Whistleblowers

New Obama Administration Guidelines for Investigating Journalists

July 13, 2013 Staff, www.Reuters.com Educate! Media, Whistleblowers

The US Justice Department is revising its policies for dealing with reporters during the investigation of media leaks after complaints that journalists' rights were violated in recent high-profile cases, a department official said on Friday. Under the new guidelines search warrants will not be sought against journalists carrying out "ordinary newsgathering activities," the official said. In another change, the Justice Department will now, in most instances, notify news organizations in advance if a subpoena is being sought to obtain phone records. The changes, which follow a review requested by President Obama, will go into effect "almost immediately," the official said, but did not give a specific timetable.

Documents Detail Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers

July 11, 2013 Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay, www.mcclatchydc.com Educate! Whistleblowers

Documents indicate that even before Edward Snowden, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions. President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Describes Breaking Finger in Prison & Being Denied Treatment

July 10, 2013 Kevin Gosztola, www.firedoglake.com Educate! CIA, Whistleblowers

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who is serving a thirty-month sentence in the federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has written a third letter from the prison. Kiriakou was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the administration of President George W. Bush. He was convicted in October of last year of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he provided the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter and sentenced in January of this year.

Sarah Harrison, the Woman From WikiLeaks

July 7, 2013 Anthony Faiola and Karla Adam, Educate! Whistleblowers, Wikileaks

Within a few years, Sarah Harrison would become the intense, 31-year-old emissary of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the mystery woman sent to spirit former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow, where she is now aiding his quest to evade U.S. authorities. Harrison began working with WikiLeaks in August 2010 on the internal vetting of confidential U.S. documents supplied by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, which the site later released. At some point that year, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Harrison and Assange became intimately involved. They cautioned that the relationship was not Harrison’s prime motivation in championing the WikiLeaks cause. “She is firmly committed to what WikiLeaks is trying to do; she believes 100 percent in the mission,” one of the people said. “Any suggestion that her relationship with Julian is what has compelled her to do the things she has would be a totally wrong assumption.”

The War on Whistleblowers Creates More Whistleblowers

July 7, 2013 Shamai Leibowitz, www.guardian.co.uk Educate! Edward Snowden, Whistleblowers

This ongoing manhunt, accompanied by a smear campaign and threats to throw the book at Snowden, is a grave mistake. If the government really wanted to keep more secrets from coming out, they would do well to let this man of conscience go live his life in some other country. Meanwhile, it would only help them if they were to apologize to the American public for lying to us, and turning the country into what Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg calls the United Stasi of America. In my case, my family and I pleaded with the DOJ lawyers to avoid a prison term, agree to a lesser punishment and put this case to rest without any media attention. But the FBI and DOJ were insistent on imprisoning me and splashing it all over the media. The ink was not even dry on my plea bargain before they ran to the media with a press release, announcing to the whole world how the 20-month prison sentence will teach me – and any future whistleblowers – a great lesson.

Another Whistleblower? Did Obama’s Favorite General Betray Him?

June 30, 2013 Fred Kaplan, www.slate.com Educate! Wars and Militarism, Whistleblowers

Cartwright a surprise whistleblower because four-star generals, active or retired, aren't the usual targets of such probes. This is especially so of a general like Cartwright, who, from 2007-11, was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - the U.S. military's second-highest-ranking officer - and who, in his final years, was known as "Obama's favorite general." Officers of this stature tend to build layers of insulation around themselves. But Cartwright was unusual in that respect. As one former senior defense official described him, he was "a lone wolf." He was very smart, a policy intellectual on the level of Gens. David Petraeus and James Mattis, but he had no protective layers, no inner circle of loyalists, and no talent (or desire) for building alliances with his fellow officers.

Whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo: I Am Moral Courage

June 29, 2013 Irshad Manji, www.youtube.com Strategize! Environment, Whistleblowers

here are good reasons to question your government. Usually, it's not a Left-Right issue. It's a right-wrong issue. Marsha Coleman-Adabayo is someone who knows very well that governments easily abuse their power. And she calls on us to be fearless citizens. "What happens when all the doors are shutting in your face?" Marsha asks. "What do you do as a citizen of conscience?" Her answer is in this 2-minute story. Be inspired. Moral Courage TV tells the stories of people who are fighting corruption in their faith, culture, or workplace. Whether they are standing up to a bully, breaking up a gang, or simply seeking truth, the heroes of our stories refuse to fail.

The Growing National (In)Security State

June 27, 2013 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.truthout.org Educate! Chelsea Manning, NSA, Surveillance, Wars and Militarism, Whistleblowers

As real and perceived threats against US security result in a national security response of more military, more spying and more intervention, the consistent response abroad is more threats to the security of Americans and attacks on the US military and transnational US corporations. Reaction by the United States is inevitably more security state violence. And the cycle continues to spiral. Real feelings of insecurity have been used to scare people in the United States into accepting the growing erosion of our civil liberties. We are taught to treat each other as potential terrorists and to be on the lookout for threats. We are accustomed to being complicit with gross invasions of our privacy as a trade-off for greater "security." But this is an illusion, as is the idea that if someone is not doing anything wrong, then this state of hypervigilance doesn't affect them. Now these illusions are being exposed.

All Leaks are Illegal, Some More than Others

June 24, 2013 Conor Friedersdorf, www.theatlantic.com Educate! NSA, Whistleblowers

As critics of Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, vilify him for breaking the law and his promise to never reveal classified information, the press critic Jack Shafer adds vital and astonishingly unremarked-upon context: The Obama Administration leaks highly classified information all the time. So did the Bush Administration. Does the rule of law demand that leaks of highly classified information be prosecuted? If so, John Brennan and many other current and former national-security officials had better be given orange jumpsuits. They weren't even leaking to alert Americans to behavior that they found immoral. Often times, the U.S. national security establishment leaks to exploit a political advantage.

Afghan Peace Volunteers Call on Whistleblowers to End War

June 20, 2013 Dr. Hakim and Afghan Peace Volunteers, www.ourjourneytosmile.com Create! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Human Rights, Wars and Militarism, Whistleblowers

We human beings are capable of living together without war. Billions of human beings all over the world live daily without killing one another, even when dealing with the most troubled or difficult of family members. We are capable of an impossible love. We can establish global norms of resolving all our problems through understanding and dialogue, and exclude war from the negotiation table. To do so, we should exclude from the UN charter the use of war as a last resort. We should disband the UN ‘Security’ Council. Of course, accomplishing these actions hinges on us, on climate change citizens, Arab Spring citizens, Occupy citizens and the ‘awakening’ citizens of every country to free ourselves from the unequal dominance of corporate governments with their laws and weapons of self-interest.

Whistleblowing 2.0 — From the Pentagon Papers to Bradley Manning to PRISM

June 19, 2013 Patrick McCurdy, www.wagingnonviolence.org Organize! NSA, Wars and Militarism, Whistleblowers

Whistleblowing is no longer the sole domain of key-holding, Harvard-educated elites at the top of the information food chain. Both Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden held low-level positions relative to their chain of command and security clearance. In a vast system where millions of government and contracted personnel have access to troves of data, leaking is an opportunity available to anyone with clearance, opportunity and motive. Manning’s SIPRNET access — along with at least 2.5 million fellow security-cleared individuals — is not exceptional but typical of military work in the network society.

International Journalists Release Offshore Database Revealing Names Behind Secret Companies, Trusts

June 18, 2013 Marina Walker Guevara, www.publicintegrity.org Educate! Corporatism, Finance and the Economy, Whistleblowers

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a database that, for the first time in history, will help begin to strip away this secrecy across 10 offshore jurisdictions. The Offshore Leaks Database allows users to search through more than 100,000 secret companies, trusts and funds created in offshore locales such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands and Singapore. The Offshore Leaks web app, developed by La Nación newspaper in Costa Rica for ICIJ, displays graphic visualizations of offshore entities and the networks around them, including, when possible, the company’s true owners.

The Whistleblower’s Guide to the Orwellian Galaxy: How to Leak to the Press

June 17, 2013 Nicholas Weaver, www.wired.com/ Educate! Privacy, Whistleblowers

While the list of government (and corporate) whistleblowers continues to grow, their options for leaking continue to shrink. It is, as one commenter noted, “a dangerous time to be right when the government is wrong.” We now live in a world where public servants informing the public about government behavior or wrongdoing must practice the tradecraft of spies and drug dealers à la The Wire. Even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI. And privately collected data isn’t immune, either; highly sensitive metadata is particularly vulnerable thanks to the Third Party Doctrine. So how can one safely leak information to the press, let alone coordinate a Deep Throat-style meetup? The obvious choices: email, phone, and mail … but you’ve got to be really careful. Here’s a guide.

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