Categories
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.

Categories
Edward Snowden News

CITIZENFOUR wins Oscar for Best Documentary

The Courage Foundation is delighted that CITIZENFOUR has been awarded the Oscar for the Best Documentary Feature of 2014.

The film shows that after journalists left Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, awaiting the United States’ charges and extradition request, Snowden relied on WikiLeaks to secure him asylum. As Laura Poitras’ film depicts, Snowden is now safe, living comfortably with his girlfriend in Moscow, but the film demonstrates the dangerous gap in protections for whistleblowers. WikiLeaks’ rescue – and the need it demonstrated – was the inception of Courage, devoted to providing protections, defence and safety nets for whistleblowers in the highest-risk situations, when others can’t or won’t help.

Courage, which hosts Edward Snowden’s only official defence fund, is establishing international networks ready to provide future Snowdens with logistical and legal help, in addition to assisting journalistic sources at risk before the investigation stage. But we need your help. Fighting legal battles against the most powerful governments in the world is expensive, yet essential. Courage’s Acting Director Sarah Harrison said: “Governments are ramping up their efforts to persecute those who expose the truth, and we must do the same if we’re going to keep our truth-tellers safe. Donate to Courage to ensure we are there when we are needed most.”

Donate to Courage today to contribute to the frontline of defence for future Snowdens: https://staging.couragefound.org/donate
Further information: https://staging.couragefound.org

Update

Video of Laura Poitras accepting the Oscar for Best Documentary:

The ACLU has published Edward Snowden’s statement congratulating Laura Poitras for her award:

When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant. I’m grateful that I allowed her to persuade me. The result is a brave and brilliant film that deserves the honor and recognition it has received. My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.

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Espionage Act Journalism News

Jeffrey Sterling convicted of espionage on circumstantial evidence

In 2003, New York Times journalist James Risen called US government representatives to ask about a covert CIA operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme. Eager to root out any information leak that doesn’t present the administration in a positive light, the government began investigating who Risen’s source or sources might be. The Times ultimately killed the story at the government’s request, but Risen published some of it in his 2006 book ‘State of War.’

Risen’s suspected source, Jeffrey Sterling, has now been convicted of nine felonies, including Espionage (see his indictment), for allegedly disclosing classified information. Sterling. a former CIA officer, had his security clearance revoked in 2001 and then was fired in 2002, after he filed an official complaint of racial discrimination.

Sterling’s defence has argued that the government could not even prove that Risen’s source was Sterling, let alone that the alleged disclosure constituted espionage. Much of the controversy surrounding the case centered on whether Risen would be forced to testify against his source or sources. Risen fought the subpoena, with fellow journalists and civil liberties condemning the notion that a reporter should have to give up his sources, but the government won an appeal and compelled him to testify. However, just before the trial commenced, the DOJ reversed course and decided not to call Risen to the stand.

Still, the case proceeded:only the second espionage case to go all the way to trial (the first was US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, now serving 35 years in jail). But the prosecution’s case against Sterling has been entirely circumstantial, as even the judge in his case, Judge Leonie Brinkema, conceded. As Marcy Wheeler writes for ExposeFacts, which has been covering the trial in depth:

The only evidence of phone calls between Sterling and James Risen immediately before Risen went to the CIA with a fully drafted story on the Merlin operation consists of 2 minutes and 40 seconds of calls, total, across 7 phone calls. Then there’s one email in which Sterling sent Risen a link to an unclassified article on Iran posted by CNN.

Two minutes and 40 seconds for what would likely have been a 1000-word story?

The government also failed to convincingly prove that Sterling, if involved, was Risen’s lone source for the information in question: as Wheeler writes, prosecution witness “FBI Agent Ashley Hunt, admitt[ed] she had not even tried to gather evidence from some of the other possible sources for Risen, and had not succeeded for others.”

The jury deliberated for days and initially returned to the judge undecided, but it ultimately convicted Sterling of all nine counts. The sentencing trial is scheduled for 24 April. Sterling could theoretically face more than 100 years in prison, though judges in similar cases usually sentence concurrently — still the potential sentence is many years of jail time.

Sterling’s conviction is another landmark in the Obama Administration’s ongoing, unprecedented, and speech-chilling war on disclosures of information and therefore on the journalism these sources make possible. Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower lawyer and DOJ whistleblower herself, swiftly condemned the conviction: “I’m frankly appalled that the jury would convict based on a purely circumstantial case,” Radack told Foreign Policy, calling the decision “a new low in the war on whistleblowers.”

As Foreign Policy continues, “While she thought an appeal very likely, Radack said the conviction would both discourage government sources from disclosing important information to journalists and intimidate reporters who might otherwise try to dig up such stories.”

Just after the jury delivered its verdict in Sterling’s case, the Department of Justice issued a press release claiming that whistleblowers can be prosecuted “without interfering with journalists’ abilities to do their jobs.” Nothing can be further from the truth. There is already evidence that the US government’s persecution of truthtellers has already silenced those in government who are otherwise compelled to reveal evidence of abuse and wrongdoing. Guardian journalist Maggie O’Kane said in 2013 that she and her colleagues spent six months trying to speak to soldiers, but that all but one were too afraid to speak out after seeing what happened (from prison abuse to a massive charge sheet) to Chelsea Manning. This chilling effect hinders journalists’ ability to do their jobs and citizens’ ability to hold their governments accountable.

Categories
Edward Snowden News

Citizenfour’s Escape to Freedom in Russia

By Ray McGovern, Courage Foundation Advisory Board

In early September in Russia, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden told me about a documentary entitled Citizenfour, named after the alias he used when he asked filmmaker Laura Poitras to help him warn Americans about how deeply the NSA had carved away their freedoms.

When we spoke, Snowden seemed more accustomed to his current reality, i.e., still being alive albeit far from home, than he did in October 2013 when I met with him along with fellow whistleblowers Tom Drake, Coleen Rowley and Jesselyn Radack, as we presented him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.

A year ago, the four of us spent a long, relaxing evening with Snowden – and sensed his lingering wonderment at the irony-suffused skein of events that landed him in Russia, out of reach from the U.S. government’s long arm of “justice.”

Six days before we gave Snowden the award, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden and House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers had openly expressed their view that Snowden deserved to be on the “list,” meaning the “capture or kill” list that could have made Snowden the target of a drone strike. When I asked him if he were aware of that recent indignity, he nodded yes – with a winsome wince of incredulity.

This September, there was no drone of Damocles hanging over the relaxed lunch that the two of us shared. There were, rather, happier things to discuss. For example, I asked if he were aware that one of his co-workers in Hawaii had volunteered to Andy Greenberg of Forbes Magazine that Snowden was admired by his peers as a man of principle, as well as a highly gifted geek.

The co-worker told Greenberg: “NSA is full of smart people, but Ed … was in a class of his own. … I’ve never seen anything like it. … He was given virtually unlimited access to NSA data [because] he could do things nobody else could.”

Equally important, the former colleague pointed out that Snowden kept on his desk a copy of the U. S. Constitution to cite when arguing with co-workers against NSA activities that he thought might be in violation of America’s founding document. Greenberg’s source conceded that he or she had slowly come to understand that Snowden was trying to do the right thing and that this was very much in character, adding, “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no traitor.”

Snowden spoke of his former co-workers with respect and affection, noting that most of them had family responsibilities, mortgages, etc. – burdens he lacked. He told me he was very aware that these realities would make it immeasurably more difficult for them to blow the whistle on NSA’s counter-Constitutional activities, even if they were to decide they should. “But somebody had to do it,” said Snowden in a decidedly non-heroic tone, “So I guess that would be me.”

Following the intelligence world’s axiom of “need-to-know,” Snowden had been careful to protect his family and Lindsay Mills, his girlfriend, by telling no one of his plans. I found myself thinking long and hard at how difficult that must have been – to simply get out of Dodge without a word to those you love.

Perhaps he felt Mills would eventually understand when he explained why it was absolutely necessary in order to achieve his mission and have some chance of staying alive and out of prison. But, not having discussed with her his plans, how could he be sure of that?

And so, learning recently of the interim “happy-ending” arrival of Mills in Russia was like a shot in the arm for me. I thought to myself, it is possible to do the right thing, survive and not end up having to live the life of a hermit. Equally important, that reality is now out there for the world to see. What an encouragement to future whistleblowers – and to current ones, as well, for that matter.

Snowden was delighted when I told him that Bill Binney, the long-time and highly respected former NSA technical director, had just accepted the Sam Adams Award, which will be presented in 2015. It was Snowden’s own revelations that finally freed up Binney and other courageous NSA alumni to let the American public know what they had been trying, through official channels, to tell the overly timid representatives in Washington.

Seeing Citizenfour

Snowden was happy to tell me about the documentary, Citizenfour, explaining that during his sessions in Hong Kong with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, Poitras seemed to have the camera always rolling during the eight days they shared in Hong Kong – including during the grand escape from the hotel. With a broad smile, Snowden said, “Ray, when people see my makeshift disguise, well, it is going to be really hard to argue that this thing was pre-planned!”

All I have seen so far is the trailer, but I have tickets for a showing Friday night when Citizenfour opens in Washington and other cities. With Snowden, I figured I could wait to witness the grand escape until I saw the film itself, so I avoided asking him for additional detail. Like: ”Don’t spoil it for me, Ed.”

I was encouraged to read, in one of the movie reviews, that the documentary does allude to the key role played by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in enabling Snowden’s escape. I had long since concluded that WikiLeaks’s role – and that of Sarah Harrison, in particular, was the sine qua non for success. I hope Citizenfour gives this key part of the story the prominence it deserves.

I feel it is an equal honor to spend time with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy whenever I’m in London. In early September, Assange was a welcoming host and we had a long chat over dinner while I was en route to Russia via London and Berlin. (I had been invited to present at the U.S.-Russia Forum in Moscow later last month and stayed there an extra day in order to visit with Snowden.)

I had been unaware of Citizenfour before visiting Assange. The film came up spontaneously when I volunteered to him that the safe extrication of Snowden from Hong Kong sits atop my gratitude list of the many things he has accomplished. That drew a very broad smile and some words about the world’s most powerful country and intelligence service, “and we still got him out!”

Assange shared how important it was not only to rescue Snowden himself but, in so doing, to provide for potential whistleblowers some real-life proof that it is possible to do the right thing and avoid spending decades in prison where WikiLeaks’ most famous source Chelsea Manning now sits. This was among the main reasons why WikiLeaks cashed in so many chips in its successful effort to bring Snowden to safety. It was surely not because Assange expected Snowden to share reportable information with WikiLeaks. He gave none.

Assange was in good spirits and hoping for some break in the Kafkaesque situation in which he has found himself for several years now (receiving asylum in Ecuador’s Embassy to avoid arrest in Great Britain and extradition to Sweden for questioning regarding alleged sexual offenses).

A Stop in Berlin

I also planned to spend a few days in Berlin to coincide with the NATO summit in Wales (Sept. 4-5). On Aug. 30, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity sent a Memorandum to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, warning her about the dubious “intelligence” adduced to blame Russia for the troubles in Ukraine. Our memo had some resonance in German and other European media, but I was saddened to find the media in the UK and Germany as co-opted and Putin-bashing as the U.S. media.

It was 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. What I said in my various talks and interviews on NATO’s reneging on its promise to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to move NATO one inch eastward, once Germany was reunited, seemed to come as a major revelation to most listeners.

“Really?” was the predominant reaction when I explained that 25 years ago there was a unique, realistic chance for a Europe “whole and free” (in words then used by President George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev) from Portugal to the Urals. Instead, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia was excluded. NATO crept steadily east toward Russia’s border.

And last February, the U.S. and EU orchestrated a coup d’état in Kiev to foster Ukraine’s “European aspirations” to cast its lot with the West and dislodge itself from Russia’s sphere of influence. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis.”]

The squandering of a historic chance for lasting peace in Europe remains atop the list of severe disappointments encountered during my professional life. The fact that, to this day, so few seem aware of what happened, and who was – and is – to blame, is also a major frustration.

In Berlin, consolation and affirmation came in renewing friendships there and getting to know others – many of them expatriates. First and foremost among the latter is Sarah Harrison, the main figure in executing WikiLeaks’s plan to get Snowden out of Hong Kong and onward to Latin American via Moscow, where his planned journey has so far stalled.

Because the U.S. Justice Department charged Snowden with espionage and the U.S. State Department revoked his passport, his stay in Moscow ended up being quite a long one. But Harrison stayed on for as long as seemed necessary to accompany and support Snowden, as well as to be able to testify to the fact that the Russians were not using anything like “enhanced interrogation techniques” on him.

I had last seen Harrison in Moscow at the Sam Adams Award presentation to Snowden; it was great to have a chance to chat with her over a long lunch.

Flying home from Moscow, having had lunch there with Edward Snowden, lunch in Berlin with Sarah Harrison, and dinner with Julian Assange in that little piece of Ecuadorian territory in London, what came first to mind was Polonius’s advice to Laertes: “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.”

But then, above the din of the jet engines, came a more familiar and more insistent voice. It was that of Jane Fahey, my Irish grandmother, who for some reason seemed 33,000 feet closer than usual: “Show me your company, and I’ll tell you who you are!” she would say, often – very often. I think my grandmother would be as pleased with my “company” as I am – and as grateful.

This piece first appeared at ConsortiumNews.com.

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Courage News News

Courage welcomes Slavoj ŽiŞek to our Advisory Board

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.

Categories
News Whistleblowing

Germany’s whistleblower protection among the worst in the G20, says new report

A new report on the state of whistleblower protection in some of the world’s richest countries has found that Germany ranks alongside Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as one of the countries that does the least to ensure that whistleblowers can speak out without fear of retribution.

The report, which was co-authored by researchers from Australian NGO Blueprint for Free Speech, Transparency International Australia, Griffith University and Melbourne University, compares G20 countries’ legal frameworks with the commitments they signed up to in the G20’s 2013-14 Anti-Corruption Action Plan, where they agreed:

to ensure that those reporting on corruption, including journalists, can exercise their function without fear of any harassment or threat or of private or government legal action for reporting in good faith

The report sets out 14 separate criteria based on the G20 agreement, other international agreements on whistleblower protection and best practice documents drawn up by intergovernmental organisations and NGOs.

What the report found

The report found that, while there had been real improvement over the past decade, serious shortcomings remained in the legal systems of most G20 countries – and those shortcomings affected most of the areas potential whistleblowers would be concerned about. Provisions for whistleblowers to remain anonymous when using internal channels to express their concerns were identified as a particular weakness across the G20, as were the rules around disclosure to third parties – including, where appropriate, the media.

The provision of independent bodies and mechanisms to deal with whistleblower complaints and to report on how legal protections were being used were also seen as poor across the countries surveyed. In addition, the authors note that where regulations exist, they tend to apply to the public sector only – governments have been much less active in ensuring that private sector whistleblowers can speak out in confidence.

Legal regimes, of course, only tell part of the story. As the report’s authors point out, the formal presence of adequate whistleblower protection laws does not in itself tell you whether they are implemented consistently, or whether “cultural or other norms [in a particular country] indirectly assist in practical protection of whistleblowers.”

As we’ve noted previously, legal frameworks are a particularly poor guide to what might happen in difficult cases, especially those where disclosures have a national security dimension. Some G20 countries, like the UK and Canada, explicitly exclude military and intelligence personnel from their ‘whistleblower’ definition and all the protections in law that derive from that (the report calls this “a glaring gap”). Others, like the United States, have a legislative framework that is well rated – and in theory extends to its intelligence agencies – but in practice apply very different rules, and extreme anti-whistleblower measures, when classified information is involved.

Why did Germany score so badly?

Germany’s poor score in the report might come as a surprise to some, given the country’s renowned worker representation laws and positive reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations. But in July 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Germany’s protection of its own whistleblowers was inadequate.

Brigitte Heinisch und das Urteil des EGMR
The case was brought by Brigitte Heinisch, a nurse who brought the systematic mistreatment of elderly patients to the attention of the healthcare company she worked for. When appeals to management proved ineffective, Heinisch brought legal action against her employers and wrote a leaflet to explain what was happening in the case. The European Court ruled that the public interest in Heinisch’s disclosures outweighed her employers’ right to protect their business reputation and that her summary dismissal had been “disproportionately severe.” She was later awarded compensation by a German court.

In fact, the German legal code only offers limited protection for public officials who are reporting suspicions of corruption – and this came only after a change of the law in 2009. Germany’s employment courts offer limited redress to those who report wrongdoing in good faith, but there remains a strong bias against anonymous reporting and public disclosure. None of the legislative proposals made since the 2011 judgment have attracted the support necessary to secure a change in the law.

Read the full report here

Categories
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.”

Categories
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.

Categories
News Whistleblowing

Obama: “If you blow the whistle, you should be thanked”

“If you blow the whistle, you should be thanked. You should be protected for doing the right thing. You shouldn’t be ignored and you certainly shouldn’t be punished.”

These were the surprising words of President Obama on 7 August 2014, as he signed a $16 billion bill to improve veterans’ access to medical care. The bill followed a report from the Department for Veterans’ Affairs, which confirmed many of the complaints whistleblowers had been making – waiting lists were indeed being manipulated to hide how long veterans were having to wait for medical appointments.

The White House again praised whistleblowers this week, responding to a letter sent by the Society of Professional Journalists and 37 other journalism and open government groups urging the Obama Administration to be more transparent. The letter from White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest claims that the Administration has “made important progress” in “protecting whistleblowers” and “disclosing previously classified information.” Earnest cites the 2012 Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act as evidence that the Administration has “fought for and won better protections for whistleblowers.”

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But the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act that the White House claims offers better protections for whistleblowers is limited. While the Act was recognised as a step forward by whistleblower organisations like the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and the National Whistleblowers Centre, GAP also recognised its limitations. Blowing the whistle within official channels does not guarantee public disclosure of the information and does little to facilitate what Yochai Benkler has called “accountability leaks… that challenge systemic practices.”

At any rate, it is not the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act for which this Presidency is likely to be remembered but the intelligence whistleblowers who have faced severe reprisals on its watch. The Obama Administration, famously, has initiated eight prosecutions under the Espionage Act –  more uses of the 1917 Act than all previous US presidents combined. Former NSA employees Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on mass surveillance; former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who blew the whistle on US torture and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan; and former CIA official John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on US torture, are among the intelligence whistleblowers who have been charged with the Espionage Act during Obama’s Administration.

Ray McGovern, a former CIA senior analyst, founder of whistleblower group Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), responded to Obama’s comments saying, “President Obama is giving hypocrisy a bad name.”

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McGovern, who is also a member of Courage’s advisory board, said:

Obama’s record speaks for itself; he has prosecuted more than twice as many whistleblowers – for espionage, no less – than all former presidents combined. As for those whose crimes have been whistle-blown upon, like those who did the torture, Obama continues to call them ‘patriots’. Former CIA operative John Kiriakou, who opposed torture, sits in a Pennsylvania prison because he revealed the name of one of the torturers.

Too bad Kafka is dead.