Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden

[BlindTiresias]

116. And yet there is stll ambiguity

"The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, for instance, does not prohibit agencies from retaliating against employees, said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University School of Law.

Goitein said President Barack Obama helped matters slightly when he issued a presidential order preventing retaliation against federal employees. But that order did not explicitly address the rights of contractors such as Snowden. And Goitein added, neither that directive nor the whistleblower law "bars the government from criminally prosecuting whistleblowers."

In 2010, NSA staffer Thomas Drake tried to use proper channels to report allegations of improper contracting but wound up the target of an investigation, said Kathleen McClellan, the national security and human rights counsel for the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower advocacy group.

"Drake followed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower law to a ‘T’," McClellan said. "He went to the Department of Defense inspector general and both congressional intelligence committees and it did not protect him from retaliation. In fact, it made him the target of an investigation."

Federal agents wrongly went after Drake in pursuit of a separate matter and charged him with multiple felonies, according to a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists. When it became clear that whatever Drake had shared with the press was either not classified or already in the public domain, the government’s felony case collapsed. A federal judge said it was "unconscionable" that Drake and his family had endured "four years of hell.""

"In 2012, a federal judge ruled that former CIA worker John Kiriakou could not present evidence about his reasons for going public with accounts of U.S. waterboarding during interrogations. Kiriakou was charged with disclosing classified information under the Espionage Act.

"Any claim that he acted with a salutary motive, or that he acted without a subversive motive, when he allegedly communicated NDI (national defense information) to journalists is not relevant to this case," the judge wrote."


I am sorry but so far all you have is an appeal to the benevolence of a congressional committee, of which the recent record has been not supportive of your claims. You are going to need to substantiate your argument more than just stating that they do possess such powers.