is hidden; a communicator or a communication platform to disseminate that information; and a legal system and political culture that effectively protect both.”

The International Press Institute, which gathered experts from around the world to consult with Kaye, lists the rapporteur’s ‘Key Recommendations for States on Improving Protection for Sources and Whistle-Blowers’

  • Ensure national legal frameworks provide for the right of access to information in accordance with international standards. Any exceptions to disclosure should be narrowly defined and clearly provided by law.
  • Adopt or revise and implement national laws protecting the confidentiality of sources. Confidentiality must apply beyond professional journalists – protection should be based on function, not a formal title.
  • Adopt or revise and implement national legal frameworks protecting whistle-blowers. Protection should be provided to any person who discloses information that he or she reasonably believes, at the time of disclosure, to be true and to constitute a threat or harm to a specified public interest.
  • Internal institutional and external oversight mechanisms should provide effective and protective channels for whistle-blowers to motivate remedial action
  • Protections against retaliation should apply in all public institutions, including those connected to national security.
  • Establish personal liability for those who retaliate against sources and whistle-blowers.
  • Actively promote respect for the right of access to information.

The report will be presented to the UN General Assembly on 22 October.

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Daniel Hale News Whistleblowing

Drone whistleblower documents give new details on US assassinations

The Intercept has published an eight-part series on the United States’ use of drones to carry out assassinations based on documents provided by an intelligence community whistleblower. Jeremy Scahill writes that the organisation obtained a “cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the US military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013.” The piece includes many revelations and details about the US’s so-called “targeted killing” programme, including the fact that, “During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”

Speculation regarding a post-Snowden leaker has endured for more than a year, with Laura Poitras’ 2014 film CITIZENFOUR confirming that a source was providing documents regarding the Obama Administration’s drone program, but it’s unclear if this source is the same.

The Intercept’s source is a whistleblower who should be lauded for his efforts to make the public aware of the government’s secret abuse of power. As Scahill relates:

The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.

This whistleblower should be protected and celebrated as a conscientious contributor to the public record.

In response to the Intercept’s series, the ACLU’s National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said, “These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets.”

Amnesty International demands that Congress launch an “urgent inquiry into Obama’s drone use.”

See the Intercept’s full series here.

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News Whistleblowing

Thomas Drake, fellow whistleblowers sue NSA, DOJ, FBI

Courage Advisory Board member and NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, along with fellow whistleblowers Diane Roark, Ed Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe and William Binney have filed a civil rights suit against former NSA directors Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden and the NSA, the DOJ and the FBI.

The group is suing over violations of

their constitutional and civil rights, invasion of privacy, and retaliation for their roles as whistleblowers, including illegal searches and seizures, physical invasion of their residences and places of business, illegal detention as temporary false imprisonment, confiscation of property, cancellation of security clearances leading to the loss of their jobs and employment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, harassment and intimidation.

The whistleblowers helped develop internet-surveillance program THINTHREAD, which worked “efficiently, effectively, and at very low cost”, but which was abandoned by the NSA in favor of TRAILBLAZER, a far more expensive program that was scrapped as well. These plaintiffs reported the waste of government funds and were raided and persecuted in retaliation.

Back in March it was reported that Thomas Drake’s formal complaint of government relatiation was rejected, with the government condoning the way it responded to Drake vocalizing his concerns.

TechDirt opines on what might come of the suit, “The government likely won’t be able to dismiss the suit quickly, but the plaintiffs are going to run into a ton of immunity claims that will be buttressed by invocations of national security concerns.”

See the suit here:

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Call to Action Whistleblowing

Save William McNeilly, Trident whistleblower

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News Whistleblowing

It’s who you are that matters

We’ve written a lot about how the current US administration has treated unauthorised disclosures of classified information. Whether those disclosures be matters of huge public significance or relatively trivial, the reaction has been to seek to prosecute those responsible under the 1917 Espionage Act.

As is well known, the Obama administration has initiated twice as many Espionage Act prosecutions than all previous US administrations combined. Denied the ability to put forward a public interest defence, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment and CIA whistleblower John Kirakou is still the only person to have been prosecuted in relation to America’s state sanctioned torture programme. And, as last week’s Pentagon Inspector General’s Office report on the treatment of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake shows, there’s no accountability for the wrongs inflicted on defendants during in Espionage Act investigation.

The emergence of former CIA director and general David Petraeus’ plea deal this week places this suffering into sharp relief. Petraeus shared eight “black books” with his biographer and mistress, containing information that included covert officers’ identities, classified notes and details about US intelligence. By his own admission, the top secret information in those Black Books was more sensitive than anything Chelsea Manning ever disclosed.

Nevertheless, under the terms of his plea bargain, Petraeus will plead guilty to a misdemeanour and serve no more than two year’s probation and a $40,000 fine. He was never indicted under the Espionage act and will not face repurcussions for lying to FBI agents.

As John Kirakou and Marcy Wheeler point out in a recent interview, there’s a glaring inequity here, with sufficient prominence acting as a safeguard against prosecution, even in matters which the US government appears to regard as priorities. More than that, it demonstrates, quite clearly, that Espionage Act prosecutions are explicitly political. As Jesselyn Radack notes in a piece which brings out this dynamic very clearly:

Now that the government has put forth a new model of how to deal appropriately with unauthorized disclosures, I suspect that Snowden would entertain returning to the United States for the kind of plea bargain that Petraeus received.

Too bad that kind of leniency is reserved for generals sharing information with their mistress-biographers — not normal Americans trying to expose government wrongdoing.

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News Whistleblowing

Government rejects Thomas Drake’s retaliation claims

NSA whistleblower and Courage Advisory Board member Thomas Drake had his career and professional reputation ruined after he disclosed information about warrantless wiretapping. Charged under the Espionage Act, Drake narrowly avoided a trial that could’ve landed him in prison for years but was bankrupted defending himself.

Drake formally complained of government retaliation, and as McClatchy reports, his claims were rejected, with the government condoning Drake’s treatment.

Drake told McClatchy, “What happened to me already had a chilling effect on whistleblowers relying on official channel. … This is just more evidence that the system is corrupted.”

Jesselyn Radack, Drake’s attorney with the Government Accountability Project, criticised the government’s handling of his claims: “This report epitomizes the utter lack of protection for national security whistleblowers. …“This is a pathetic, anemic excuse for an investigation.”

Although the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office conceded that his disclosures legally qualified as a whistleblower, it doesn’t believe he was retaliated against —but as McClatchy says, “Drake says the retaliation by the NSA began long before the prosecution and soon after he began cooperating in 2002 with congressional investigations into 9/11 intelligence failures.”

Read McClatchy’s full story here.

Read the report here.

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Journalism Legislation News Whistleblowing

German government plans source prosecution as Greens push new whistleblower protection law

Reports about an impending prosecution shows that Germany is pulling in opposite directions on whistleblower protection. On Friday, Der Spiegel suggested that the federal government is planning to prosecute an unknown whistleblower for revealing  official secrets that were reported in that publication and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The news of this investigation comes as Germany’s official inquiry into surveillance, launched in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, becomes increasingly mired in protracted arguments over the disclosure of information that implicates Germany’s spy agencies as much as it does the NSA. Despite attempts to restrict the documentation and witnesses available to the inquiry, it has so far revealed loopholes Germany’s signals intelligence agency, the BND, uses to circumvent the prohibition on German nationals and new details about controversial joint operations with the NSA.

wpid-1396534488_Untersuchungsausschuss-NSA-Aufklarung-startet-mit-Panne

The German government has reacted poorly to these disclosures, to the point of warning of possible prosecution should further information reach the media.

Improving Germany’s whistleblower laws

Given that Germany is one of the countries that has shown the strongest support for Edward Snowden – a recent survey shows that the NSA whistleblower has better public recognition there than the US – the country’s own whistleblower protections are surprisingly poor. A 2011 judgment from the European Court of Human Rights has yet to be reflected in domestic law and, as a result, Germany’s truthtellers have to wait for employment tribunals to rule in their favour, by which point employer retaliation is already a fait accompli.

Last month, Germany’s Green representatives, led by Hans-Christian Stroebele, proposed new legislation to improve the situation. On his website, Stoebele explains that the bill is intended to “significantly improve whistleblowers’ protection from employer retaliation or dismissal and to improve legal certainty.”

This isn’t the first time the German Greens have tried to introduce a law like this, but this latest attempt is notable because it has the potential to do more than bring Germany into the mainstream of legal protections for whistleblowers. Provisions in the bill promise to erase the artificial divide that leads to national security whistleblowers facing severe retribution without the protections other public employees enjoy. Stroebele has been clear that the Bill specifically covers cases where a secret service employee “discloses confidential information to uncover a serious grievance, such as massive violations of fundamental rights.”

Protecting alleged sources before charge

Alleged sources who are under investigation and unable to come forward publicly find themselves in a particularly invidious position and in real need of support. Courage runs the only fund designed to guard alleged truthtellers who are obliged to remain anonymous.