NYT Editorial Board Calls For CLEMENCY For Snowden

[mother earth]

18. Protections exempting the intelligence community? & What of Clapper misleading Congress?

Would Obama's whistleblower protection have helped Snowden?

Obama on Friday: "I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community for the first time."

True -- he signed an executive order in October of 2012 that protects intelligence community whistleblowers. The Intelligence community is exempted from other whistleblower protections he signed into law in 2012.

Read the executive order

But that protection does not appear to do much for someone like Snowden, who wanted to blow the whistle to public on a classified program.

The order states that classified information should be protected. It also adjudicates through the intelligence committee, which is already complicit and agrees with the program that he disclosed.

In other words, Snowden would have been protected in blowing the whistle up to the director of National Intelligence. Currently, that's James Clapper, who has had to apologize for misleading Congress about the existence of the programs.

In any case, he already knew about the programs. So that does seem like a bit of a Catch-22. But it is part of a larger debate about whether Americans trust their government to have secret programs. If so, they have to trust the branches of government to do the checking and balancing.

Intel chief admits 'erroneous statements' to Congress

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/politics/obama-snowden-whistleblower/index.html