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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.

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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.

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Why the world needs more whistleblowers

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.

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Edward Snowden News

Yochai Benkler argues for Edward Snowden’s immunity

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.

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Legislation News Whistleblowing

Yochai Benkler outlines public accountability defence for whistleblowers

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.

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New reports shed light on surveillance’s chilling effects

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.

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Sen. Leahy introduces new USA Freedom Act to curb NSA surveillance powers

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CIA spying on its own “internal channels” for whistleblowers

McClatchy reports that the Central Intelligence Agency may be “intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s classified 6,000-page report into the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation programme is still yet to be published and the Committee has already accused the agency of illegally spying on that probe.

Cia-lobby-seal

Now it has emerged that the CIA retaliated against an official who cooperated with the Senate investigation, and Senate members emailed one another to accuse the agency’s inspector general of failing to investigate that retaliation – and the CIA has obtained at least one of those emails.

As McClatchy writes, “The email controversy points to holes in the intelligence community’s whistleblower protection systems and raises fresh questions about the extent to which intelligence agencies can elude congressional oversight.” If the Senate cannot investigate the CIA independently and free of retaliation fears, who can? How can intelligence agencies be held accountable if they even intercept communications into their own operations?

From internal channels to insider threats

It is already difficult enough for government employees in the US to come forward with their concerns. If intelligence community officials fear reprisal, they have even less incentive to expose wrongdoing through internal channels. US Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden have publicly warned that if public employees are committed to blowing the whistle and internal channels are compromised, it is to be expected that some will anonymously seek other ways to voice their misgivings.

Truly meaningful whistleblower protections need to include the option of a legitimate channel for confidential disclosures… However, if potential whistleblowers believe that disclosing waste, fraud or abuse means putting a target on their backs for retaliation, they will be intimidated into silence. The failure to provide such protected alternatives could result in whistleblowers choosing to make unprotected disclosures in public forums, with potential negative consequences for national security.

The CIA’s illegal monitoring of whistleblower communications has been seen as part of the Obama Administration’s Insider Threat programme, which categorically treats leaks of classified information about wrongdoing as aiding America’s enemies. Introduced in an October 2011 executive order as a direct response to US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s disclosures, the programme covers “virtually every federal department and agency”, including those who are not concerned with national security matters.

A series of reports by McClatchy over the past year describe a range of measures designed to encourage public officials to report on colleagues who they perceive to be exhibiting unusual behaviour. The programme has taken profiling to extreme lengths: late last year it was revealed that the personal details of 5,000 US citizens who had purchased a book on defeating polygraph tests had been retained on the off-chance that they might apply for a job in a federal agency at some point in the future.

This new controversy about the Insider Threat programme exacerbates an already deeply problematic situation for potential whistleblowers within the US intelligence community. Recent public statements by officials responsible for whistleblower protection within the NSA display a reluctance to take complaints seriously, suggesting that within that agency at least, officials see their role as containing rather than engaging with the concerns of employees.

“Don’t bother me with this”

In a recent interview for PBS, the NSA’s former General Counsel Vito Potenza admitted that he would have dismissed Thomas Drake’s criticisms of US warrantless wiretapping:

If he came to me, someone who was not read into “The Program,” right, and not a part of what we were doing and told me that we were running amok essentially and violating the Constitution and it was in that timeframe when there was an awful lot going on and we were all worried about the next [terrorist] attack, there’s no doubt in my mind I would have told him, you know, go talk to your management. Don’t bother me with this. I mean, you know, the minute he said, if he did say you’re using this to violate the Constitution, I mean, I probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly. So, I mean, if that’s what he said he said, then anything after that I probably wasn’t listening to anyway.

Drake subsequently blew the whistle to the media, and before the government’s case collapsed just days ahead of trial, he was facing an Espionage Act charge that could have imprisoned him for decades.

Similarly, Edward Snowden made enquiries within the NSA about the legality and morality of that agency’s mass, unchecked surveillance. He spoke up at least ten separate times — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has in fact released one of Snowden’s emails. When he was ignored, Snowden was compelled to give documents detailing the NSA’s spying programs to investigative journalists.

In February this year, NSA Inspector General George Ellard, the official responsible for dealing with whistleblower communications, outlined his likely response to a complaint about the collection of US call data:

Ellard was asked what he would have done if Snowden had come to him with complaints. Had this happened, Ellard says would have said something like, “Hey, listen, fifteen federal judges have certified this program is okay.” (He was referring to the NSA phone records collection program.)

“I would also have an independent obligation to assess the constitutionality of that law,” Ellard stated. “Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do.”

Insufficient security or insufficient democracy?

The Insider Threat programme and the stated attitudes of the very officials responsible for facilitating internal channels draw a picture of a US administration that is deeply hostile, not only to disclosure of government information, but to internal criticism of its activities from those charged to carry them out.

Famously, President Obama has overseen the prosecution of more Espionage Act cases than all previous presidents combined. The majority of those cases concern individuals trying to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. Within their number include cases, like that of Thomas Drake, where employees have tried to make their case within the ‘official channels’ ostensibly created to facilitate internal whistleblowing.

It is ironic that the United States has responded to disclosures of illegality and abuse, not by subjecting its programmes to democratic input or ensuring that future whistleblowers have better options, but by cracking down on those who speak up and the journalism they enable. The US administration has treated whistleblowers as an issue of insufficient security rather than insufficient democracy.

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Edward Snowden News

Former NSA director says Edward Snowden “blew the whistle” on US spying

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Edward Snowden News

Video: Snowden’s German lawyer interviewed on Democracy Now!

Wolfgang Kaleck, Edward Snowden’s German lawyer and the founder and general secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, spoke to Democracy Now! on Monday.

Kaleck discussed Snowden’s prospects of returning to the United States:

It’s not only about the charges. Yeah, there are charges under the Espionage Act, a very doubtful law which deserves to be reformed very quick. But it’s the treatment, the special treatment, what whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning got in the recent year in the U.S., and that’s special administrative measures in—during the prison time. It’s incommunicado time. It’s inhumane treatment, what he might face, but especially it’s a very long and not appropriate prison sentence he might get. And so, I fully understand, we all fully understand—the German public, the European public fully understands—that he doesn’t return under these conditions.

He talked about the German government canceling its contract with Verizon:

…the significance of this is that there were some members of the Parliament who raised their concern that when Verizon is organizing the internal communication within the German Parliament on one hand, and on the other hand they are known for their cooperation with U.S. secret services, there is a danger that internal communication within the German Parliament will be kind of wiretapped by U.S. secret services. You know, no matter if this concern is right or not, but, I mean, this is a strong signal to all U.S. corporations, telephone corporations and Internet corporations, to do something about this problem, because they are going to lose more contracts than this if they are not willing to establish firewalls between, you know, their clients and the secret services.

Kaleck commented on what he thought was Snowden’s most important revelation:

I think it’s not one document. It’s the series of documents released all over the last 12 months. There is no way out. There is no excuse possible. All what we were suspecting over the last decade, many people were criticizing, but without real evidence, and now this evidence is out. And so, nobody can deny that this practice of mass surveillance, not only of so-called terrorists, not only of so-called dangerous people, but massive surveillance against many of us is taking place. And I think that’s the biggest—the biggest revelation, the most important.

Watch the full broadcast and read a full transcript here.

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Edward Snowden News

Be prepared for a long distance run: Wolfgang Kaleck on the legal efforts to protect Snowden

Speaking at Courage’s launch event in Berlin last week, Edward Snowden’s lawyer in Germany, Wolfgang Kaleck explained the threats his client faces, the politicisation of his case and the ongoing legal work to protect him.

Courage runs Edward Snowden’s only official defence fund, donations to which support legal and public defence efforts for the NSA whistleblower.  Since the fund was launched in August 2013, it has spent over 100,000 dollars on
direct legal costs alone.

Continue reading “Be prepared for a long distance run: Wolfgang Kaleck on the legal efforts to protect Snowden”