WHISTLEBLOWERS cont'd
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force – otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers – a top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study of the U.S. government's decision-making process during the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers detailed massive policy and leadership failures. The revelations proved that the Johnson Administration lied to the public and the U.S. Congress about the scope of activity in Vietnam.
Ellsberg disclosed information that the American people needed – and indeed had the right – to know. This is where, in our mind, the line should be drawn. The line is discretion. Ellsberg's leak DID NOT include everything in the Vietnam report. For example, he omitted everything concerning ongoing diplomatic efforts, including those underway to safely release prisoners of war.
Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange failed to use this discretion, and that is when they all crossed the line.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush launched an aggressive campaign to secure this nation, authorizing a number of activities that went far beyond the parameters of traditional law enforcement. At the same time, Congress passed sweeping legislation designed to enhance American counterterrorism efforts. This included the USA PATRIOT Act, which significantly increased the federal government’s authority to gather, analyze and investigate private information related to U.S. citizens. President Obama also sanctioned hardcore surveillance practices. A program called PRISM gathered the private communications of users of nine popular Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Google and Facebook.
However, the American public did not know all of this...
...until Edward Snowden stole top-secret documents from the National Security Agency (NSA). Working as an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, Snowden "touched" up to 1.5 million files. In 2013, the Guardian published the first of Snowden's stolen documents, the first of over 7,000 top-secret documents that journalists have since released.
Here are just some of the things we learned about the NSA and American citizens*:
On the positive side, Snowden's actions initiated a debate about domestic surveillance that forced the U.S. government to pass laws to better protect the American public's privacy. Had he left it there, we would call him a hero. But Snowden crossed the line. He also released classified information that greatly jeopardized our national security, compromised our foreign intelligence operations, and harmed our relationships with many of our allies.
Snowden's actions revealed plenty of information to our allies – and to our enemies. For example, we're sure our enemies were interested to read:
And, we're pretty certain our allies did not appreciate the following information getting out on our watch...
And, of course, they probably weren't too happy that we were actually spying on them as well.....
In the largest leak in U.S. military history, Bradley Manning – now Chelsea Manning – a former U.S. Army soldier and intelligence analyst, leaked a massive amount of classified and unclassified but sensitive documents to WikiLeaks. The leaked information included videos of airstrikes, U.S. diplomatic cables, and 391,832 United States Army field reports. These Army field reports, now known as the Iraq War Documents or Iraq War Logs contain almost 400,000 military logs recorded between 2004 to 2009. Again, there were things that Americans needed to know – like unreported civilian deaths, prison abuse by U.S. troops, and the widespread use of torture – but, because she indiscriminately leaked everything (to Wikileaks no less, see next paragraph), Manning also crossed the line. Luckily, reputable media outlets such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism redacted sensitive information before they published the information, but Wikileaks showed no such concern for the well-being of our troops or to anything else having to do with our national interests. Manning was convicted by court-martial and sentenced to 35 years at Fort Leavenworth. Ultimately, President Obama commuted her sentence to time served, which was almost seven years behind bars.
Julian Assange not only continually crossed the line, he blows right through it. He is not a hero, a journalist or a whistleblower. He is just a straight up criminal hacker.
Even before the Mueller report was released in April 2019, it had become clear that Wikileaks and Assange gave zero thought to the real-life consequences of indiscriminately publishing stolen material. What started out as a website for so-called "transparency" and "accountability" has obviously turned into nothing more than a vehicle for revenge and personal agenda. We already knew that putting people at risk meant nothing to Wikileaks – publishing Chelsea Manning's unredacted material proved that. But Assange and Wikileaks took it to a whole new level when they published almost 300,000 emails from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice & Development Party (AKP). What was supposed to be damaging information about Erdogan was instead personal, sometimes sensitive, information about everyday Turkish citizens, including their home addresses, phone numbers, and political party affiliation. This is a bad move anytime, but it is especially dangerous at a time when thousands of people – including soldiers and judiciary members – were still being detained and arrested after a failed military coup.
And then the icing on the cake: Wikileaks' interference in our 2016 U.S. presidential election, including working with Guccifer 2.0 to obtain 20,000 stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and the chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Plus, in a really shitty move on Assange's part, Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that Assange and Wikileaks, in order "to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing," "made a number of statements about Seth Rich, a former DNC staff member who was killed in July 2016. The statements about Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails." Complete jerks.
On April 11, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Julian Assange was arrested in the United Kingdom pursuant to the U.S./UK Extradition Treaty, in connection with the Chelsea Manning leak. In an 18-count indictment for multiple violations of the Espionage Act, the United States Department of Justice charges that "cables that WikiLeaks published included names of persons throughout the world who provided information to the U.S. government in circumstances in which they could reasonably expect that their identities would be kept confidential. These sources included journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents who were living in repressive regimes and reported to the United States the abuses of their own government, and the political conditions within their countries, at great risk to their own safety." Read the entire document here.
On April 11, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Julian Assange was arrested in the United Kingdom pursuant to the U.S./UK Extradition Treaty, in connection with the Chelsea Manning leak. In December 2021, the London High Court ruled that Assange, who has been detained in a London maximum security prison since his arrest, could be extradited to the United States for trial.
Good riddance.
Evidence:
* This information came directly from The Business Insider: "This Is Everything Edward Snowden Revealed In One Year of Unprecedented Top-Secret Leaks," written by Paul Szoldra (September 16, 2016).
United States. Department of Justice. "The False Claims Act: A Primer." 22 Apr 2011
United States. Department of Justice. "Justice Department Recovers Over $2.8 Billion from False Claims Act Cases in Fiscal Year 2018." 21 Dec 2018
United States. Department of Labor. "Whistleblower Protection Program." Occupational Safety & Health Administration. 23 Apr 2019
United States. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Office of the Whistleblower." 23 Apr 2019
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
The NSA collected the telephone records from millions of Verizon customers; The NSA accessed and collected data through back doors into U.S. internet companies such as Google and Facebook with the aforementioned PRISM; The NSA had a program code-named EvilOlive that collected and stored large quantities of Americans' internet metadata; Until 2011, the Obama administration permitted the NSA's continued collection of vast amounts of Americans' email and internet metadata under a Bush-era program called Stellar Wind; Internal NSA document revealed an agency "loophole" that allowed a secret backdoor for the agency to search its databases for U.S. citizens' emails and phone calls without a warrant; The NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, according to an internal audit; and The NSA collected more than 250 million email contact lists from services such as Yahoo and Gmail.
An 18-page presidential memo showing President Obama ordered intelligence officials to draw up a list of overseas targets for cyber attacks; That the U.S. carried out 231 offensive cyber attacks in 2011; That the NSA hacked into Qatar-based media network Al Jazeera's internal communications system; That NSA surveillance played a key role in the targeting for overseas drone strikes; That the NSA stationed surveillance teams at 80 locations around the world; That Britain's GCHQ (its intelligence agency) and other European spy agencies worked together to conduct mass surveillance; Strategic missions of the NSA, which include combatting terrorism and nuclear proliferation, as well as pursuing U.S. diplomatic and economic advantage; That the NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malware designed to steal sensitive information; That the NSA gathered evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a plan to discredit Muslim jihadists; That Intelligence operatives with NSA and GCHQ infiltrated online video games such as "World of Warcraft" in an effort to catch and stop terrorist plots; That the NSA has the ability to decrypt the common A5/1 cellphone encryption cipher; That, with a $79.7 million research program, the NSA was working on a quantum computer that would be able to crack most types of encryption; That, using radio transmitters on tiny circuit boards or USB drives, the NSA can gain access to computers not connected to the internet; That the U.S.'s "targeted killing" program of drone strikes relied mostly on cellphone metadata and geolocation, rather than on-the-ground human intelligence; and that the NSA developed sophisticated malware "implants" to infect millions of computers worldwide.
Britain's GCHQ intercepted phone and internet communications of foreign politicians attending two G-20 meetings in London in 2009; Britain's GCHQ tapped fiber-optic cables to collect and store global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories, and calls, and then shared the data with the NSA; Seven of the world's leading telecommunications companies provide GCHQ with secret, unlimited access to their network of undersea cables; Britain ran a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept emails, phone calls, and web traffic; Britain's GCHQ launched a cyber attack against Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian telecommunications company; Canada's signals intelligence agency, CSEC, spied on phone and computer networks of Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy and shared the information with the "Five Eyes" intelligence services of the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand; Australia's DSD spied on the cellphones of top Indonesian officials, including the president, first lady, and several cabinet ministers; The British government struck a secret deal with the NSA to share phone, internet, and email records of UK citizens; Working with Canadian intelligence, the NSA spied on foreign diplomats at the G-8 and G-20 summits in Toronto in 2010; A draft document revealed Australia offered to share information collected on ordinary Australian citizens with the NSA and other "Five Eyes" partners; Swedish intelligence was revealed to be spying on Russian leaders, then passing it on to the NSA; The Norwegian Intelligence Service was developing a supercomputer, called Steel Winter, to decrypt and analyze data from Afghanistan, Russia, and elsewhere; Australia's intelligence service had surveillance teams stationed in Australian embassies around Asia and the Pacific; and Australia's Defense Signals Directorate and the NSA worked together to spy on Indonesia during a UN climate change conference in 2007.
The U.S. government bugged the offices of the European Union in New York, Washington, and Brussels; The U.S. government was spying on at least 38 foreign embassies and missions, using a variety of electronic surveillance methods; The NSA spied on millions of phone calls, emails, and text messages of ordinary German citizens; Using a program called Fairview, the NSA intercepted internet and phone-call data of Brazilian citizens; The NSA conducted surveillance on citizens in a number of Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and others. The agency also sought information on oil, energy, and trade; The NSA provided surveillance to U.S. diplomats in order to give them the upper hand in negotiations at the UN Summit of the Americas; The NSA spied on former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto (then a candidate); Using a "man in the middle" attack, NSA spied on Google, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, and the Brazilian oil company Petrobras; The NSA spied on Indian diplomats and other officials in an effort to gain insight into the country's nuclear and space programs; The NSA tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel; The NSA spied on Italian citizens, companies, and government officials; The NSA monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders and encouraged other government agencies to share their "Rolodexes" of foreign politicians so it could monitor them; The NSA spied on Spanish leaders and citizens; The NSA spied on the Vatican; The NSA spied on millions of cellphone calls in Norway in one 30-day period; Widespread spying was revealed in Italy, with the NSA spying on ordinary Italians as well as diplomats and political leaders; The NSA closely monitored the Chinese technology firm Huawei in attempt to reveal ties between the company and the Chinese military. The agency also spied on Chinese banks and other companies, as well as former President Hu Jintao.