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Courage News News

Courage statement on Petraeus “sentencing”

Former CIA director and retired US general David Petraeus has escaped with only a couple of years’ probation and a fine for distributing highly sensitive classified information, revealing “covert operatives, the coalition war strategy and notes about Petraeus’ discussions with President Barack Obama and the National Security Council.”

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden faces multiple Espionage Act charges for releasing information that has given the global public a far better understanding of the US’ mass surveillance apparatus, an act for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The US downed planes and cancelled Snowden’s passport in an effort to send him to jail. Why such an enormous disparity?

Those who release information of public interest should be celebrated, not punished. Petraeus’ “sentence” is perhaps the starkest example yet of how the powerful can break the rules they insist on for others, and do so with virtual impunity. In Obama’s war on whistleblowers, punishment is reserved for disclosures that speak truth to power, while the powerful are protected no matter what they do.

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Courage News News

Courage team members participate in Reddit AMA

Courage trustee Julian Assange, acting director Sarah Harrison, and advisory board members Renata Avila, who is an internet rights lawyer, and Andy Müller-Maguhn, on the board of the Wau Holland Foundation, which collects donations for Snowden and Hammond on Courage’s behalf, participated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session yesterday.

The AMA followed President Obama’s latest Executive Order, which authorises sanctions against ‘cyber-enabled activities’ and which journalists and supporters worry could affect those donating to WikiLeaks and Courage. In response to the order, issued 1 April 2015, Reddit supporters initiated a surge in bitcoin donations to Edward Snowden’s defence fund.

Overall, supporters have given 3.68 BTC to Courage, with 1.07 coming since the EO, and 1604 to Snowden’s fund. Supporters have given Snowden 24 BTC since the EO alone, through 236 separate donations, with the largest being nearly 8.5 BTC – worth $2000.

Questions covered Courage’s various beneficiaries, its goals and the participants’ outlook for addressing secrecy, the crackdown on whistleblowers and countering propaganda.

Harrison spoke about the ultimate effects of Snowden’s whistleblowing:

The long term effects of Snowden’s actions remain to be seen. What I hope is that the public around the world will stand up for their rights and demand change, and their governments will listen to them. I think a lot rests with users understanding the threats and protecting themselves against them.

I think the rest of Edward’s life will forever be complex, as it will for all that have stood up to the most powerful and speak the truth: Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea Manning, Barrett Brown, Julian Assange and many others. However, he has been granted asylum which offers immediate protection. I hope that in the future more countries stand up to protect him, and all those that have worked for the public’s right to know.

Harrison responded to those who say whistleblowers are “traitors” who “support the enemy”:

This propaganda happens a lot. What is very important here is to explain that throughout the whole of the Manning trial the US government was desperate to prove that some “harm” had come. In fact if could prove none. What did happen, is that the US troops began to withdraw from Iraq. What has happened since Snowden’s revelations is that citizens around the world began to protect their communications. And still not one reported “harm”. In fact we still get bombs by known person’s of suspect. It is a matter of US interests the government is protecting, not US security.

Avila discussed how people in under-developed countries can raise awareness regarding whistleblowers and privacy:

Coming from a similar country, I will say that those are precisely the countries where advocates for the right to truth and access to information in hands of the powerful are crucial. You need to directly connect it as follows: the less the people know about their governments, the more opaque they are, the more they colude with corporations and divert their actions and increase the problems distracting funds to their pockets.

Assange explained why Courage is supporting Matt DeHart:

Matt DeHart has been the subject of significant abuse by the FBI, but the case is very important legally as it involves an interplay between asylum, crypto-extradition, deportation, anonymous, WikiLeaks, espionage and pariah charges. You can read more about Matt’s case here: https://staging.couragefound.org/2015/03/matt-dehart-named-as-third-courage-beneficiary/

Assange and Müller-Maguhn also discussed systemic problems.

You can see all of Harrison’s, Assange’s, Avila’s and Müller-Maguhn’s responses, and you can review the full Reddit AMA here.

Finally, M_Cetera has compiled an easy-to-read collection of all the Courage team members’ responses here.

Support the Courage Foundation and its beneficiaries here:

Edward Snowden defence fund

Bitcoin: 1snowqQP5VmZgU47i5AWwz9fsgHQg94Fa

Jeremy Hammond defence fund

Bitcoin: 1JeremyESb2k6pQTpGKAfQrCuYcAAcwWqr

Matt DeHart defence fund

Bitcoin: 1DEharT171Hgc8vQs1TJvEotVcHz7QLSQg

Courage Foundation

Bitcoin: 1courAa6zrLRM43t8p98baSx6inPxhigc

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News

Obama reportedly criminalises “support” for “cyber-enabled activities”

US President Barack Obama has issued an executive order authorising the Treasury Secretary to enact sanctions against those whom it deems to have “have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for” cyber-related crimes.

Reuters reports that even US lawmakers consider the order “surprisingly broad”, and investigative journalists are concerned about its wide-ranging scope.

The order criminalizes anyone who is “responsible for or complicit in, or [who has] engaged in, the receipt or use for commercial or competitive advantage or private financial gain, or by a commercial entity, outside the United States of trade secrets misappropriated through cyber-enabled means.”

Former DOJ lawyer Mark Rasch told Reuters, “Even denial-of-service attacks that knock websites offline with meaningless traffic, which can be orchestrated over the Internet for a few hundred dollars, could officially qualify for sanctions.” The PayPal 14 were imprisoned and fined heavily for denial-of-service attacks on PayPal in response to its freezing of WikiLeaks’ bank account, and President Obama has called Edward Snowden a “hacker”, so reporters and supporters wonder if this new order will affect donations to organizations like WikiLeaks and the Courage Foundation.

Investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler said that this order “could be used to target journalism abroad. Does WikiLeaks’ publication of secret Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations qualify? Does Guardian’s publication of contractors’ involvement in NSA hacking?”

Wheeler’s post notes many elements of the order that appear “ripe for abuse.” Questioning just how broadly the ‘material support’ interpretation goes, she said, “Does that include encryption providers? Does it include other privacy protections?”

In response to the possibility that donations to Edward Snowden’s defence fund could be criminalised, Reddit users criticized the order and sparked a surge in bitcoin donations to Edward Snowden’s defence fund. Courage has received over 200 transactions already this month, including a single donation of 8.49 bitcoin (over 2000 dollars).

Reddit AMA

Members of the Courage team, including trustee Julian Assange, acting director Sarah Harrison, and advisory board members Renata Avila, who is an internet rights lawyer, and Andy Muller-Maguhn, on the board of the Wau Holland Foundation, which collects donations for Snowden and Hammond on Courage’s behalf, will be participating in a Reddit AMA on Monday, 7pm EST / 11pm GMT. They’ll discuss Courage, ready to answer anything, including questions on the increase in BTC since the Executive Order.

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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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Edward Snowden News

Lon Snowden on speaking truth to power

This weekend, an op-ed written by Edward Snowden’s father Lon appeared in the pages of Philadelphia magazine. Lon Snowden, a former chief warrant officer with the US Coast Guard, used the article to draw parallels between his son’s actions and those of the Media Eight, who brought COINTELPRO to the attention of the US public by breaking into an FBI field office in Pennsylvania in 1971.

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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.

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Courage News News

Journalist Chris Hedges joins Courage Advisory Board

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.

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Journalism News

British journalists call for an end to “routine” surveillance

In the summer of 2013, many wondered why journalists in the UK, one of the countries most implicated in mass surveillance, didn’t pursue Edward Snowden’s revelations more aggressively. Even when the British government began to directly intimidate those who were reporting on the Snowden documents – by detaining David Miranda under anti-terrorism legislation and insisting that they should be able to destroy computer equipment within the Guardian offices – protest against these actions in the UK media was muted, with a significant section of the UK press deciding to stand up for the rights of the UK state rather than the freedom to report.

That may now, belatedly, be changing. A new scandal has demonstrated that journalists have a real interest in fighting surveillance – and that current UK practices put source protection right in the firing line. This month, London’s Metropolitan Police published a report that confirmed they had used surveillance powers to obtain the phone records of Sun journalist Tom Newton Dunn without his knowledge in order to find out who his source was.

This direct threat to journalists’ interests has focused attention on just how routine communications data (metadata) orders are in the UK. Unlike ‘live’ intercepts of data or content, which require a court order, British public bodies can obtain historical metadata simply by making a request to a telecommunications provider for any data they hold. There is no judicial involvement in these orders, about half a million of which are made in the UK every year. Even the official charged with overseeing these orders has admitted that the 514,608 requests made in the UK in 2013 “seems to me to be a very large number. It has the feel of being too many.”

There are few safeguards on the use of these orders under the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). In particular, RIPA makes no provision for the protection of information that might relate to journalists’ communication with sources, or indeed communications with lawyers. The ability of police to effectively obtain metadata at will means that many, if not most, journalists in the UK are no longer able to offer their sources an assurance of confidentiality. Recent changes to UK surveillance laws suggest that journalists and lawyers should now treat online services and webmail with a similar degree of caution.

Journalists have responded to the Metropolitan Police’s report with op-eds and  a Save our Sources campaign. The absence of safeguards in the law is now also the subject of a legal challenge launched in the European Court of Human Rights by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the third such challenge to be made to the UK’s surveillance practices since the start of reporting on Edward Snowden’s revelations.

Gavin Millar QC, who is aiding the Bureau of Investigative Journalism with the case, has said that police “routinely” use RIPA powers to obtain journalists’ metadata and identify their sources:

This circumvents the rights of a journalist to protect a source and to a hearing before a judge before any order is made to disclose such information.

The sheer volume of data being harvested by GCHQ under RIPA means that confidential journalistic material is also being covertly accessed and analysed by security and intelligence all the time. Again sources are being identified – but on a much larger scale.

Yet there is no word in RIPA or the government’s code of practice under it about these key journalistic rights. The UK simply flouts the Convention.

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News Whistleblowing

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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Courage News News

Courage joins ‘Necessary and Appropriate Principles’ week

np-logo-2The 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.”