OMNI
NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER’S DAY NEWSLETTER #9, JULY 30, 2014.
Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice (#1
Oct. 21, 2011; #2 Dec. 12, 2011; #3 January 31, 2012; #4 Sept. 12, 2012; $5,
March 29, 2013; #6, May 22, 2013; #7 June 24, 2013; #8 July 30, 2013).What’s at stake: “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” James Madison.
NOTE: FOR EIGHT NUMBERS THIS NEWSLETTER ON WHISTLEBLOWERS WAS PUBLISHED PERIODICALLY. NOW IT IS PUBLISHED ON (AT PRESENT the PROPOSED) NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER’S DAY, JULY 30. SEE EXPLANATION BELOW.
OMNI’s endowed fund at UA’s Mullins Library for the purchase of books and films on Victims includes books and films on corporations and on resistance to US Imperialism Abroad and Repression at Home—including whistleblowers and investigative reporters, true heroes, true valor.
OMNI NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL DAYS PROJECT
My blog: The War
Department and Peacemaking
Newsletters:
Index:
See: Wikileaks, Assange, Government and Corporate Corruption, Corporate
Crime, Democracy, Investigative Reporting, Manning, Snowden, Surveillance,
Whistleblowers Newsletters.
CARTOON in Z
Magazine (May 2013) p. 11.
Two characters on a barren landscape:
“Finally someone’s going to prison over the torture
our government practiced over the last decade.
Yeah, the CIA whistleblower who pointed it
out.” Rob Gulliver, Big Bend Sentinel.
Whistleblower Newsletter Contents Nos. 3-8 ARE BELOW. For 1 and 2 see newsletter url just above.
Contents
#9 July 30, 2014 National Whistleblower Day
RootsAction, Donate to More
Ellsberg Billboards
Tomgram: National
Secrecy State
Liptak: From Nixon to Obama
Public Citizen, Snowden and WB
Protection
Film War on Whistleblowers, Rev. by Karen Martin
RootsAction, Prisoner
Whistleblowers
GAP, Bridging the Gap
Bridging the Gap on NSA
Zizek, Public Reason and
International Network to Protect Whistleblowers
Greenwald on Maher, Who Elected
the Whistleblowers and Leakers?
Tomgram, Next Whistleblower Battle
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tomdispatch@nationinstitute.org
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September 17, 2013
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I wanted those of
you who were kind enough to send in a donation for a signed, personalized
copy of Andrew Bacevich's widely hailed new book, Breach of Trust: How Americans
Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, to know that it is now officially in the mail to
you! He's been on a book tour, which has slowed the process.
(Most recent appearance: the
Colbert Report on Monday!)
Anyone who still wants a signed book in return for a contribution of $100 (or
more), the offer remains open. Just visit our donation page to check it out. Tom]Tomgram: Engelhardt, How to Build a National Security Blowback Machine Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower How the By Tom Engelhardt Dear Whistleblower, I don’t know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in years. You might be someone who entered government service filled with idealism or who signed on to “the bureaucracy” just to make a living. You may be a libertarian, a closet left-winger, or as mainstream and down-the-center as it’s possible to be. I don’t know much, but I know one thing that you may not yet know yourself. I know that you’re there. I know that, just as Edward Snowden and Bradley (now And how exactly do I know this? Because despite our striking inability to predict the future, it’s a no-brainer that the national security state is already building you into its labyrinthine systems. In the urge of its officials tocontrol all of us and every situation, in their mania for all-encompassing secrecy, in their classification not just of the millions of documents they generate, but essentially all their operations as “secret” or “top secret,” in their all-encompassing urge to shut off the most essential workings of the government from the eyes of its citizenry, in their escalating urge to punishanyone who would bring their secret activities to light, in their urge to see or read or listen in on or peer into the lives of you (every “you” on the planet), in their urge to build a global surveillance state and a military that will dominate everything in or out of its path, in their urge to drop bombs on Pakistan and fire missiles at Syria, in their urge to be able to assassinatejust about anyone just about anywhere robotically, they are birthing you. In every action, a reaction. So they say, no? Give our national security managers credit, though: they may prove to be the master builders of the early twenty-first century. Their ambitions have been breathtaking and their ability to commandeer staggering amounts of our taxpayer dollars to pay for those projects hardly less so. Their monuments to themselves, their version of pyramids and ziggurats -- like the vast data storage center the National Security Agency is building foralmost $2 billion in Bluffdale, Utah, to keep a yottabyte of private information about all of us, or the new post-9/11 headquarters the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built, again for almost $2 billion, so that its 16,000 employees could monitor our system of satellites Click here to read more of this dispatch.Click here to read more of this dispatch. Click here to read more of this dispatch.Click here to read more of this dispatch.nitoring every square inch of the planet -- are in their own way unique. In their urge to control everything, to see everything from your Facebook chatter to th Click here to read more of this dispatch.eemails of the Brazilian president, they are creating a system built to blowback, and not just from the outside or distant lands. Chalmers Johnson, who took “blowback,” an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, and embedded it in our everyday language, would have instantly recognized what they’re doing: creating a blowback machine whose “unintended consequences” (another term of his) are guaranteed, like the effects of the Snowden revelations, to stun us all in a myriad of ways. Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
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Reader Supported News | 04 August 13
FOCUS | Obama Has Followed in
Nixon's Footsteps
Adam Liptak, The New York Times
Liptak writes: "The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail."
READ MORE
Adam Liptak, The New York Times
Liptak writes: "The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail."
READ MORE
RESTORE PROTECTIONS TO
WHISTLEBLOWER
Fear retaliation?
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Dick,
Imagine what it must be like when a worker with access to inside information at the NSA, FBI or CIA recognizes that the government is secretly violating the rights of American citizens.
You believe what the intelligence agency has been doing is not only morally wrong, but against the law. Do your colleagues agree? Does your boss?
Imagine the fear you must overcome to right such a wrong — especially when you lack protection from retaliation if your boss disagrees. If your boss fires you for speaking out, you can’t even take your boss to court.
No one should have to fear retaliation for standing up to government lawbreaking.
Tell Congress to restore whistleblower protections for intelligence contractor workers.
For more about the urgent need for strong whistleblower protections, read the earlier email, copied below, from Public Citizen President Robert Weissman.
Thanks,
Rick Claypool
Imagine what it must be like when a worker with access to inside information at the NSA, FBI or CIA recognizes that the government is secretly violating the rights of American citizens.
You believe what the intelligence agency has been doing is not only morally wrong, but against the law. Do your colleagues agree? Does your boss?
Imagine the fear you must overcome to right such a wrong — especially when you lack protection from retaliation if your boss disagrees. If your boss fires you for speaking out, you can’t even take your boss to court.
No one should have to fear retaliation for standing up to government lawbreaking.
Tell Congress to restore whistleblower protections for intelligence contractor workers.
For more about the urgent need for strong whistleblower protections, read the earlier email, copied below, from Public Citizen President Robert Weissman.
Thanks,
Rick Claypool
Dick,
Intelligence agencies — like the NSA, FBI and CIA — are supposed to protect the American people.
But what if they go too far? What if they violate the rights of the very people they’re supposed to be protecting?
That’s when we need those who work at intelligence agencies to step forward and expose violations without fear of retaliation.
Tell Congress: Reinstate safeguards for workers who blow the whistle when our rights are violated or our taxes are wasted.
Intelligence contractor whistleblowers can be fired for exposing government waste, fraud and abuse — and they are denied a day in court to hold their bosses accountable.
A well-known example is Edward Snowden, who, while working for an NSA contractor, exposed the agency’s privacy abuses and then fled the country for fear of retaliation.
Many months before Snowden went public, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives repealed protections for contractor employees who blow the whistle through proper government channels.
Send a message urging your members of Congress to restore protections for the whistleblowers who alert us to government misconduct.
Snowden has repeatedly explained that a major reason he chose to leak was that he had seen how those who worked within the system were harassed and prosecuted.
No one should have to circumvent the law to fight government illegality.
Congress has the authority — and the obligation — to restore these rights.
Tell your members of Congress to restore and strengthen intelligence contractor whistleblower rights.
Thank you for taking action today.
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen
Intelligence agencies — like the NSA, FBI and CIA — are supposed to protect the American people.
But what if they go too far? What if they violate the rights of the very people they’re supposed to be protecting?
That’s when we need those who work at intelligence agencies to step forward and expose violations without fear of retaliation.
Tell Congress: Reinstate safeguards for workers who blow the whistle when our rights are violated or our taxes are wasted.
Intelligence contractor whistleblowers can be fired for exposing government waste, fraud and abuse — and they are denied a day in court to hold their bosses accountable.
A well-known example is Edward Snowden, who, while working for an NSA contractor, exposed the agency’s privacy abuses and then fled the country for fear of retaliation.
Many months before Snowden went public, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives repealed protections for contractor employees who blow the whistle through proper government channels.
Send a message urging your members of Congress to restore protections for the whistleblowers who alert us to government misconduct.
Snowden has repeatedly explained that a major reason he chose to leak was that he had seen how those who worked within the system were harassed and prosecuted.
No one should have to circumvent the law to fight government illegality.
Congress has the authority — and the obligation — to restore these rights.
Tell your members of Congress to restore and strengthen intelligence contractor whistleblower rights.
Thank you for taking action today.
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen
KAREN MARTIN, WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS: FREE PRESS AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE , ARKANSAS
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Kevin "Rashid"
Johnson has
been blowing the whistle on abuse and torture in U.S.
"As I sit writing this a lieutenant Deward Demoss passes my cell making segregation rounds. Further down the tier he exchanges words with another prisoner, then yells down to two unit guards, 'make sure cell 118 doesn’t eat today.' 'Yessir,' they both chime in. Such is the abusive impunity here in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's (TDCJ) Estelle 2 Unit (E2U). In fact, guards' summarily denying prisoners' meals in this manner is so routine, there's a nickname for it here. It's called 'jacking trays'. And that's the least of it."
Click here to add your voice to Rashid's in demanding an end to prison abuse.
Rashid has been documenting widespread and routine food deprivation, sleep deprivation, physical torture, denial of medical care, extended solitary confinement, death threats, the instigation of racial divisions, unsanitary conditions, destruction of property, interference with letters, denial of legal rights, and retribution against those who expose, protest, or organize.
The least we can do is send an email on his behalf.
Rashid is aVirginia prisoner, transferred first to Oregon and now to Texas
If Rashid's story were found in a nation that ours wanted to bomb, it would become war propaganda. But Rashid's story is all-American. And it's a similar story to those of theAngola
3, of Russell Maroon Shoatz, and of the men at Pelican Bay State Prison who
recently sparked a prolonged hunger strike among prisoners throughout California
It's up to us to hear the cries of one prisoner speaking for many others, and to raise our voices with theirs for basic human rights.
Please click here to email the Virginia and Texas prison authorities.
Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends.
-- The RootsAction.org team
P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Coleen Rowley, Frances Fox Piven, and many others.
P.P.S. This work is only possible with your financial support. Please donate.
Background:
Truthout: Beatings and Threats: Odyssey of a Prisoner-Advocate, From Virginia to Texas
CommonDreams: On Soul-Killing Solitary
Kevin "Rashid" Johnson: Audio essay "We Are All Doing Time"
"As I sit writing this a lieutenant Deward Demoss passes my cell making segregation rounds. Further down the tier he exchanges words with another prisoner, then yells down to two unit guards, 'make sure cell 118 doesn’t eat today.' 'Yessir,' they both chime in. Such is the abusive impunity here in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's (TDCJ) Estelle 2 Unit (E2U). In fact, guards' summarily denying prisoners' meals in this manner is so routine, there's a nickname for it here. It's called 'jacking trays'. And that's the least of it."
Click here to add your voice to Rashid's in demanding an end to prison abuse.
Rashid has been documenting widespread and routine food deprivation, sleep deprivation, physical torture, denial of medical care, extended solitary confinement, death threats, the instigation of racial divisions, unsanitary conditions, destruction of property, interference with letters, denial of legal rights, and retribution against those who expose, protest, or organize.
The least we can do is send an email on his behalf.
Rashid is a
If Rashid's story were found in a nation that ours wanted to bomb, it would become war propaganda. But Rashid's story is all-American. And it's a similar story to those of the
It's up to us to hear the cries of one prisoner speaking for many others, and to raise our voices with theirs for basic human rights.
Please click here to email the Virginia and Texas prison authorities.
Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends.
-- The RootsAction.org team
P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Coleen Rowley, Frances Fox Piven, and many others.
P.P.S. This work is only possible with your financial support. Please donate.
Background:
Truthout: Beatings and Threats: Odyssey of a Prisoner-Advocate, From Virginia to Texas
CommonDreams: On Soul-Killing Solitary
Kevin "Rashid" Johnson: Audio essay "We Are All Doing Time"
BRIDGING THE GAP (Autumn 2013). Magazine of the Government Accountability Project, that protects not only government whistleblowers but corporate and international.
Opening article: “GAP Stands with Snowden.” The NSA surveillance whistleblower revealed constitutional violations and deserves support. The article is highly worth reading. The Exec. Dir. Of GAP, Bea Edwards, also wrote an editorial in defense of Snowden. Other articles on a USDA inspector whistleblower now facing retaliation, military whistleblowers, petition to ban the criminalization of whistleblowers, and more.
GAP: NSA people prior to Snowden who tried to use the system
Dick,
I don’t know if you are the mailing list for the Government Accountability
Project (GAP), but if not you may be interested in this (fund-raising) letter
from them about the history of NSA people prior to Snowden who tried to use the
system and all the grief that caused them. I find the treatment of Drake
particularly reprehensible, but am interested to see that the NSA blithely
ignored a comparatively cheap in-house program and contracted to an outside
vendor a much more expensive and less sophisticated one.
David
W. Hart
4 attachments — Download
all attachments
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DONATE
Radomes at
an operating facility of the BND, the main German foreign intelligence
gathering agency, near Bad Aibling ,
Germany
FEATURES » AUGUST 13, 2013
Freedom in the Cloud
Assange, Manning and Snowden are the new heroes of the era of
digitalized control.
BY SLAVOJ
ŽIŽEK
[The title in the print edition (Oct. 2013) is: “Superheroes of the Digital Age: Snowden,
Manning and Assange Help Keep the Public Use of Reason Alive.” --Dick]
We need more Mannings and Snowdens—in China , in Russia United
States
We all remember President Obama's smiling face,
full of hope and trust, when he repeatedly delivered the motto of his first
campaign, “Yes, we can!”—we can get rid of the cynicism of the Bush era and
bring justice and welfare to the American people. Now that the United States
However, such simple personalization misses the
point: The threat to our freedom disclosed by whistle-blowers has much deeper
systemic roots. Edward Snowden should be defended not only because his acts
annoyed and embarrassed the U.S. U.S. China
to Russia , from Germany to Israel
Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that
the German ancien regime “only imagines that it believes in
itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.” In such a
situation, to put shame on those in
power becomes a weapon—or, as Marx goes on: “The actual pressure must be
made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be
made more shameful by publicizing it.” And this, exactly, is our situation
today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the representatives of the
existing global order who only imagine that they believe in their
ideas of democracy, human rights, etc. What happens in Wikileaks
disclosures is that the shame, theirs and ours for tolerating
such power over us, is made more shameful by publicizing it.
What we should be ashamed of is the worldwide
process of the gradual narrowing of the space for what Immanuel Kant called the
“public use of reason.” In his classic text What is Enlightenment?, Kant
opposes “public” and “private” use of reason: “private” is for Kant the
communal-institutional order in which we dwell (our state, our nation…), while
“public” is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason:
The public use of one’s reason must always be
free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of
one’s reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without
particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one’s
reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the
reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a
particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.
We see where Kant parts with our liberal common
sense: The domain of State is “private,” constrained by particular interests,
while individuals reflecting on general issues use reason in a “public” way.
This Kantian distinction is especially pertinent with the Internet and other
new media torn between their free “public use” and their growing “private”
control. In our era of cloud computing, we no longer need strong individual
computers: Software and information are available on demand, and users can
access web-based tools or applications through browsers as if they were
programs installed on their own computer.
This wonderful new world is, however, only one
side of the story, which reads like the well-known joke about the doctor who
gives “first the good news, then the bad news.” Users are accessing programs
and software files that are kept far away in climate-controlled rooms with
thousands of computers—or, to quote a propaganda-text on cloud computing:
“Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise
in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports
them.” Two words are tell-tale here:abstraction and control—in order to manage a
cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning,
and this system is by definition hidden from users. The more the small item
(smartphone or tiny portable) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use,
“transparent” in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the
work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the
user’s experience. The more our experience is non-alienated, spontaneous and
transparent, the more it is regulated by the invisible network controlled by
state agencies and the large private companies that follow the state's secret
agendas.
Once we chose to follow the path of state
secrets, we sooner or later reach the fateful point at which the very legal
regulations prescribing what is secret become secret. Kant formulated the basic
axiom of the public law: “All actions relating to the right of other men are
unjust if their maxim is not consistent with publicity.” A secret law, a law
unknown to its subjects, legitimizes the arbitrary despotism of those who
exercise it, as indicated in the title of a recent report on China : “Even what’s secret is a secret in China
What makes the all-encompassing control of our
lives so dangerous is not that we lose our privacy and all our intimate secrets
are exposed to the view of the Big Brother. There is no state agency that is
able to exert such control—not because they don’t know enough, but because they
know too much. The sheer size of data is too large, and in spite of all
intricate programs for detecting suspicious messages, computers which register
billions of data are too stupid to interpret and evaluate them properly,
yielding ridiculous and unnecessary mistakes whereby innocent bystanders are
listed as potential terrorists—and this makes state control of our
communications even more dangerous. Without knowing why, without doing anything
illegal, we can all of a sudden find ourselves on a list of potential
terrorists. Recall the legendary answer of a Hearst newspaper editor to
Hearst’s inquiry as to why he doesn't want to take a long-deserved holiday: “I
am afraid that if I go, there will be chaos, everything will fall apart—but I
am even more afraid to discover that, if I go, things will just go on as normal
without me, a proof that I am not really needed!” Something similar can be said
about the state control of our communications: We should fear that we have no
secrets, that secret state agencies know everything, but we should fear even more
that they fail in this endeavor.
This is why
whistle-blowers 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 digitalized control. They are no longer just whistle-blowers
who denounce illegal practices of private companies (banks, tobacco and oil
firms) to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities
themselves when they engage in “private use of reason.”
We need more
Mannings and Snowdens—in China , in Russia United States United States doesn’t treat prisoners as
brutally as China or Russia United States is even more dangerous than China
It is therefore not enough to play one state
against the other (as Snowden did, when he used Russia
against the United States
A version of this story ran in the
October 2013 print issue of In These Times under the headline “Superheroes of
the Digital Age.”
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Slavoj Žižek, a
Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen , Germany London
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: AP)
Who Elected Them?
ho elected Daniel Ellsberg and The New York Times to take it upon themselves to reveal thousands of pages of the top secret Pentagon Papers to the American public?
Who
elected Dana Priest and her still-unknown source(s) to take it upon themselves
to reveal in The
Washington Post the
existence of the CIA's top secret network of black sites?
Who
elected Sgt. Joseph Darby and the
New Yorker's Seymour Hersh to take it upon themselves totell Americans about the classified operations at Abu
Ghraib?
Who
elected Mark "Deep Throat" Felt to illegally disclose, and Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein topublish, secret information from an FBI investigation in the pages of The Washington Post?
Who
elected Thomas Tamm, Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau to spill Bush's top secret NSA warrantless eavesdropping
program in the pages
of The New York Times?
Why did all these people - whom we didn't
elect - think they had the right to decide which classified information should
be disclosed?
RSN: This is not all there is to this
article, right? So, if it isn't, where is the rest of it? If there's more,
please correct this error and provide it all here. Thank you.
My guess is that this is the whole
article. And my second guess is that it is a response to Bill Maher's (stupid)
question to Greenwald Friday evening at the beginning of his show.
Unfortunately, if Maher can read, he doesn't have a great track record of being
able to learn information and admit that he was mistaken... so this won't
likely benefit the HBO host one iota.
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Who
can keep up? The revelations -- mainly thanks to the documents Edward Snowden took from the
National Security Agency -- are never-ending. Just this week, we learned that GCHQ, the British intelligence
agency whose activities are interwoven with the NSA’s, used a program called
Optic Nerve to intercept and store “the webcam images of millions of internet
users not suspected of wrongdoing” (including Americans). As theGuardian reported, "In one six-month
period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery -- including
substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications -- from more than
1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally." Yahoo is now outraged;
the Internet Association, a trade group for the giants of the industry, has
condemned the program; and three U.S. senators announcedan
investigation of possible NSA involvement. At about the same time, Glenn Greenwald revealed that GCHQ was engaging in "extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction." These included "'false flag operations' (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting ‘negative information’ on various forums." Again, this was evidently happening with the knowledge, if not collusion, of the NSA. Meanwhile, with Washington entering a self-proclaimed era of "reform" when it comes to spying on Americans, we just got a striking you-can’t-win-for-losing Catch-22 message from the front lines of the surveillance wars. Claiming that recent pending lawsuits make it necessary, the Obama administration has requested permission to hang on to phone metadata “on billions of And mind you, that’s just dipping a toe in the positively oceanic global surveillance waters. It’s been nine months since the Snowden revelations began and who can keep it all straight? Nonetheless, it’s possible to put everything we know so far into a simple message about our American world-in-the-making: the surveillance part of the national security state has, in its own mind, no boundaries at all. As a result, there is no one, nor any part of communications life on this planet, that is out of bounds to our surveillers. Given what we now know, it’s easy to ignore what we don’t knowabout how our government is acting in our name. That's why the figure of the whistleblower -- and the Obama administration’s urge to suppress whistleblowing of any sort -- remains so important. How are we ever to know anything about the workings of that secret state of ours if someone doesn’t tell us? As a result, TomDispatch remains dedicated to documenting the Obama administration’s ongoing war against those who have the urge to bring the secret workings of the national security state to our attention -- especially in cases like Robert MacLean's, where otherwise little notice is paid in the mainstream media. So today, we’re publishing a follow-up to our earlier story about MacLean, again by TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren. Himself a State Department whistleblower, Van Buren takes another deep dive into the dark territory he has dubbed post-Constitutional America. Tom Silencing Whistleblowers Obama-Style Supreme Court Edition? By Peter Van Buren The Obama administration has just opened a new front in its ongoing war on whistleblowers. It’s taking its case against one man, former Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Air Marshal Robert MacLean, all the way to the Supreme Court. So hold on, because we’re going back down the rabbit hole with the Most Transparent Administration ever. Despite all the talk by Washington insiders about how whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should work through the system rather than bring their concerns directly into the public sphere, MacLean is living proof of the hell of trying to do so. Through the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to use MacLean’s case to further limit what kinds of information can qualify for statutory whistleblowing protections. If the DOJ gets its way, only information that the government thinks is appropriate -- a contradiction in terms when it comes to whistleblowing -- could be revealed. Such a restriction would gut the legal protections of the Whistleblower Protection Act and have a chilling effect on future acts of conscience. Having lost its case against MacLean in the lower courts, the DOJ is seeking to win in front of the Supreme Court. If heard by the Supremes -- and there’s no guarantee of that -- this would represent that body’s first federal whistleblower case of the post-9/11 era. And if it were to rule for the government, even more information about an out-of-control executive branch will disappear under the dark umbrella of “national security.” Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
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From the White House: Write or Call
President Obama is committed to creating the
most open and accessible administration in American history. That begins with
taking comments and questions from you, the public, through our website.
Call the President
PHONE NUMBERS
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
TTY/TTD
Comments: 202-456-6213
Visitor's Office: 202-456-2121
Write a letter to the President
Here are a few simple things you can do to make
sure your message gets to the White House as quickly as possible.
1. If possible, email us!
This is the fastest way to get your message to President Obama.
2. If you write a letter, please consider typing it on an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper. If you hand-write your letter, please consider using pen and writing as neatly as possible.
3. Please include your return address on your letter as well as your envelope. If you have an email address, please consider including that as well.
4. And finally, be sure to include the full address of the White House to make sure your message gets to us as quickly and directly as possible:
2. If you write a letter, please consider typing it on an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper. If you hand-write your letter, please consider using pen and writing as neatly as possible.
3. Please include your return address on your letter as well as your envelope. If you have an email address, please consider including that as well.
4. And finally, be sure to include the full address of the White House to make sure your message gets to us as quickly and directly as possible:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington , DC 20500
GAP: Government Accountability Project
Employment Law Group
FDA Illegal Surveillance of Whistleblowers
Contents of #4
GAP: Government Accountability Project
Sirota: Executive Branch War on Whistleblowers
John Kiriakou
Kiriakou’s Book, Reluctant Spy
Pentagon Fails Its Whistleblowers
Hedges: Obama versus Whistleblowers
Public Citizen
NSA
Misc. via Google
Contents
of #5
Wikipedia Whistleblowers
National Whistleblowers Center
Protect Federal Employee
Whistleblowers
GAP’S Bridging the Gap
GAP: Government Accountability
Project
OSHA and Whistleblowers
Greenwald, Documentary War on Whistleblowers
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now Programs on WB
More on Kiriakou
Contents
#6, May 22, 2013
Write, Call for John Kiriakou
GAP: Bridging
the Gap Spring 2013
Railway Whistleblowers Get
Federal Protection
US Government Quick Guide
Department of Labor Whistleblower
Regulations
Greenwald, Obama’s War on
Whistleblowers (one Google page)
Sibel Edmonds, Book , US
Contents
#7 June 26, 2013
OMNI Showing War on Whistleblowers Film June 26
Ann Wright on Obama Admin. vs.
Manning
GREENWALD
Dick: Greenwald’s War on Whistleblowers Film
Greenwald’s War on Whistleblowers
Greenwald on Whistleblowers and
Government Threats
EDWARD SNOWDEN
Leaker Snowden
Send Thanks to Snowden
Support for Snowden Around the World
Google Search
Bridging the Gap
Executive Director
Vance v. Rumsfeld, Tortured
Whistleblowers Sue
Contents
#8 July 30, 2013 National Whistleblower
Day
NWC Requests July 30 Be National
Whistleblower Day
NWC’s The Whistleblower’s
Handbook
Google Search for NWC
Greenwald, NSA’s Enhanced Cell
Phone Tapping
General Cartwright Reveals
Cybernet Warfare Against Iran
Pilger, Leakers vs. US Fascism
Amy Goodman Interviews Chris
Pyle, 1970s Whistleblower
Bunnatine Greenhouse: Iraqi Oil
Contracts Whistleblower
La Franiere, Crackdown on Leakers
Insider Threat Program: President
Obama’s Crackdown on Leakers
END WHISTLEBLOWER NEWSLETTER #9 JULY 30
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