The War on Whistleblowers
The G.W. Bush administration, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, simply bypassed the FISC courts altogether, setting up the secret Stellarwind surveillance program, one part of which involved the extensive collection of Americans’ phone call logs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later found that the program may have violated FISA.
Former intelligence official William Binney and two colleagues, Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis, made the decision to quit the NSA and become whistleblowers when they discovered the spy agency had begun using the “Thin Thread” software Binney had created to scoop up information on Americans without a court order. They attempted to become protected whistleblowers according to established procedure, and instead found themselves facing reprisals from the NSA and the DOJ; Binney came out of his shower one morning to find himself face to face with a gun-toting FBI agent, part of a team of 12 who were sent to search his home and confiscate his computer and documents. Similar treatment occurred with others. Such mistreatment at the hands of the federal government, along with the lies told to the American people by high-ranking officials like James Clapper, influenced the decision of Edward Snowden not to “work within the system.”
In 2013, while working as a government contractor, Snowden leaked highly classified information from the NSA. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs run by the NSA, the GCHQ, and the British-dominated "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance, with the cooperation of telecommunication companies. Fearing the reprisals that earlier whistleblowers had faced—the Obama administration was prosecuting whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate—he took elaborate measures for his personal security, leaving the U.S. before disclosing his leaked material and carefully choosing the recipients. However, rather than making his disclosures anonymously, he made them publicly under his real name. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he wrote. Snowden took evasive action to avoid being “renditioned” and ultimately accepted asylum from the government of Russia. The U.S. government indicted him for espionage.
Julian Assange, the Australian journalist who founded Wikileaks in 2006, created a mechanism with which whistleblowers could anonymously leak material that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties by various governments. After verifying their authenticity, Wikileaks then released document caches.
On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks released 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage which WikiLeaks titled “Collateral Murder.” It showed the crew of the American gunship in Iraq firing on a group of people and killing several of them, including two Reuters journalists, and then laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians. Needless to say, this did not endear Assange to the neocons, who, as usual, were anxious to promote their latest war of choice as a noble, altruistic crusade for Democracy and Human Rights.
The neocon faction began looking for some way to retaliate, which led to a series of elaborate legal maneuvers involving the governments of Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. In 2012, Assange took asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he lived for seven years until the asylum was withdrawn. Then Assange was incarcerated in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh prison for another five years before finally being released. He was indicted in the U.S. for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion“ and later for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, but never stood trial.
The cases of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange became a highly polarizing issues, with neocons squaring off against civil libertarians. The neocons argued that, in the interests of national security, operatives of the secret agencies must have an implicit license to carry out highly illegal activities without scrutiny. Snowden and Assange had caused them acute embarrassment by revealing the sleazy depths of criminality in which they were engaging, such as the illegal surveillance (including of foreign heads of state such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel), war crimes, meddling in U.S. electoral politics, and even the nurturing of terrorist organizations. The neocons demanded extreme retribution in order to deter any future whistleblowing; Mike Pompeo, at the time that he headed the CIA, instructed the agency to develop plans to kidnap and murder Assange.
Meanwhile, a broad array of human rights and journalists’ organizations from around the world have called for the exoneration of both Snowden and Assange, as has Tulsi Gabbard. In a 2019 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Gabbard had this to say about Assange:
I think what’s happening here is, unfortunately, it is some form of retaliation coming from the government saying, ‘Hey, this is what happens when you release information that we don’t want you to release.’ And I think that’s why this is such a dangerous and slippery slope, not only for journalists, not only for those in the media, but also for every American that our government can and has the power to kind of lay down the hammer to say, ‘Be careful, be quiet and fall in line, otherwise we have the means to come after you.’
On September 30, 2020, Gabbard, along with Rep. Matt Gaetz, introduced House Resolution 1162, reproduced here:
RESOLUTION
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Federal Government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden.
Whereas, during a Senate hearing on March 12, 2013, James Clapper, then-Director of National Intelligence, was questioned by Senator Ron Wyden, and was asked whether the National Security Agency “collect[ed] any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans”, to which Clapper replied “No, sir”, and added “not wittingly”, a response he later admitted was “clearly erroneous”;
Whereas, in June 2013, Edward Snowden disclosed to a selective group of journalists National Security Agency documents exposing that bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records from telecommunications providers by the intelligence community was occurring;
Whereas, on June 21, 2013, the Department of Justice unsealed charges against Edward Snowden for violating sections 793(d) and 798(a)(3) of the Espionage Act and theft of government property under section 641 of title 18, United States Code;
Whereas, on January 23, 2014, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s report on the National Security Agency’s telephone records program found “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack” and that the program significantly threatened and violated the constitutional rights of the American people;
Whereas, on May 7, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of telephone records and therefore such collection was unlawful;
Whereas, on September 2, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled the National Security Agency’s telephone records bulk collection program illegal and possibly unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment;
Whereas the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found the telephone records bulk collection program did not play a pivotal role in any terrorism investigations;
Whereas those involved in the collection of Americans’ telephone records have yet to be held accountable for their illegal actions, further increasing the danger of continued government overreach and abuse of civil liberties; and
Whereas the United States Government must protect whistleblowers who expose illegal and unconstitutional acts of abuse within our government: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that—
(1) the National Security Agency’s bulk collection telephone records program was illegal and unconstitutional;
(2) Edward Snowden’s disclosure of this program to journalists was in the public interest; and
(3) the Federal Government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden.
Those Senators who will vote on whether to confirm President Trump’s appointees should ask themselves, which is more damaging to U.S. national security: the exposure of criminal activities—or the criminal activities themselves? The shrillness and ferocity of the attacks on Gabbard and Patel, coming from those who have something to hide, should tell us that there is a lot more dirt that has not yet seen the light of day. Speaking of both Snowden and Assange, Tulsi Gabbard called upon President Trump in 2020 to “please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.”