OMNI
SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #8, September
18, 2016
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(#1 July 9, 2013; #2 Nov. 1, 2013; #3 Feb. 15, 2014; #4 April 15, 2014;
#5 May 25, 2014; #6 Dec. 4, 2014; #7 August 15, 2015)
Thanks to Marc Quigley for entering all of these
newsletters in OMNI’s web site.
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POST MY NEWSLETTERS ON YOUR FACEBOOK.
What’s at stake: The US Constitution, international law, established
human rights, social and economic justice, civil resistance including
whistleblowers and leakers, and investigative reporting constitute the most
hopeful alternatives to US militarism run amok: empire abroad, police state at
home, and incessant warfare to sustain them both as Orwell depicted in his
novel 1984. (Inspired by Francis A. Boyle, Protesting Power).
No. 7 at end
Contents: Snowden Newsletter #8, September 18, 2016
Oliver
Stone’s Film, Snowden
Review of Film
by Stephen Farber (Hollywood Reporter),
NADG (Sept. 16,
2016), and Dick’s Comments
2016), and Dick’s Comments
Greenberg’s
Critique of the Film, Dick’s Comments
Google Search
Greenwald
and Poitras on Snowden
Greenwald, No Place to Hide
Poitras, Citizenfour
Obama
Should Pardon Snowden?
Holder’s View
of Snowden 5-31-16
Democracy Now Debate in Two Parts: Should Snowden Be
Pardoned? Could
He Receive a Fair Trial under the Espionage Act?
He Receive a Fair Trial under the Espionage Act?
ACLU’s Ben
Wizner Interview, “A Pardon for Snowden”
Whistleblowers
and Leakers for the Sake of
Honest, Democratic
Government
Government
Mark
Hertsgaard’s New Book, Bravehearts: Whistle-Blowing in the Age of
Snowden.
Snowden.
Hertsgaard, The Nation, Pentagon’s Broken
Whistleblower System
Moyers’ Morning
Reads: A Second Snowden,” Leaked
Documents Reveal
Drone Secrets
Drone Secrets
OLIVER
STONE’S FILM, SNOWDEN
STEPHEN FARBER,
“WHITEOUT,” NADG (9-16-16) (The Hollywood Reporter).
To Farber, the film is “a tad dull,” the
script “pedestrian, sometimes disjointed,” the tale “told in… a hushed and
bloodless manner,” whose hero will not “draw intense audience empathy.” The chief female character “never blossoms
into a full-blooded, distinctive character.”
Aside from the Snowden role, “almost none” of the many “good actors”
“has a chance to etch an indelible character,” and none matched the “energetic
hams” of earlier films” who “chewed the scenery entertainingly.” Only one character has a chance to get a
humorous rhythm going.” “Stone’s
direction is …totally lacking in the fire and flamboyance that sometimes
electrified…his earlier films.” “The
story moves along without any real sense of urgency or suspense.” The film “never achieves the emotional force
that Poitras achieved in her” documentary.
The film is “well-crafted but lackluster.”
What?
It’s well-crafted but in essentials—character and plot—the film lacks
vitality? What’s the problem here? That the film is not Stone’s Scarface, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of
July?
He himself gives one clue. “Snowden himself was something of a geek and
technocrat, not the kind of flamboyant figure who populated many of Stone’s
earlier movies.” So let’s restart
Farber’s review with the question good reviews and teachers of writing
ask: Given his character, how might
Snowden have evolved out of his super-patriotism, and survived and then
outmaneuvered the two most powerful security organizations in the world? And then ask what is the film Snowden saying about our country? And how important is that message? Then you deal with the film itself and not
with the films Farber wished Stone had made.
Stone’s Snowden fails to inspire “intense
audience empathy”? Well, how does
Farber know that, and not if you have paid attention to the questions raised by
the film.
The story of Snowden’s evolution from
robot flag-patriot to thinking patriot lacks “emotional force”? Greenwald tells the story well, but he is also
a boffin and interweaves the technology into the narrative. The
Guardian’s Luke Harding in his The Snowden Files concentrates on the
plot. Take Chapter 6, “Scoop!: described
June 2013. Snowden was revealing top
secret program after top secret program, each one unconstitutional, and each
possible certain to lead to prison for the leakers. At the chapter’s end the top-secret program
BOUNDLESS INFORMANT was next. This
program “allows the NSA to map country by country the voluminous amount of information
it collects from computer and telephone networks. . . .It revealed that in
March 2013 the agency collected a staggering 97 billion intelligence data
points from computer networks worldwide” (140).
The NSA was evesdropping on every nation and national leader! The
Guardian was preparing to publish the news despite heavy breathing from “some
of the most powerful people on the planet” (which would lead to the destruction
of its computer hard-drives by British intelligence agents) (13). And in the final sentence of chapter 6,
Snowden decides to go public and “reveal his identity to the world” (141). And in the final sentence of chapter 7: “”How
much longer could he hold out until the US grabbed him?” (154). The story of Snowden’s successful resistance
to the CIA and NSA lacks “urgency or suspense”?
Rather, Stone packs this “particularly surreal episode in the history of
western hournalism and its battels against the state” into two insistent,
imperative hours.
Finally, let’s hear from Greenwald on the
significance of Stone’s film. Snowden
“focused the world’s attention on the dangers of ubiquitous state surveillance
and pervasive government secrecy. It
triggered the first global debate about the value of individual privacy in the
digital age and prompted the way people around the world viewed the reliability
of any statements made by US officials and transformed relations between
countries. It radically altered views
about the proper role of journalism in relation to government power. And within the United States, it gave rise
to an ideologically diverse, trans-partisan coalition pushing for meaningful
reform of the surveillance state” (No
Place to Hide, 248). The film is
not dull, pedestrian, hushed, bloodless.
Rather, it portrays resistance, successful resistance, inside the belly
of the US NSA/CIA beast, sitting in his hotel room in Hong Kong radiating “a
sense of tranquility and equanimity” (Harding 13).
ANDY GREENBERG. “EDWARD
SNOWDEN REALLY NEEDS OLIVER STONE’S HERO MOVIE RIGHT NOW.” 09.14.16. Some comments by Dick Bennett
9-17-16.
In a generally favorable
critique, Greenberg identifies possible aspects of fiction in Stone’s
recounting:
- “Many of the NSA crimes
that Stone depicts in the film aren’t documented in the very real privacy violations Snowden’s leaks revealed—amounting
to blunt political fiction that’s surprising even for
Stone, a career-long critic of the federal government.”
- Dick: No, not “many,” but three. “At one
point, an NSA employee casually watches an unwitting Muslim woman in real-time
through her laptop’s camera as she removes her niqab and shirt. Later,
Snowden narrates how the agency worked to plant malware in power plants,
dams, and hospitals in Japan, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, and Austria, the
better to shut down those countries’ infrastructure if they become
enemies. The final element in Snowden’s decision to blow the whistle comes
when he learns that a senior CIA official is reading the email of his
girlfriend, Lindsay Mills.”
- Dick: Two of these are very minor sexual anecdotes
inserted I suppose to attract an audience.
Planting malware to shut down countries, however, is a major
allegation that if not true is apparently the one serious historical
exaggeration by Stone.
- Stone made a mistake in allowing these fictions into
his almost wholly factual docudrama. This
lapse results in Greenberg uncritically quoting Susan Hennessey without
question, when her claim is extremely over-generalized: “’This is a work of fiction, and it
doesn’t reflect any reality I’m aware of,’” says Susan Hennessey, a former
NSA attorney and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. ’People go
into the movie and aren’t sure what’s real and not real, and they assume
some things are fact, and that’s really problematic.’” That’s a shame, and Greenberg should have
focused on explaining the truth to viewers of the film I have read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the
NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, and watched Laura Poitras’ honored
documentary film, Citizenfour, and
everything significant and essential to Snowden’s story in Stone’s version
fits the accounts given by Greenwald and Poitras.
- Properly, Greenberg ends his essay with Greenwald’s and
Poitras’ facts, not with Hennessey’s wild slander. Snowden’s ACLU attorney,
Ben Wizner, asked Stone if his story was true. Stone replied: “I had to make all this
material work in a two-hour timeframe and not bore people. “But
Wizner went on to offer his own answer, pointing to two “deep truths”
that underlie any of the fictionalized details of Stone’s story. ‘The
United States developed and deployed a system of mass surveillance without
democratic consent,’ Wizner said. ‘That’s accurately portrayed. And the
person who stepped forward to reveal that did so with sincerity, courage,
conviction, and patriotism. And I think that’s also accurately
depicted.’”
OLIVER STONE’S SNOWDEN
FILM, Google, 9-15-16, Page one
Oliver Stone's 'Snowden' film opens without much ado |
Film | DW.COM | 15.09.2016 Deutsche Welle - 9 hours ago
Oliver Stone & Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Making New
Film "Snowden," Humanizing World's Most Wanted Man
Democracy Now! - 1 day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_(film)
Wikipedia
Snowden is a 2016
American-German biographical political thriller film directed by Oliver Stone and written by
Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald. The film is based
Biography · The NSA's illegal surveillance techniques are leaked
to the public by one of the ... Director Oliver
Stone talks about surveillance and his
new film Snowden ...Oliver Stone and Scott
Eastwood in Snowden (2016) · Oliver Stone and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Snowden (2016) · Joseph
Gordon-Levitt and Shailene ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlSAiI3xMh4
Apr 27, 2016 - Uploaded by Open Road Films
Academy Award®-winning director Oliver Stone, who brought Platoon,
... he pulled it off makes for one of the ...
www.cinemablend.com/.../Oliver-Stone-Snowden-Has-Been-Pushed-Bac...
Snowden was once pegged
as an Oscar contender for 2016's awards, but alas, the film was pushed to a May
13th release date, in order to open at the Cannes ...
www.democracynow.org/.../oliver_stone_joseph_gord...
Democracy Now!
1 day ago - As the
much-anticipated movie "Snowden," about one of the most wanted men in the world, hits
theaters, we spend the hour with its director, ...
www.hollywoodreporter.com/.../oliver-stone-re...
The Hollywood Reporter
Mar 8, 2016 - When Stone (whose films include Platoon,
Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street) was first approached to make the
movie, he hesitated.
www.bbc.com/.../20160912-film-review-is-oliver-stones-snowden-r...
BBC
3 days ago - Oliver Stone's new film has many naysayers. Sure, it has its problems but there
are things to recommend it too, writes Sam Adams from the ...
variety.com/.../film/.../snowden-review-toronto-film-festival-jose...
Variety
6 days ago - Oliver Stone's new docudrama, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden, is the director's most exciting — and ...
GREENWALD AND POITRAS ON SNOWDEN
www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/.../no-place-to-hide-by-glenn-greenwald.ht...
In “No Place to Hide,” Glenn Greenwald writes about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency
and the dangers of government ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../no-place-to-hide...greenwald.../dfa45d...
Glenn Greenwald's “No Place to Hide” offers a disturbing overview of the agency's surveillance
efforts.
www.slate.com/.../glenn_greenwald_s_book_no_place_to_hide_reviewed.h...
Greenwald's pugilistic
skills are on full display in his new book, No Place to Hide. My copy came with
CONFIDENTIAL stamped on every page ...
https://citizenfourfilm.com/
When filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to meet
Edward Snowden for
the first time, Poitras brought her camera with her. The result is a 100%
... Film Critics Circle
Best Non-Fiction Film (Documentary) ...
See the film · About · Code Names of
the ... · Trailer
www.theguardian.com › Arts › Movies ›
Citizenfour
The Guardian
Jul 14, 2015 - Film-maker whose documentary about Edward Snowden won an ...
Citizenfour director Laura Poitras sues US over 'Kafkaesque harassment'.
OBAMA SHOULD PARDON SNOWDEN?
CBS News - 15 hours ago
Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a podcast Edward Snowden should ... but he should still return to
the U.S. to stand trial, former U.S. Attorney General Eric ...
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“A Pardon for Snowden,” The Nation (Sept. 26/Oct. 3, 2016).
The Nation’s Jon Wiener Interviews ACLU’S Ben Wizner, Snowden’s
Attorney. He is clarifying on Snowden’s Revelations, Extradition, the
Espionage Act, Possible Plea Deal, Possible
Pardon. For example: The tyrannous Espionage
Act enables the government to imprison a person merely for providing classified
information to an unauthorized person; no other consideration is
permissible. If Snowden came to US it
would be for sentencing not for a trial.
WHISTLEBLOWERS AND LEAKERS
New Book Bravehearts by Mark Hertsgaard Features Numerous Past and Present Government
Accountability Project (GAP) Clients. Staff, May 31, 2016
An Investigative Tour de Force Revealing A New
Chapter In The Edward Snowden Story And Highlighting The Whistle Blowers Who
Pay With Their Lives to Save Ours
By now, almost everyone knows what Edward
Snowden did: leak secret documents revealing that the US government was
spying on hundreds of millions of people around the world. But if you
want to know why Snowden did it, the way he did it, you need
to know the stories of two other men.
The first is Thomas Drake,
who blew the whistle on the very same surveillance ten years before Snowden did
and got crushed. The other is The Third Man, a former senior Pentagon
official who comes forward in this book for the first time to describe how his
superiors repeatedly broke the law to punish Drake—and unwittingly taught
Snowden how to evade their clutches.
When insiders such as The Third Man or Big
Tobacco truth-teller Jeffrey Wigand blow the whistle on high-level government or
corporate lying, lawbreaking, or other wrongdoing, the public can benefit
enormously. Liberty is defended, deadly products are taken off the market, wars
are ended. The whistle-blowers themselves, however, generally end up
ruined when they refuse to back down in the face of ferocious official
retaliation. This moral stubbornness despite terrible personal cost is the
defining DNA of whistle-blowers. The public owes them more than we know.
In Bravehearts, Mark Hertsgaard
tells the gripping, sometimes darkly comic stories of these unsung heroes.
Deeply reported, impassioned but fair-minded, Bravehearts is
for citizens of all nations, especially students, teachers, activists, and
anyone wanting to make a difference.
Below is a sample of some of the coverage the
book has already received:
* BBC
World Service, Newshour, (43 million listeners), May 26, 2016 (story
runs from 26 minutes, 15 seconds to 34:55).
* New York Times, “Op-Ed Page,” May 26, 2016.
* KQED (Bay Area NPR affiliate), Forum, May
25, 2016.
* Democracy Now!, national radio and TV program,
May 23, 2016.
* And the scoop that started it all: The
Guardian, May 22, 2016.
* And the accompanying Guardian news story reporting
Snowden’s reaction to the scoop:
The Guardian, May 22, 2016.
The Guardian, May 22, 2016.
* And a video interview with John Crane, GAP client
and Pentagon whistleblower who comes forward for the first time in Bravehearts.
* Finally, The Nation will very soon
publish an excerpt from Bravehearts, which will be posted to Mr.
Hertsgaard's website.
You can buy the book, preferably at your local independent book shop, or via the HotBooks/Skyhorse website,here!
You can buy the book, preferably at your local independent book shop, or via the HotBooks/Skyhorse website,here!
Bravehearts: Whistle-Blowing in the Age of
Snowden by Mark Hertsgaard
·
Details
Whistleblowers pay with their lives to save
ours. When insiders like former NSA analyst Edward Snowden or ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley or Big Tobacco
truth-teller Jeffrey Wigand blow the whistle on high-level lying, lawbreaking
or other wrongdoing—whether it's government spying, corporate murder or
scientific scandal—the public benefits
enormously. Wars are ended, deadly products are taken off the market,
white-collar criminals are sent to jail. The whistleblowers themselves,
however, generally end up ruined. Nearly all of them lose their jobs—and in
many cases their marriages and their health—as they refuse to back down in the
face of increasingly ferocious official retaliation. That moral stubbornness
despite terrible personal cost is the defining DNA of whistleblowers. The
public owes them more than we know.
In Bravehearts, Hertsgaard tells the gripping, sometimes darkly comic and ultimately inspiring stories of the unsung heroes of our time. A deeply reported, impassioned polemic, Bravehearts is a book for citizens everywhere—especially students, teachers, activists and anyone who wants to make a difference in the world around them. (From the publisher. )
In Bravehearts, Hertsgaard tells the gripping, sometimes darkly comic and ultimately inspiring stories of the unsung heroes of our time. A deeply reported, impassioned polemic, Bravehearts is a book for citizens everywhere—especially students, teachers, activists and anyone who wants to make a difference in the world around them. (From the publisher. )
The National-Security Exposé So
Secret Even Edward Snowden Didn’t Know About It
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-national-security-expose-so-secret-even-edward-snowden-didnt-know-about-it/
A former senior Pentagon official shows how broken our
whistleblower system really is.
By Mark Hertsgaard. The Nation, JUNE 1, 2016
Three years after Edward Snowden’s
revelations regarding the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance
program, Eric Holder has decided
that Snowden may have done the right thing after all. His whistleblowing was “a
public service,” the Obama administration’s former attorney general said on a podcast released
May 30. Snowden should still be prosecuted, Holder added—leaking top-secret
documents is illegal, after all—but his disclosures helped in “raising the
debate.”
Snowden welcomed Holder’s about-face,
which buttresses Snowden’s longstanding offer to return home and face trial if
he is allowed to offer a “public-interest” defense for his actions. In a tweet, Snowden seemed bemused but hopeful about the
evolution in officialdom’s views:
2013: It’s treason!
2014: Maybe not, but it was reckless
2015: Still, technically it was unlawful
2016: It was a public service but
2017:
Meanwhile, dramatic new disclosures
offer fresh insights into why Snowden did what he did and raise tantalizing
questions about additional secrets that may lurk in the documents he released.
On May 22, my own exposé of a secret new chapter in Snowden’s
story was published in my book, Bravehearts: Whistle-Blowing in
the Age of Snowden.
The exposé details extraordinary revelations from John Crane, a former senior Defense Department
official who has come forward publicly for the first time about what he
witnessed inside the Pentagon.
A
solidly built Virginian with flecks of gray in a neatly trimmed chinstrap
beard, Crane had been an assistant inspector general at the Pentagon, where
he’d handled whistleblower cases from 2004 until 2013, when his bosses forced
him out because he insisted on standing up for the legal treatment of
whistleblowers. In dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how his superiors, allegedly, broke the law
repeatedly while dealing with whistleblowers—obstructing justice,
withholding and probably destroying evidence, and then lying to a federal judge
about it, among other crimes.
Given
this bureaucratic hostility to whistleblowers, Crane said he understood why
Snowden might decide his only workable option for exposing the NSA’s
surveillance was to break the law by leaking documents to the press. Yet Crane
lamented Snowden’s actions. “Someone like Snowden should not have felt the need
to harm himself just to do the right thing,” Crane told me.
“When I was at NSA, everybody knew that
for anything more serious than workplace harassment, going through the official
process was a career-ender at best,” Snowden told my Guardian colleague Ewen MacAskill
in response to Crane’s revelations. “If your boss in the mailroom lies on his
timesheets, the [inspector general] might look into it. But if you’re [former
NSA executive] Thomas
Drake, and you find out the
president of the United States ordered the warrantless wiretapping of everyone
in the country, what’s the IG going to do? They’re going to flush it, and you
with it.”
“Flush” is an apt term for what the
Pentagon did to Drake. If you want to know why Snowden did what he did, the
way he did it, you have to know the stories of both John Crane and
Thomas Drake. As Snowden has said, “If there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there
wouldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”
Drake
was a much higher-ranking official in the NSA who tried, 10 years earlier, to blow
the whistle on the same NSA activities that Snowden revealed. But Drake, a
career military man, followed the rules, raising his concerns through official
channels—first with his superiors at the NSA, then with the agency’s
congressional overseers.
In return
for his obedience, Drake’s house was raided in 2007. He was fired, stripped of
his security clearance, threatened with life in prison, and eventually reduced
to working as a clerk in an Apple store, the only job he could find.
But
not everyone in the government tried to throttle him. Crane felt so strongly
about the value of whistleblowers that he carried in his pocket a copy of the
Whistleblower Protection Act and the US Constitution so he could cite them
during workplace conflicts. Crane fought for the lawful treatment of Drake not
because Crane was for or against the NSA surveillance; he did it because the
law required that all government whistleblowers be given anonymity and other
protections when they report “waste, fraud, or abuse,” as every federal
employee is obligated to do.
Crane
later detailed his allegations in affidavits he filed with the federal Office
of Special Counsel after he became a whistleblower himself, following his
forced resignation. The OSC, which adjudicates whistleblower cases throughout
the federal government, ruled in March that there was a “substantial
likelihood” that Crane’s charges are true. This finding in turn triggered a
requirement for Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to organize a fresh investigation
of Crane’s allegations, which the Justice Department is conducting.
The supreme irony? The Pentagon
officials who led the charge against Drake ended up unwittingly teaching
Snowden how to evade their clutches. Drawing on the example of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense
Department adviser who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Snowden removed key documents
from the NSA database and gave them to independent journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, who,
along with MacAskill, began publishing articles based on Snowden’s
revelations.
“The
sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with
evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake,” Snowden told
MacAskill regarding Crane’s revelations. “Going to the press involves serious
risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”
Snowden had plenty of criticisms of the
mainstream media; one reason he didn’t take his revelations to The New York Times was his distrust of the paper after its
editors agreed to President George W. Bush’s request, just before the 2004
election, not to publish a story by Times reporters that began to uncover the
NSA’s surveillance activities. “Hiding that story changed history,” Snowden
later told Greenwald. Not until December 2005 did the Times finally publish the story.
Snowden
further grasped that a whistleblower who took his concerns to the media had to
bring plenty of ammunition in the form of official documents that could not be
brushed off as mere hearsay. A sitting government can usually withstand a negative
story if it’s prominent for only a day or three. To capture the public’s
attention and put real pressure on government, the revelations must pierce the
24/7 media babble and make news not just for a few days, but for weeks. That in
turn requires not just a single exposé, no matter how sensational, but a
continuing stream of newsworthy information.
Again, the Pentagon Papers proved
instructive. “If you’re going to shoot at the King, you have to shoot to kill,”
Ellsberg told me in reflecting on Snowden’s achievements. “The media don’t want
to risk angering the King if they don’t have documentary proof.” Thus,
whistleblowers who leak to the press “have to put out documents, and they have
to put out a lot of them if they want to have a big
effect.”
Yet
even as Snowden put out a lot of documents, he eschewed the WikiLeaks model of
releasing all the information at his disposal. He held back certain documents
and removed specifics from others, for fear of revealing information that could
put US operatives in danger or imperil legitimate security objectives. Snowden
argued that democratic governance did not mean the public had to know the names
of each NSA surveillance target. What it meant was that “we as Americans and
members of the global community have a right to know the broad outlines of
government policies that have a significant impact on our lives.” Snowden gave
trusted journalists final authority to decide which parts of the information he
disclosed should or should not be published. For all the attacks that critics
have leveled on his supposed recklessness, his actions were carefully
modulated, which strengthened their impact—and his credibility.
And their impact may soon be felt anew.
Greenwald recentlyannounced, via his
column at The Intercept, that he and his colleagues were beginning “to release
large batches of Snowden documents to the public—and to open the [Snowden]
archive to greater access by foreign and U.S. journalists.” Again, Greenwald
and his colleagues took the precaution of redacting certain names as well as
inviting the NSA to comment on the documents before publication. The goal of
this newly broadened access to the Snowden archive, Greenwald explained, is to
“enhance public understanding of these extremely powerful and secretive
surveillance agencies.”
Nothing about Edward Snowden impressed
the experts at the Government Accountability Project—a Washington NGO that is
arguably the world’s leading whistleblower-advocacy group and has provided
legal representation for Snowden, Drake, and Crane—more than his sheer
effectiveness. Yes, Snowden was courageous; yes, his revelations were
eye-popping. But over the nearly 40-year history of GAP, its attorneys had
counseled thousands of whistleblowers in both the public and private sectors
who had displayed great courage and brought forward astonishing revelations.
(See Bravehearts for
examples.)
What
distinguished Snowden, they said, was his ability to draw lessons from the
experiences of previous whistleblowers and formulate a strategy that avoided
the usual bureaucratic traps and delivered exceptional results. Of course,
since releasing classified documents without authorization is unequivocally
illegal, Snowden had to be willing, like Ellsberg before him, to break the law
and face the consequences.
“It
comes down to the difference between lawful whistleblowing and
civil-disobedience whistleblowing,” said GAP legal director Tom Devine. “None
of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless
surveillance activities—and Drake was far from the only one who tried—had any
success. They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said,
‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the
whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified
all the evidence.”
The key to Snowden’s success, Devine
continued, was that he “took
the evidence with him. So when the government issued its usual
denials, he could produce document after document showing they were lying. That
is civil-disobedience whistleblowing. And in the national-security area,
civil-disobedience whistleblowing is what works.”
Snowden had more than one wish when he
first went public. Besides alerting people around the world to the
unprecedented and secret surveillance that the US government was subjecting
them to, he also hoped to encourage more whistleblowing. Snowden “told me…that
he wanted to show that you could come out and tell the truth about something
you thought was wrong and you didn’t have to hide,” said Barton Gellman, who
reported on Snowden’s disclosures for The Washington Post.
Three
years later, Snowden remains committed to this goal but has clearer ideas about
how to achieve it. “We need iron-clad, enforceable protections for
whistleblowers, and we need a public record of success stories,” he told
MacAskill. “Protect the people who go to members of Congress with oversight
roles, and if their efforts lead to a positive change in policy, recognize them
for their efforts. There are no incentives for people to stand up against an
agency on the wrong side of the law today, and that’s got to change. We can’t
fix the problems if we don’t know what they are, and for that we need
whistleblowers.”
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military bases around the world, and bombing 7 sovereign nations.
FIVE MOST RECENT 2016 NEWSLETTERS: Russia, Climate, Climate/Anthropocene,
Israel/Palestine, Hiroshima/Nagasaki (August)
CONTACT YOUR
REPRESENTATIVES
None of the
senators or representatives publishes his e-mail address, but each can be
contacted by filling in forms offered through his website.
Senator John Boozman: (202)224-4843
Senator Tom Cotton: (202)224-2353
Rep. Rick Crawford, 1st District: (202)225-4076
Rep. French Hill, 2nd District: (202)225-2506
Rep. Steve Womack, 3rd District: (202)225-4301
1119 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Washington, DC 20515
3333 Pinnacle Hills, Suite 120
Rogers, Arkansas 72758
Rogers, Arkansas 72758
Rep. Bruce Westerman, 4th District: (202)
225-3772
Contents: Snowden Newsletter #7, August 15, 2016
Code Pink to President Obama: Return Snowden’s Passport
Snowden’s
Statement to VfP on NSA vs. Freedom
Related Books: Michael Glennon’s National Security and Double Government; Pilisuk and Rountree, The Hidden Structure of Violence
Related Books: Michael Glennon’s National Security and Double Government; Pilisuk and Rountree, The Hidden Structure of Violence
Snowden
David Fidler, ed. The Snowden Reader
Ted Rall, Snowden Graphic Reader
Laura Poitras’ Citizen Four Documentary Wins Oscar
Snowden 2015 Google Search
David Fidler, ed. The Snowden Reader
Ted Rall, Snowden Graphic Reader
Laura Poitras’ Citizen Four Documentary Wins Oscar
Snowden 2015 Google Search
Related
Greenwald and Fishman, NPR Is Laundering CIA Talking Points
Nadia Prupis, NSA Phone Surveillance Ruled Illegal
Greenwald and Fishman, NPR Is Laundering CIA Talking Points
Nadia Prupis, NSA Phone Surveillance Ruled Illegal
Dick, Why Criticize Your
Government and Not Others
Contact Your Representatives
Recent OMNI Newsletters
END SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #8
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