Whistleblower

SEE TWO

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420 bak (massive twit code deleted)

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AN NO LNX

Trump just issued a threat to all of us

Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo

Thom Hartmann May 06, 2025

In the dark corners of America’s halls of power, something sinister is unfolding. Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched an assault on one of the most sacred pillars of our democracy: the freedom of the press. And make no mistake, this isn’t just another policy change. It’s a deliberate strategy straight from the dictator’s playbook.

Late last month, Bondi quietly issued a memo rescinding vital protections for journalists that had prevented the government from forcing reporters to reveal their sources or surrender their notes during leak investigations. This wasn’t just any memo; it was a declaration of war against the very foundation of press freedom in America.

Bondi’s memo, released late on a Friday afternoon (a classic timing choice to minimize media attention), rescinded policies that had limited when and how Justice Department attorneys could pursue records or testimony from journalists, including in cases involving the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets to the press. The implications are chilling and immediate.

The Justice Department will now allow federal investigators to pursue communications from media outlets in government leak investigations, marking a complete reversal of Biden-era (and previous administrations’) policies that protected journalists from becoming targets of government intimidation.

Bondi’s justification? The Justice Department “will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Did you catch that? Not disclosures that threaten national security, but those that “undermine President Trump’s policies.” Since when did the President’s policies become sacred and beyond scrutiny? Since when did exposing wrongdoing by our government become a crime against “the American people”?

Throughout our history, ethical government officials who leaked information to the press have been essential to maintaining our democracy. They’ve exposed corruption, illegal wars, and unconstitutional surveillance, and in many cases they’ve paid a heavy price for their courage.

Take my old friend and correspondent Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps America’s most famous whistleblower. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing how multiple presidents had systematically lied to the American people about the Vietnam War. He believed the documents contained “evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder.” His brave act helped change public opinion and ultimately contributed to ending that disastrous war.

When Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon administration tried to block their publication. The Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States upholding the press’s right to publish has been called one of the “modern pillars” of First Amendment rights with respect to freedom of the press.

That same Nixon administration that tried to silence Ellsberg created the infamous “White House Plumbers” unit to stop leaks, which later led directly to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s downfall.

History shows that when presidents attack whistleblowers and the press, they’re usually trying to hide their own misdeeds. And it sure feels like that’s exactly what Bondi and Trump are now up to.

In more recent history, we’ve seen Edward Snowden expose the NSA’s mass surveillance programs and Chelsea Manning reveal troubling military actions, including the killing of civilians. Both were driven by their conviction that the American people deserved to know about government overreach and misconduct.

The Founders understood that a democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry, and citizens cannot be informed without a free press that can hold the powerful accountable. That’s why they enshrined press freedom in the First Amendment; they knew from bitter experience that power corrupts, and that the powerful will always seek to hide their corruption.

A free press serves as our early warning system against government overreach and abuse. When journalists can protect their sources, those inside the government who witness wrongdoing can come forward without fear of retribution. This critical flow of information is what Bondi is now trying to shut down.

Bondi’s actions come in the midst of an aggressive campaign against unauthorized leaking in Trump’s second administration. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has already referred “two intelligence community leakers” to the Justice Department for potential prosecutions, with a third referral on the way.

What we’re witnessing is step one in the dictator’s playbook: silence those who tell the truth about your regime. We’ve seen this pattern in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and countless other countries where democracy has withered into authoritarianism. First, attack the press. Then, criminalize dissent. Intimidate lawmakers, lawyers, and judges. Finally, consolidate power in the hands of a single leader.

Bondi’s memo added that there will be procedures in place before members of the media are compelled to testify or their records are seized, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Justice Department is now prepared to compel journalists to testify, and their records will be subject to seizure.

But the most alarming part of all is what Bondi reportedly wants to do next. According to sources close to the Justice Department, she has argued that leakers — or even reporters — who provide information that she doesn’t like could be prosecuted for treason, a crime that carries the death penalty.

Let that sink in: the Attorney General of the United States believes that journalists doing their constitutionally protected job could be subject to execution.

I’ve been covering American politics for five decades, and just to be very clear: This is not normal. This is not just another partisan policy dispute. This is an existential threat to our constitutional system of government.

When a government official can decide that reporting unflattering information is “treason,” we’re no longer living in a democracy. We’re living in an authoritarian state where power flows from the top down, not from the people up.

Bondi’s actions reveal the Trump administration’s true nature. They have no interest in our democratic traditions or constitutional liberties. Their only goal is to consolidate power and silence dissent.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which documents threats to press freedom, has condemned Bondi’s decision and criticized Republicans in Congress who killed a federal shield law in 2024 that would have protected journalists from such subpoenas.

We’ve seen this before. Nixon’s attacks on the press were a precursor to his abuses of power. The Bush administration’s aggressive prosecutions of leakers after 9/11 helped enable his unconstitutional torture program and illegal surveillance. And Trump’s first term was marked by constant rhetorical attacks on the press as “enemies of the people.”

But this move by Bondi takes things to a new and dangerous level. By institutionalizing the persecution of journalists and their sources, she’s laying the groundwork for a full-scale assault on press freedom.

She claims that “subpoenaed news outlets are to be given advanced notice” and that the subpoenas will be “narrowly drawn,” but these are empty promises from an administration that has repeatedly shown contempt for democratic norms and the rule of law.

The time for polite disagreement or “strongly worded letters” is over. The time for waiting to see what happens next is over. We must act now to protect our democracy before it’s too late.

First, demand that Congress pass a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to reveal their sources. This is not a partisan issue; it’s about preserving the basic functioning of our democracy.

Second, support independent journalism with your dollars and your attention. Subscribe to newspapers, donate to nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica, and share important stories with your networks. A robust press is our best defense against tyranny.

Third, contact your representatives and tell them that protecting press freedom must be a top priority. Remind them that their oath is to the Constitution, not to any president or party. The phone number for the congressional switchboard, which can connect you to both your senators and your member of the House, is 202-224-3121.

Fourth, prepare to take to the streets if Bondi follows through on her threat to prosecute journalists for treason. That would be a red line from which there is no return to normal democratic governance.

Finally, remember that the press isn’t perfect — no human institution is — but it’s essential. When governments attack journalists, it’s rarely because they’re telling lies. It’s almost always because they’re telling truths that the powerful don’t want heard.

We stand at a crossroads in American history. Down one path lies a renewed commitment to our democratic values, including a free press that can hold the powerful accountable. Down the other lies authoritarianism, where “truth” is whatever the leader says it is, and those who disagree face persecution or worse.

The choice should be obvious. But making the right choice requires courage, from journalists who continue to do their jobs despite threats, from whistleblowers who risk everything to expose wrongdoing, and from citizens who refuse to be silent in the face of growing tyranny.

Pam Bondi and Donald Trump have shown their true colors. They’ve revealed their contempt for the Constitution and their fear of the truth. They’re trying to create a country where no one can challenge their power or expose their corruption.

We cannot — we must not — let them succeed. Our democracy depends on it.

NOW READ: Democrats need to draw 'political blood': Expert lays out strategy for defeating MAGA

The time to act is now.

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Top Amazon official resigns in disgust over whistleblower rights Julia Conley / Common Dreamsan 5/20

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leaked-memo-amazon-execs-sought-to-tar-fired-employee-who-organized-coronavirus-walkout/

omfg fire whistleblower

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-what-wall-street-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-its-grip-on-emergency-rooms/

no lnx

Here’s what Wall Street doesn’t want you to know about its grip on emergency rooms

Written by Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt / Independent Media Institute April 3, 2020

Doctor Ling Min is the first emergency room doctor to be fired for going public with his concerns about poor hospital emergency room safety practices and shortages of medical supplies and protective gear for health workers.

He won’t be the last.

Like many hospitals in the US, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham Washington, where Ling Min worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency room.So, Min works on-site at the hospital’s ER, but he is employed by a physician staffing firm that runs the ER. These staffing firms are often behind the surprise medical bills for ER services that patients receive after their insurance company has paid the hospital and doctors, but not the excessive out-of-network charges billed by these outside staffing firms.[huh?]

About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs 20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.

Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across the US.

Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic? One clue may be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President Trump’s inner circle. He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the allocation of supplies and protective gear. The president might conclude that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would that leave Schwartzman?

PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.

The American Academy of Emergency Medicine protested Dr. Min’s ouster and questioned how TeamHealth is allowed to provide hospital services when the law requires that physician practices must be owned by a licensed medical practitioner. TeamHealth skirts the law by owning all the assets of the physician practices it acquires—the real estate, offices, equipment, supplies, inventory, and even accounts receivable.

On paper, the physician practices are owned by a doctor-led organization that TeamHealth has set up to comply with the law. But what does it mean to own a physician practice if the practice has no assets and no possibility to exist on its own?

The furor over patients hit by surprise medical bills revealed that TeamHealth controls the billing for the doctors it supplies to hospital emergency rooms. The firing of Doctor Ling Min pulls back the curtain and reveals that TeamHealth controls the doctors as well.

Eileen Appelbaum is the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK.

Rosemary Batt is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work, Cornell University ILR School.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.html

Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts

Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, saw potentially suspicious transactions involving the company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, she said.

Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, saw potentially suspicious transactions involving the company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, she said.Credit...Willie J. Allen Jr. for The New York Times

By David Enrich

May 19, 2019

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.

The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.

Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.

But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.

“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” said Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions. “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”

Ms. McFadden said she was terminated last yearafter she raised concerns about the bank’s practices. Since then, she has filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators about the bank’s anti-money-laundering enforcement.

Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said the company had intensified its efforts to combat financial crime. An effective anti-money laundering program, she said, “requires sophisticated transaction screening technology as well as a trained group of individuals who can analyze the alerts generated by that technology both thoroughly and efficiently.”

“At no time was an investigator prevented from escalating activity identified as potentially suspicious,” she added. “Furthermore, the suggestion that anyone was reassigned or fired in an effort to quash concerns relating to any client is categorically false.”

Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the Trump family’s many business interests, said: “We have no knowledge of any ‘flagged’ transactions with Deutsche Bank.” She said the Trump Organization currently has “no operating accounts with Deutsche Bank.” She did not respond when asked if other Trump entities had accounts.

Karen Zabarsky, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said: “Any allegations regarding Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Kushner Companies which involved money laundering is completely made up and totally false. The New York Times continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”

Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer.

Congressional and state authorities are investigating that relationship and have demanded the bank’s records related to the president, his family and their companies. Subpoenas from two House committees seek, among other things, documents related to any suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business bank accounts since 2010, according to a copy of a subpoena included in a federal court filing.

Mr. Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank in April, seeking to block it from complying with the congressional subpoenas. The president’s lawyers described the subpoenas as politically motivated.

Suspicious activity reports are at the heart of the federal government’s efforts to identify criminal activity like money laundering and sanctions violations. But government regulations give banks leeway in selecting which transactions to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Lenders typically use a layered approach to detect improper activity. The first step is filtering thousands of transactions using computer programs, which send the ones considered potentially suspicious to midlevel employees for a detailed review. Those employees can decide whether to draft a suspicious activity report, but a final ruling on whether to submit it to the Treasury Department is often made by more senior managers.

In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner, now a senior White House adviser.

Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals.She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.

Ms. McFadden drafted a suspicious activity report and compiled a small bundle of documents to back up her decision.

Tracking 30 Investigations Related to Trump

Federal, state and congressional authorities are investigating Donald J. Trump’s businesses, campaign, inauguration and presidency.

Typically, such a report would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who are independent of the business line in which the transactions originated — in this case, the private-banking division — according to Ms. McFadden and two former Deutsche Bank managers.

That did not happen with this report. It went to managers in New York who were part of the private bank, which caters to the ultrawealthy. They felt Ms. McFadden’s concerns were unfounded and opted not to submit the report to the government, the employees said.

Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.

After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.

Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.

Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion.Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.

When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.

Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.

In the past few years, United States and European authorities have punished Deutsche Bank for helping clients, including wealthy Russians, launder funds and for moving money into countries like Iran in violation of American sanctions. The bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and is operating under a Federal Reserve order that requires it to do more to stop illicit activities.

On two palm-tree-lined campuses in Jacksonville, Deutsche Bank has thousands of employees who vet customers and transactions. Six current and former bank employees there said the operations were deeply troubled.

Anti-money laundering workers were pressured to quickly sift through transactions to assess whether they were suspicious, the employees said. As a result, they often erred on the side of not flagging transactions.

Two former employees said that they had raised concerns about transactions involving companies linked to prominent Russians, but that managers had told them not to file suspicious activity reports. The employees were under the impression that the bank did not want to upset important clients.

Several employees said they had complained about the bank’s anti-money laundering processesto Joshua Blazer, the head of Deutsche Bank’s financial crimes investigations division in Jacksonville, and had then been criticized for having a negative attitude. One employee said she resigned last summer over concerns about the bank’s ethics.

Mr. Blazer, hired by Deutsche Bank in 2017 to strengthen the bank’s financial crime-fighting apparatus, declined to comment.

Ms. McFadden’s job at Deutsche Bank was to inspect clients and transactions in the company’s private-banking division — the unit that lent money to Mr. Trump. She joined the bank in 2008, after working for Bank of America, also in Jacksonville.

Ms. McFadden had left Bank of America in 2005, and later sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. According to court records, her lawsuit was settled on confidential terms the same year she joined Deutsche Bank, where she went on to win multiple performance awards.

Around the time she flagged the Kushner Companies’ transactions, Ms. McFadden said, she also complained about how the bank was scrutinizing the accounts of high-profile customers, such as those in public office. Those customers — known as politically exposed persons — are regarded as at heightened risk of being involved in corruption. As a result, their accounts are subject to extra vetting.

Ms. McFadden said she had told her superiors that dozens of politically exposed clients of the private-banking division, including Mr. Trump and members of his family, were not receiving that added attention. Her superiors told her to stop raising questions, according to Ms. McFadden and the two former managers.

After taking her complaint to the human resources department, Ms. McFadden was transferred to another division. She was terminated in April 2018. The bank told her that she was not processing enough transactions.

Ms. McFadden disputed that. She said her superiors had reduced the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she voiced her concerns. She and the two former managers said they perceived her termination as an act of retaliation.

“They attempted to try to silence me,” she said. “I’m at peace because I know that I did the right thing.”

Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle “neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,” propagating an outraged solidarity.(The efficacy of these techniques is still a matter of debate.)He describes another project that the company called “voter disengagement” — that is, suppression of African-American voters. Republican clients, worried that demographic changes were spelling electoral trouble for them, asked Cambridge Analytica to find “ways to confuse, demotivate and disempower people of color.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/1134751/

gomer outs whistleblower?!

an 1119

no lnx

Russian state media is outing the alleged whistleblower after Rand Paul’s reckless outbursts: report

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story November 6, 2019

President Donald Trump’s allies are trying to retaliate against the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the Ukraine scandal. And no one is doing so more enthusiastically than Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who tweeted out a link to a right-wing article in Real Clear Investigations that purported to reveal the whistleblower’s name, occupation at the CIA, and photograph.

Thus far, although that article has been live for several days, the mainstream media has ignored it, resisting any effort to spread information about the whistleblower that would compromise their federal legal protections and open them up to reprisal or threats.

But according to The Daily Beast, there is one group of media outlets that is eagerly promoting Paul’s reckless attempt to out the whistleblower: Russian state media.

Not only did sites like Russia Today, TASS, and Rossiya-1 disseminate this same information shortly after Paul did, one of the sites falsely claimed that the original source was the Washington Post rather than Real Clear Investigations, apparently to give the information more legitimacy.

This, notes The Daily Beast, marks the latest in a long string of efforts by Russian propaganda networks to boost Trump and attack the impeachment investigation — which in addition to attempting to remove a president Russian officials broadly think is strategically useful to them, also centers on his apparent efforts to extort the government of Ukraine, a nation which Russia is violently occupying and from which they are annexing land.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-deep-state-strikes-back-trump-spent-3-years-maligning-career-civil-servants-now-theyre-honorably-exposing-his-corruption ...Ipx 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: right;">:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:The Conversation

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveillance-fbi-trump/

aSSANGE?

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveillance-fbi-trump/

GoVERNMENT WHISTLEBLOWERS ARE increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies.

They’re ordinary Americans and, like most of us, they carry smartphones that automatically get backed up to the cloud. When they want to talk to someone, they send them a text or call them on the phone. They use Gmail and share memes and talk politics on Facebook. Sometimes they even log in to these accounts from their work computers.

Then, during the course of their work, they see something disturbing. Maybe it’s that the government often has no idea if the people it kills in drone strikes are civilians. Or that the NSA witnessed a cyberattack against local election officials in 2016 that U.S. intelligence believes was orchestrated by Russia, even though the president is always on TV saying the opposite. Or that the FBI uses hidden loopholes to bypass its own rules against infiltrating political and religious groups. Or that Donald Trump’s associates are implicated in sketchy financial transactions.

Why You Should Care About Donald Trump’s War on Whistleblowers

So they search government databases for more information and maybe print some of the documents they find. They search for related information using Google. Maybe they even send a text message to a friend about how insane this is while they consider possible next steps. Should they contact a journalist? They look up the tips pages of news organizations they like and start researching how to use Tor Browser. All of this happens before they’ve reached out to a journalist for the first time.

Most people aren’t very aware of it, but we’re all under surveillance. Telecom companies and tech giants have access to nearly all of our private data, from our exact physical locations at any given time to the content of our text messages and emails. Even when our private data doesn’t get sent directly to tech companies, our devices are still recording it locally. Do you know exactly what you were doing on your computer two months ago today at 3:05 p.m.? Your web browser probably does.

Yet while we all live under extensive surveillance, for government employees and contractors — especially those with a security clearance — privacy is virtually nonexistent. Everything they do on their work computers is monitored. Every time they search a database, their search term and the exact moment they searched for it is logged and associated with them personally. The same is true when they access a secret document, or when they print anything, or when they plug a USB stick into their work computer. There might be logs of exactly when an employee takes screenshots or copies and pastes something. Even when they try to outsmart their work computer by taking photos directly of their screen, video cameras in their workplace might be recording their every move.

Government workers with security clearance promise “never [to] divulge classified information to anyone” who is not authorized to receive it. But for many whistleblowers, the decision to go public results from troubling insights into government activity, coupled with the belief that as long as that activity remains secret, the system will not change. While there are some protections for whistleblowers who raise their concerns internally or complain to Congress, there is also a long history of those same people being punished for speaking out.

The growing use of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that criminalizes the release of “national defense” information by anyone “with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation,” shows how the system is rigged against whistleblowers. Government insiders charged under the law are not allowed to defend themselves by arguing that their decision to share what they know was prompted by an impulse to help Americans confront and end government abuses. “The act is blind to the possibility that the public’s interest in learning of government incompetence, corruption, or criminality might outweigh the government’s interest in protecting a given secret,” Jameel Jaffer, head of the Knight First Amendment Institute, wrote recently. “It is blind to the difference between whistle-blowers and spies.”

While we all live under extensive surveillance, for government employees and contractors — especially those with a security clearance — privacy is virtually nonexistent.

Of the four Espionage Act cases based on alleged leaks in the Trump era, the most unusual concerned Joshua Schulte, a former CIA software developer accused of leaking CIA documents and hacking tools known as the Vault 7 disclosures to WikiLeaks. Schulte’s case is different from the others because, after the FBI confiscated his desktop computer, phone, and other devices in a March 2017 raid, the government allegedly discovered over 10,000 images depicting child sexual abuse on his computer, as well as a file and chat server he ran that included logs of him discussing child sexual abuse images and screenshots of him using racist slurs. Prosecutors initially charged Schulte with several counts related to child pornography and later with sexual assault in a separate case, based on evidence from his phone. Only in June 2018, in a superseding indictment, did the government finally charge him under the Espionage Act for leaking the hacking tools. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The other three Espionage Act cases related to alleged leaks of government secrets have involved people who are said to have been sources for The Intercept. The Intercept does not comment on its anonymous sources, although it has acknowledged falling shortof its own editorial standards in one case. It is not surprising that a publication founded as a result of the Snowden leaks, and one that has specialized in publishing secret government documents whose disclosure serves the public interest, has been an appealing target for the Trump administration’s war on whistleblowers.

The government comes to this war armed with laws like the Espionage Act that are ripe for abuse, and with the overwhelming firepower of surveillance technology that has almost no limits when applied to its own workers and contractors. But journalists also have tools at their disposal, including the First Amendment and the ability to educate ourselves about the methods the government uses to track and spy on its employees. We’ve mined the court filings in allsevenleak cases filed by Trump’s Justice Department to identify the methods the government uses to unmask confidential sources.

WWHEN A GOVERNMENT WORKER becomes a whistleblower, the FBI gets access to reams of data describing exactly what happened on government computers and who searched for what in government databases, which helps narrow down the list of suspects. How many people accessed this document? How many people printed it? Can any of their work emails be used against them? What evidence can be extracted from their work computers?

Once the FBI has a list of suspects based on the vast amount of data the government itself has collected, they use court orders and search warrants to access even more information about the targets of its investigation. They compel tech companies, whose business models often rely on collecting as much information on their users as possible, to hand over everything, including personal emails, text messages, phone call metadata, smartphone backups, location data, files stored in Dropbox, and much more. FBI agents raid the houses and search the vehicles of these suspects, extracting whatever they can from any phones, computers, and hard drives they find. Sometimes, this includes files the suspects thought they had deleted or text messages and documents sent through encrypted messaging services like Signal or WhatsApp. The encryption these apps use protects messages while they’re sent over the internet so that the services themselves can’t spy on the content or hand it over to the government, but this encryption doesn’t protect messages stored on a phone or other device that is seized and searched.

Because whistleblowers aren’t spies, they normally don’t know how to avoid this kind of surveillance. One whistleblower who knew what he was up against, former CIA and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, didn’t see any way to get secret government information into the public domain while retaining his anonymity.

“I appreciate your concern for my safety,” Snowden wrote in an encrypted email, from an anonymous address not associated with his real identity that he only accessed over the Tor network, to filmmaker Laura Poitras in the spring of 2013, “but I already know how this will end for me and I accept the risk.” In the documentary film “Citizenfour,” Snowden explains that the security measures he took while reaching out to journalists were only designed to buy him enough time to get information about the NSA’s overwhelming invasions of privacy to the American public. “I don’t think there’s a case that I’m not going to be discovered in the fullness of time,” he said from a hotel room in Hong Kong before he publicly came forward as the source.

If we want to live in a world where it’s safer for people to speak out when they see something disturbing, we need technology that protects everyone’sprivacy, and it needs to be enabled by default. Such technology would also protect the privacy of whistleblowers before they decide to become sources.

...

In 2017, in the first indictment of an alleged whistleblower since Trump became president, the Justice Department charged Reality Leigh Winner under the Espionage Act for leaking a top-secret NSA document to a news organization that was widely reported to be The Intercept. At the time, Winner was a 25-year-old decorated U.S. Air Force veteran, who was also a dedicated CrossFit trainer with a passion for slowing the climate crisis. The document was an NSA intelligence report describing a cyberattack: Russian military intelligence officers hacked a U.S. company that provides election support in swing states and then, days before the 2016 election, sent local election officials — who were customers of this company — over 100 malware-infected emails, hoping to hack them next.

Government insiders charged under the Espionage Act are not allowed to defend themselves by arguing that their decision was in the public interest.

According to court documents, Winner was one of only six people who had printed the document she was accused of leaking (she had searched for, accessed, and printed the document on May 9, 2017). After searching all six of those employees’ work computers, they found that Winner was the only one who also had email contact with the news organization that published the document. (Using her private Gmail account, she had asked the news organization for a transcript of a podcast episode.) At the time, those who accused The Intercept of having revealed Winner’s identity said that the online publication, in an attempt to authenticate a document that had been sent anonymously, shared a copy with the government that contained a crease, suggesting that it had been printed. But Winner’s email and printing history alone would have made her the prime suspect.

FBI agents then raided her house and interrogated her without a lawyer present and without telling her she had a right to remain silent, leading to defense accusations that the government violated her Miranda rights. In her house, they found handwritten notes about how to use a burner phone and Tor Browser. They also seized her Android smartphone and her laptop and extracted evidence from both devices.

The Government’s Argument That Reality Winner Harmed National Security Doesn’t Hold Up. Here’s Why.

The FBI also ordered several tech companies to hand over information from Winner’s accounts. Facebook provided data from her Facebook and Instagram accounts, Google provided data from two separate Gmail accounts she used, Twitter provided data on her account, and AT&T also contributed.

We don’t know exactly what these companies turned over, but we do know that they were ordered to disclose all information associated with her accounts, including:

Usernames, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers
A history of every time she logged on, for how long, and from which IP addresses
Metadata about every instance of communication she ever had over these services, including the type of communication, the source and destination, and the file size or duration of the communication

The FBI also requested records of accounts that were linked to her Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, and AT&T accounts — those that were created using the same email address, accessed from the same IP address, or logged into from the same web browser. (If users don’t take extra steps to remain anonymous, service providers can trivially link different accounts accessed from the same computer.)

The FBI also extracted everything it could from Winner’s phone:

Her photos, including one that was taken on February 7, 2017, of a webpage that listed eight SecureDrop servers run by different media organizations.
Data extracted from her smartphone apps like the Facebook app, which contained private messages she had exchanged with her sister, which were later used against her.
Her phone’s browser history: On March 7, she visited a website that contained a list of “dark web email providers,” and she searched the internet for “tor email.” On May 9, at “approximately 7:29:49 p.m. (EST),” Winner searched for and viewed the tips page of the news outlet to which she was accused of leaking the NSA document, as well as the tips page of a second news outlet; later that night, she logged into her Dropbox account, and three minutes after that, she viewed the first media organization’s tips page again.

So the FBI got a search warrant issued to Dropbox, demanding all the files and other information stored in Winner’s account, as well as “any messages, records, files, logs, or information that have been deleted but are still available to Dropbox, Inc.” Dropbox gave the FBI a thumb drive containing that data.

They also got a search warrant issued to Google, demanding nearly everything stored in Winner’s account, including:

All the messages in her Gmail account.
Her Google search history.
Her location history.
All of her web browser activity that could be identified based on web browser cookies (this could possibly include a list of every webpage she visited that used the Google Analytics service).
Backups of her Android phone.

Based on metadata that the FBI got from its previous court order to Google, the bureau learned about a new, separate Google account that it suspected Winner used, which it hadn’t previously known about. The search warrant demanded data from this other account as well. Google gave the FBI “electronic files in excess of 809mb (compressed)” of data from Winner’s two Google accounts.

The FBI also extracted data from her laptop. It discovered that she had downloaded Tor Browser on February 1, 2017, and had used it in February and March. The FBI also discovered a note saved to her desktop that contained the username and password for a small email company called VFEmail, and so it got another search warrant demanding a copy of everything in the VFEmail account as well.

Winner was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison, the longest sentence ever given to an alleged journalistic source by a federal court. The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, contributed to Winner’s legal defense through the Press Freedom Defense Fund.

...

Donations like yours enable us to provide free legal support to scientists like Maria Caffrey, a CSLDF client who filed a whistleblower complaint against the Trump administration on July 22. Caffrey was forced out of her job at the National Park Service after refusing to delete references to human-caused climate change from a report she authored about how sea level rise impacts coastal parks.

Sadly, attempts to muzzle scientists are increasingly common under the Trump administration. As Lauren Kurtz, our director, recently told The Guardian, this kind of censorship is “part of a larger trend of disputing scientific realities for political reasons” and it extends beyond climate to pesticide safety, reproductive health, and other issues.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/26/war-on-science-trump-administration-muzzles-climate-experts-critics-say

Maria Caffrey,

no lnx

War on science: Trump administration muzzles climate experts, critics say

Whistleblowers and groups tracking agency decisions say administration is ignoring science and censoring expertise

Emily Holden in Washington

Fri 26 Jul 2019 12.49 BST

The Trump administration is disregarding science and expertise across a wide range of government work, as documented by whistleblowers and groups tracking agency decisions.

Trump officials are censoring warnings about the climate crisis, moving critical agencies out of Washington and enacting far-reaching changes in what facts regulators can consider when they choose between industry and the public good.

[ I'm a scientist. Under Trump I lost my job for refusing to hide climate crisis facts

Maria Caffrey

Private Jets and Wastes of Taxpayer Money

When Clement first blew the whistle, he accused the department of wasting taxpayers' money. Clement, who had experience in science, policy and climate change, had been reassigned by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to a position for which he said he was unqualified.

The move shifted him from director of the Interior Department's Office of Policy Analysis, where he spoke frequently and publicly about the impacts of climate change, to a position in the accounting department. There, he had a "job title with no duties in an office that specializes in auditing and dispersing fossil fuel royalty income," he wrote in his resignation letter.

Complaints about the Trump administration wasting taxpayer dollars gained steam in recent weeks as news broke that Zinke and other cabinet officials, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and recently resigned Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, were using private planes paid for with public money.Politico reportedthat Zinke and his aides took several private or military flights, including a charter plane between Las Vegas and his hometown that cost taxpayers more than $12,000.

"Secretary Zinke, you and your fellow high-flying Cabinet officials have demonstrated over and over that you are willing to waste taxpayer dollars, but I am not," Clement wrote in his letter of resignation.

Breaking Point: Zinke on Loyalty to Trump

After blowing the whistle, Clement told InsideClimate News that he tried to remain at his job and learn what was required for the new position. The breaking point came last week, he said, when Zinke accused one-third of the department of being disloyal to the Trump administration.

"Zinke's comments the other day, demanding loyalty from the career staff, was just so offensive to everybody," Clement said in an interview. "It caused me to sit and think, "I'm toiling away at something I'm not good at when I could be a voice for something that this agency is clearly not going to address.'"

He added that he felt the number of Interior Department employees who disagree with Trump and Zinke is probably much higher. "I would suggest it's well over 90 percent," he said, "and it went up after those comments."

Before his reassignment, Clement's work involved the intersection of climate change and public lands, and he was responsible for coordinating federal, state and local efforts to relocate Alaskan communities that are threatened by climate change.

"I'm still checking in with folks to see how things are going, and they're saying everything is stalled out in Washington," he said. "At the state level, everything is ongoing, but there's just no support in Washington." Meanwhile, the members of those communities are facing continued threats from erosion and the thawing of permafrost.

Investigations into Zinke Shifting Scientists

Clement's whistleblowing spurred two investigations into Zinke's actions in the department: one by the Office of Special Counsel and one by the Interior Department's Office of the Inspector General, which was called for by eight senators the day after Clement came forward. Both investigations are ongoing.

Clement said he's not sure what he'll do next, though made it clear that, while he's resigning, he's not going away. "I have a lot of contacts in and outside the agency," he said. "I'd like to use those to keep the pressure on the Trump administration."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

see DOI 8/8/17 sci made acc't, woman resigned epa?

also state dept

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/14/the-leakers-who-exposed-gen-flynns-lie-committed-serious-and-wholly-justified-felonies/

TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.

That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.

Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.

This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.

That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.

This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.

Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.

But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished.

IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”

It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.

But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes....Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them: [MASSIVE TWIT CODE DELETED HERE; SEE TEXT FILE MALWARE?!]

...ut this is just the tawdry, craven game of Washington. People with no actual beliefs shamelessly take diametrically opposite views on fundamental political questions based exclusively on whether it helps or hurts their leaders. Thus, the very same Democrats who just three months ago viewed illegal leaking as a grave sin today view it as an act of heroic #Resistance.

What matters far more than this lowly and empty game-playing is the principle that is so vividly apparent here. Given the extreme secrecy powers that have arisen under the war on terror, one of the very few ways that the public has left for learning about what its government officials do is illegal leaking. As Trevor Timm notes, numerous leaks have already achieved great good in the three short weeks that Trump has been president.

Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing, and want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection. That’s the same reason the rest of us should celebrate such illegal leaks and protect those who undertake them, often at great risk to their own interests, so that we can be informed about the real actions of those who wield the greatest power. That principle does not change based upon which political party controls the White House.

* * * * *

From the creation of The Intercept during the Obama presidency through to today under Trump, a central principle of The Intercept — a key reason it was created — was to enable whistleblowing and report on leaks in the public interest. As our pinned article on our front page says: “If You See Something, Leak Something,” with instructions on how to do that as safely as possible.

https://www.whistleblower.org/

Govt acct project also csw

piltz

https://www.whistleblower.org/

http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/10/epa-fracking-methane-emissions/

whistleblower

...

An environmental watchdog alleges that the answer may be a years-long, systematic cover-up of the true data surrounding these toxic emissions. That cover-up, the group says, was at the hands of at least one EPA researcher who accepted payments from the oil and gas industry.

In an incendiary federal complaint filed on Wednesday with the EPA’s Inspector General, the 28-year-old North Carolina-based group NC WARN wrote that “there has been a persistent and deliberate cover-up that has prevented the agency from requiring the natural gas industry to make widespread, urgently needed and achievable reductions in methane venting and leakage (’emissions’) across the nation’s expanding natural gas infrastructure.”

“Studies relied upon by EPA to develop policy and regulations were scientifically invalid,” the organization charged.

Specifically, wrote NC WARN in a press statement,“Dr. David Allen, then-head of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, has led an ongoing, three-year effort to cover up underreporting of the primary device, the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler and a second device used to measure gas releases from equipment across the natural gas industry. Allen is also on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been funded by the oil and gas industries for years.”

“The EPA’s failure to order feasible reductions of methane leaks and venting has robbed humanity of crucial years to slow the climate crisis,” said Jim Warren, director of NC WARN. “The cover-up by Allen’s team has allowed the industry to dig in for years of delay in cutting emissions—at the worst possible time.”

The cover-up was discovered by NC WARN, the group wrote in its complaint, when it became aware that the very inventor of the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler, an engineer named Touché Howard, had been attempting to blow the whistle for years on the crucial instrument’s malfunctioning. The critical failure causes the instrument to under-report methane emissions “up to 100-fold,” the organization wrote.

Studies have shown the EPA underestimating methane leaks from fracked gas production for years and Howard’s own research found that the agency has been “hugely underestimating” methane emissions specifically as a result of the faulty instrument, asCommon Dreams reported.

“In the extreme, that kind of failure could lead to catastrophic explosions,” Howard told the Los Angeles Times.

The complaint describes Howard’s repeated attempts to warn the EPA and Allen about the instrument and the silence he received in response.

“It appears that the goal of the [University of Texas] team was not to critically examine the problems but to convince [Environmental Defense Fund, who co-authored the study] and its production committee members that no problems existed,” NC WARN added.

“We believe Mr. Howard was specifically prevented from providing input because the [University of Texas] team knew that he would be able to show that their counterarguments were faulty and the resulting studies scientifically invalid,” the group concluded.

Howard’s concerns and the specific mechanical problems of the measurement instrument he has repeatedly pointed out have to this date never been addressed, “resulting in the failure of the EPA to accurately report methane emissions for more than two years, much less require reductions,” the complaint noted. “Meanwhile, the faulty data and measuring equipment are still being used extensively throughout the natural gas industry worldwide.”

Indeed, a graphic included in the complaint demonstrates that the malfunctioning Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler is relied upon to measure methane emissions at nearly every point in the fracked gas production process:

credit card lawsuits

pro publ

ow banks handle delinquent accounts is largely shielded from public scrutiny. They aren’t required to disclose how many suits they file. And the role of debt buyers — companies that purchase accounts from banks at a steep discount, then try to collect — further obscures what happens to customers who don’t pay.

To generate a national estimate for Capital One’s suits, ProPublica looked to Encore Capital Corp., the nation’s biggest debt buyer,which voluntarily disclosed the number of suits it had filed nationally until 2010. That year, the company reported having filed 517,000 suits.

Capital One filed about 40 percent more collection suits than Encore in 2010 in the states for which ProPublica has data, indicating that the bank filed at least half a million suits that year nationally and potentially hundreds of thousands more. Our data showed even more suits in the two preceding years.

Capital One declined to respond to this comparison or provide a count of its suits.

After 2010, Encore Capital, under scrutiny for its litigation practices, stopped disclosing the number of suits it had filed. A spokesperson for Encore did not explain the decision beyond saying, “as we have diversified and grown as a company, we continue to evaluate what disclosures are appropriate for our investors.”

Because some banks sell their defaulted accounts to debt buyers like Encore, it is impossible to determine how many of their customers were ultimately sued. The three largest card issuers, Citibank, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, have sold accounts to debt buyers in the past, according to court filings.

Capital One has also sold debt in the past. Stead, the bank’s spokeswoman, declined to provide detail on its debt-selling practices, but said the bank’s “strong preference” is to do its own collecting.

The lack of transparency leaves both borrowers and policymakers in the dark, said April Kuehnhoff, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “We need more data about debt-collection practices by both debt buyers and original creditors so that we can improve debt collection laws,” she said.

ProPublica contacted the six largest card issuers for this story, and all were guarded when it came to details about their approach to collections.

Citibank and Bank of America declined to respond to questions. Chase stopped filing lawsuits or selling its debt in 2011, after a whistleblower identified flaws in the bank’s collection practices. Those problems led to a consent agreement with regulators in 2013.

Discover filed the second-most suits, according to ProPublica’s analysis. It, too, declined to comment. Like Capital One, Discover’s volume of suits was also disproportionately large given the bank’s relatively small market share — Discover is the sixth-largest card issuer.

American Express, the fifth-largest issuer, filed relatively few suits. Spokeswoman Sonya Conway said the bank has not sold its debt in the past six years and had no plans to do so.

Federal regulators say they are alert to the potential for abuse through debt collection lawsuits, but it’s unclear that consumers should expect any more transparency in the near term.

Banks should “consider the risks of excessive litigation,” said Bryan Hubbard, spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The regulator has also publicly urged banks, when selling debts to buyers, to “consider selecting debt buyers who limit their use of litigation.”

While the agency says it closely monitors banks’ collection practices, that scrutiny does not extend to tracking the number of lawsuits each bank files. Hubbard said the agency does not consider the number of lawsuits “an effective indicator of bank safety and soundness or compliance.”

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in the process of writing new rules for debt collection that are expected to cover a wide range of activities, including the filing of lawsuits. A spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the CFPB tracked the number of collection lawsuits filed by banks or planned to in the future.

A number of the bureau’s past enforcement actions have centered on debt collection litigation practices. It filed suit against the largest collections firm in Georgia, Frederick J. Hanna & Associates, which counts Capital One among its clients. Calling the firm a “debt collection lawsuit mill,” the CFPB alleged attorneys often filed suits with faulty information. The law firm disputes the allegations, and the suit is ongoing.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13098/us-chamber-works-behind-scenes-gut-whistleblower-protections

Efforts to gut the federal False Claims Act backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. The federal push builds on previous back-door Chamber efforts through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to discourage states from pursuing fraud claims.

The False Claims Act (FCA) allows the government to recover from businesses that defraud government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and protects whistleblowers who report suspected fraud on government contracts. According to the Department of Justice, cases brought under the FCA resulted in the recovery of $42 billion from 1987-2013, making it an important legal tool for deterring fraud and protecting public funds.

Ensuring that contractors don't defraud the government is clearly in the public interest. Yet for a number of years, the Chamber has been targeting the FCA through its lobbying efforts and its Institute for Legal Reform, which advocates policy changes that would reduce financial penalties on many companies and make it harder for whistleblowers to report alleged misconduct.

Three of the four scheduled speakers at Thursday's hearing on "Oversight of the False Claims Act," held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, called for the FCA to be overhauled; two have clear ties to the U.S. Chamber.

Larry D. Thompson of the University of Georgia School of Law advocated for "greater creativity" in ethics oversight—offering the U.S. Chamber's proposal as an exemplar.

Thompson served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush and was previously a member of the U.S. Chamber's Board of Directors.

Jonathan Diesenhaus, a lawyer with Hogan Lovells US LLP, claimed that the qui tam statute gives too much power to whistleblowers "with less than honorable intentions." Diesenhaus wrote a report on state qui tam statutes and FCAs for the Chamber's ILR, and presented on potential FCA "reforms" at an Institute for Legal Reform summit in 2013.

U.S. Chamber Blocks State Anti-Fraud Efforts through ALEC

This won't be the first time the U.S. Chamber has gotten seemingly independent sources to mouth its talking points.

The Chamber has also worked through ALEC to pressure state lawmakers against strengthening state-level false claims laws, as shown in documents uncovered by Common Cause and reported on by The New York Times.

In 2012, a U.S. Chamber lawyer was the co-chair of ALEC's Civil Justice Task Force, along with Ohio state legislator Bill Seitz. After consulting with the Chamber's representative about a proposed False Claims Act to protect whistleblowers in Ohio, Seitz told The New York Times, "he learned that the bill, as originally written, would have been 'a trial lawyer’s bonanza.'" Seitz then began drafting an ALEC-friendly model and sent a warning to a fellow state legislator about the push to increase false claims litigation.

"While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved," Seitz wrote.

Seitz's efforts on the Chamber's behalf did not go unnoticed. He received the Institute for Legal Reform's "State Legislative Achievement Award" the following year.

4/16 DN luxemburg tax shelter, face 10 yrs

http://www.alternet.org/world/6-things-you-need-know-about-bombshell-panama-papers-leak

http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/09/jon-lundgren-blue-dasher-farm/

Jonathan Lundgren built an international reputation as a leading entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Now, after filing a whistleblower complaint against the USDA for blocking his research on negative impacts of insecticides, Lundgren is applying his science to regenerative agriculture at Blue Dasher Farm, a new research and demonstration farm in South Dakota.

Research Showed Neonicotinoids Harmed Butterflies

Lundgren worked as a senior research entomologist at the USDA for 11 years, conducting risk assessment research on pesticides and genetically modified organisms. Last fall the agency suspended Lundgren, claiming he made an error in a travel authorization for a speaking engagement. Lundgren said the agency suspended him over his research showing negative effects on monarch butterflies from neonicotinoid insecticides.

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“We discovered things that weren’t particularly convenient,” he said. “I saw there was a clear link to pesticide use.”

Lundgren filed a whistleblower complaint against the USDA, detailing attempts by USDA managers to block publication of new research, bar discussion of results with the media and disrupt his lab’s operations.

Laura Dumais, staff counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which filed the complaint, said: “Dr. Lundgren is suffering the proverbial professional death by a thousand cuts precisely because of the implications of his scientific work for agribusiness.”

Lundgren said he had no research agenda. “If our data showed neonics had not caused problems with monarchs, I wouldn’t have any problems publishing that,” he says.

The USDA tried to dismiss Lundgren’s complaint, but in December a judge rejected the request, allowing it to move forward.

The legal battle may take months or years to be resolved.

USDA Whistleblower Accuses Agency of Censorship of Pesticide Research https://t.co/iOL2gJHvKo @BugLundgren @nutiva pic.twitter.com/tgMOH9zkF1

— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) December 29, 2015

Blue Dasher Farm to Showcase Regenerative Agriculture Practices

In the meantime, Lundgren is launching Blue Dasher Farm, which, according to the farm’s website, aims to be “the first of a network of research, education and demonstration farms to bring scientific support to biodiverse food production.”

“There are certain topics for the food system that I can better address outside the USDA,” Lundgren said. “That drives what I am doing with Blue Dasher Farm.”

Inspiration for Blue Dasher Farm came from Lundgren’s research work with farmers who he said are on “the leading edge of food production” and regenerating soils.

“They didn’t need a lot of inputs, fertilizers, pesticides and GMOs,” he said. “They were creating farming systems that are so much more resilient to pests and climate change. I came to realize that these farmers are leading the science.”

Lundgren wants to showcaseregenerative agriculturemethods on Blue Dasher Farm. These include cover crops to reduce weeds and insect pressure, diversified crop rotations, soil fertility practices and conservation crops to increase pollinators, such as bees, among others.

Blue Dasher Farm aims to bridge the gap between farmers and researchers.

“We want to pair agroecologists with producers and train the next generation of farmers, ranches, beekeepers and scientists,” he said. “We have so much we can learn from each other.”

Blue Dasher Farm won’t be organic, but will encompass organic methods. “A lot of what we are doing fits into the organic model,” Lundgren said. “But I don’t think farmers will need to be organic to be more profitable using regenerative practices.”

Changing Agriculture From the Ground Up

Lundgren believes that changes in agriculture and food production will come from the grassroots and not from top-down approaches of government, universities and corporations.

“Transformational changes need to be done to food systems and these changes come from the bottom up,” he said. “We need science to innovate agriculture and not maintain the current paradigm. We want to give scientific support to grassroots efforts in regenerative agriculture.”

Lundgren’s project has struck a chord at the grassroots level with a successful Indiegogo crowd-funding effort for Blue Dasher Farm. His goal of $75,000 was surpassed to more than $81,000. Lundgren has also received donations of equipment and even bees.

“The response we’ve had so far has been so positive,” he said. “Consumers and independent scientists can support the kind of research they want, instead of research that is traditionally done by government and universities, which can be easily controlled by major corporations.”

National Network of Research Demonstration Farms

The 53-acre farm in Deuel County, South Dakota will be a fully operational farm that Lundgren aims to make a model of regenerative agriculture.

“Farmers can come and see the practices being used on an operating farm,” he said. “We want to show how a farm can be profitable on a small acreage.”

Blue Dasher Farm will initially focus on three areas: helping to solve the challenges facing honey bees with pesticides and mites, improving diversity on cattle grazing lands and enhancing soil health and crop production.

The first project will be to grow seeds for cover crops and conservation mixes.

“There’s a strong need for these seeds,” Lundgren said.

Looking to the long term, Lundgren aims to help establish similar research, education and demonstration farms like Blue Dasher around the U.S.

“We need a national network of research demonstration farms that are adapted to local needs,” he said. “That’s the vision, that’s the goal.”

Lundgren and his wife Jenna, who has a degree in biology, recently completed the purchase of the farm and will launch Blue Dasher Farm this spring.

“We’re excited to get started,” he said. “Things are happening at a fast pace.”

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Research/docs.htm?docid=11483

Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, an expert on the risk assessment of pesticides and genetically modified crops, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research for more than a decade. But when his findings on the ill effects of systemic pesticides and RNAi (a biological process in which RNA molecules inhibit gene expression) on pollinators began to gain traction and visibility, the harassment and punishments did as well.

The 40-year-old agro-ecologist and entomologist hoped that if he kept his head down, the increasing aggression would dissipate. But it didn’t. His scientific work continued to be disrupted along with his ability to communicate with other colleagues and the press.

Ultimately, the coercion and intimidation derailed Lundgren’s career and he stepped down as lead scientist and lab supervisor.

“USDA is blocking science,” Lundgren affirms. “And I refused to be silenced.”

On behalf of Lundgren, The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed an official Whistleblower complaint.

“Censorship of public agency science does not affect only scientists—it concerns the public at large as well as every entity relying upon the integrity of USDA science,” PEER executive director Jeff Ruch stated. “USDA cannot piously pledge its devotion to scientific integrity while at the same rebuffing any attempts to safeguard it.”

Separately, PEER has also filed a lawsuit against the USDA to strengthen its Scientific Integrity Policy. The suit targets official restraints on USDA scientists who publish or speak about their findings in peer-reviewed journals before professional societies and other unofficial settings.

In June, USDA Chief Scientist Catherine Wotecki wrote a letter which stated that the agency refused to consider the substance of the petition because scientific integrity only affected its “internal personnel rules and practices” and was therefore exempt from the public notice and comment process normally required of agency rules.

Sublethal Low-Level Harassment

Neonicotinoid seed treatments, manufactured by Bayer and Syngenta,have been harminghoneybees since they were introduced on the marketplace in the mid ’90s. They are the most widely used insecticides with sales of about $2.6 billion. Today they’ve infected our soil, waterways and have even been fond in our blood stream. They’re harming our pollinators as well as developing human brains.

“Neonics are 5 to 10 thousand times more toxic than DDT, and the environment and everything in it is being poisoned by the toxic equivalent of hundreds of billions of pounds of DDT every year,” Tom Theobald, activist, beekeeper and founding member of the Boulder County Beekeepers Association, said.

Lundgren’s troubles began around March when he submitted an article to the scientific journal Naturwissenschaften (The Science of Nature). His data illustrated that the seed treatment and systemic pesticide Clothianidin kills **monarch** butterfly larvae in the laboratory and that these pesticides were found in milkweed plants, the only food source for developing larvae, under field conditions.

Several months after Lundrgen’s article was published, his direct supervisor Sharon Papiernik confronted him and informed him that the paper shouldn’t have been submitted without “official” approval. She was also upset that he’d conducted a radio interview on the topic.

“The USDA gave me the okay [to publish the study] and then after the paper drew international attention from the media, said they never did,” Lundgren recalled.

Not long after that incident, TheNational Academy of Sciences and Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance scheduled Lundgren to give presentations on his research on the effects of genetically modified crops on farmland ecology. It is customary for these organizations to cover his travel expenses to Pennsylvania and Washington, DC.

Lundgren was literally boarding the plane when his superiors instructed him to return home and reimburse airfare costs out of his pocket. He was reprimanded for not completing the requisite paperwork. He was told to return to his duty station immediately, that he was officially AWOL and would not be paid for the week. This was his first accidental oversight on travel paperwork in 11 years and three other employees had had similar travel oversights within six weeks before Lundgren and received no discipline.

Next, he was suspended for 30 days before they reduced it to two weeks without pay.

“That’s a severe punishment for doing my job,” Lundgren said in an interview from his South Dakota homestead Blue Dasher Farms. “The tax payers, farmers and beekeepers paid for this research to be done. I don’t work for the government, I work for the people of the U.S. They deserve to know the latest science on these issues, even if that data is politically inconvenient.” The suspension affected his personnel file, harmed his reputation and cost him more than $9,000 in lost pay and expenses.

In total, the USDA cited two infractions: providing some of his research to a scientific journal without proper approval and violating official travel policies in connection with lectures he delivered in Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

However, Lundgren said these actions were not justified and in reality they were trying to block his research.

“I am not even anti-gmo or anti-pesticide,” Lundgren said. “I just believe that if there are safer methods they should be used first. If you do things right, you don’t need them.”

Lundgren criticized GMOs and systemic pesticides in the past. One paper he coauthored suggested that soybean seeds pretreated with Syngenta’s thiamethoxam (another nicotine-based systemic pesticide) produces no yield benefits to farmers, who pay extra for the seeds and may even be hurting beneficial predators in soybean fields that farmers need to manage the aphids that the insecticide isn’t controlling. And in 2013, he wrote a paper in Bioscience on the potential dangers of “gene splicing” pesticides or RNAi, which he said require further study to determine if they would possibly harm other organisms.

He also peer reviewed a report published by the Center for Foods Safety, Heavy Costs, which was critical of neonicotinoid pesticides for proving little to no benefit to farmers and adversely affecting bees.

Politics of Science

We put a lot of emphasis on the importance of science without taking into consideration the politics involved. For starters, science is not independent. Many universities who conduct research, for instance, are indirectly funded by big corporations who give them donations. cf

Meanwhile, many studies are conducted by Big Ag. For instance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not conduct its own studies on neonics. Rather, it relies on manufacturers such as Syngenta or Bayer to do due diligence. According to a paper published in Bioscience, the EPA’s pesticide evaluation process may be riddled with flaws, allowing industry too much power and influence. What ends up happening is that the companies, who benefit from allowing these poisons on the market, design, fund and conduct toxicity studies.

This corruption puts our planet and health in danger.

And science is also not impartial. For instance, when it came to the hormone-disrupting herbicide Atrazine, the EPA accepted only one industry-funded study for review in its 2007 and 2012 assessments. That study, which looked at an amphibian that doesn’t even live on this continent, determined atrazine is safe.

There were plenty of other researchers, but they either couldn’t afford to conduct the research or their papers were conveniently disqualified for technicalities. Incidentally, the EU banned atrazine 12 years ago.

For many, these shenanigans represent a deep-rooted corruption in the USDA and EPA that have gone unaddressed for a long time.

“The USDA and EPA have become cheerleaders, enablers and marketing agents for the mega-corporations,” Theobald said. “We no longer have a government, we are governed by an un-elected cabal of industrialists. Agencies we rely on to protect us from this are in bed with the poisoners and are running away from the science. It is a crowded bed and congress is right in there with the rest of them or we wouldn’t be where we are.”

According to Lundgren, he is not alone. There are other scientists from the EPA, USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service and USDA-Agricultural Research who have been hushed and harassed. They just haven’t come forward. Yet. In the suit, PEER cited instances where USDA scientists have been ordered to retract studies, water-down findings, remove their name from authorship (this happened to Lundgren in a paper involving the unintended adverse consequences of genetically modified corn crops) and endure long indefinitive delays in approving publication of papers that may be controversial. While media requests are either delayed or denied.

Sounds like bureaucratic red tape hell, not science.

Future is Sustainble Farming

Lundgren is embracing his new-found freedom. He is pouring his energy into the Blue Dasher Farm initiative and believes that the future hinges ondiversifying our food production. He wants to bridge science with innovative farmers in what will hopefully become a national network of centers of excellence in regenerative agriculture. “And through crowdfunding, we will allow the people to decide what research questions will be tackled. Independent risk assessments and beekeeper-driven science will be key to helping the bees,” Lundgren said.

“I’d like to usher in an innovation in food production and help solve the bee problem. The issues we are having with our bees has to do with the way we produce food.”

Check out his new project Blue Dasher Farm on Indiegogo and support and share.

What’s the Latest?

According to The Washington Post:

Judge Patricia M. Miller rejected earlier this month the USDA’s request to dismiss research entomologist Jonathan Lundgren’s complaint as “frivolous.” The USDA had argued that Lundgren’s complaint was based purely on “speculative and unsupported” allegations.

Miller, an administrative law judge with the Merit Systems Protection Board, also set a Jan. 6 status conference for th

http://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/new-research-links-neonicotinoid-pesticides-to-monarch-butterfly-declines/

seems legit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Project

http://www.whistleblowers.org/

Stand Up For Truth: An International Week to Support Whistleblowing

June 1-7, 2015 -- StandUpForTruth.org

Thomas Drake, Dan Ellsberg, Jesselyn Radack, Coleen Rowley, and Norman Solomon are making news in Europe with these events. They will deliver this petition in Berlin. Big news there, and this is your last chance to add your name and comments: click here.

ExposeFacts has been engaged in a campaign for truth 
about CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. Now, ExposeFacts
has produced the film "The Invisible Man: CIA Whistleblower
Jeffrey Sterling,

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-whistleblowers-tale-how-an-accountant-took-on-halliburton

This story was co-produced with Marketplace.

The email that ruined Tony Menendez’s life arrived on a warm and sunny February afternoon in 2006. Menendez is, by nature, precise and logical, but his first instinct was somewhat irrational. He got up to close the door to his office, as if that might somehow keep the message from speeding across cyberspace. Then he sat down at his desk to puzzle out what had just happened.

The email was sent by Mark McCollum, Halliburton’s chief accounting officer, and a top-ranking executive at Halliburton, where Menendez worked. It was addressed to much of the accounting department. “The SEC has opened an inquiry into the allegations of Mr. Menendez,” it read. Everyone was to retain their documents until further notice.

Panic gripped Menendez. How could McCollum have learned he had been talking to the SEC? The substance of the email was true. After months of raising concerns inside the company, Menendez had filed a complaint with regulators and Halliburton’s audit committee that accused the giant oil services company of violating accounting rules. But those complaints were supposed to be kept strictly confidential. Did the agency violate that trust? Did a board member? Somebody had talked.

Ten minutes passed, maybe fifteen. Menendez finally could move. He got up, opened his office door carefully and looked out. The floor normally bustled at that hour in the mid-afternoon. It had cleared out. He turned around quickly, grabbed his computer and rushed out of the heavily secured Halliburton complex north of Sugarland, Texas.

Menendez drove around for hours. He doesn’t remember much about where he went or for how long. At some point, he called his wife.

“Ondy,” he cried out to her, frantic. “They outed me!”

As shocked as Menendez was, his wife had seen something like this coming. Tony was a perennial optimist, even naïve. He always thought the company would do the right thing and fix its accounting problem. More jaded, his wife was prepared for the worst. She’d even urged Tony to start secretly taping his bosses.

“Is anyone following you?” she asked. “Make sure.”

Menendez looked around, seeing only a blur of cars pass at the beginnings of evening rush hour. He didn’t think anyone was tailing him. Then again, how would he know? He needed a lawyer – right now. Only months into the best job he’d ever had, he was in the most trouble of his professional career.

Menendez quickly googled “whistleblower” and “lawyer” on his phone and came up with Philip Hilder, the attorney who had represented the Enron whistleblower, Sherron Watkins. He placed the call and got through. Hilder heard Menendez out and then told him to listen carefully. Hilder instructed Menendez not to tell anyone, not even his wife. Too late for that, and he wouldn’t have kept it from Ondy anyway. They were partners.

“Ok. Then don’t talk on the phone anymore. Don’t talk in your office. Don’t talk in your house,” Hilder continued.

“How quickly can you come in to see me?”

I met Tony and Ondy Menendez this past winter, in a suburb less than an hour outside Detroit. Now 44, Menendez speaks earnestly and insistently, with the carefully chosen words one would expect from an accountant. His cheeks carry a tinge of pink and, at the slightest smile, his eyes are consumed by crow’s feet. He hid a bulky frame with a corduroy jacket over a black V-neck sweater.

They told me about their long and agonizing fight against a powerful corporation. It’s a story of what it takes to be a whistleblower in America – and what it takes out of you.

Many whistleblowers come undone after they launch their fights. They have trouble keeping their jobs, their marriages, their sobriety. Even friends who are sympathetic often see them as pains in the ass. They are forever marked by a scarlet “W.” And while whistleblowers naturally start off more skeptical than the average, the experience pushes some into often justifiable paranoia. If you want to know why whistleblowers can seem a little crazy, it’s because anybody who is not a little bit crazy would back away from the ordeal of confronting a corporate behemoth or grinding government bureaucracy.

There’s nothing crazy about Menendez, however, beyond an optimism that persists even when the facts don’t warrant it. Throughout the whole struggle, he just knew that somehow, sometime, the world would come around to seeing he was right about Halliburton.

Menendez grew up in Houston, the son of a jovial construction worker with an eighth-grade education. His father had once operated several chicken restaurants and there was a story about almost getting Bob Hope to be a partner, but it never happened. His father had lost it all.

His mother was an insatiably curious, perpetual graduate student in education. The eighth of 11 kids, Menendez was the only college graduate. Ondy, who grew up in Claude, a small town in North Texas, also was the only one in her family to graduate college. Serious and cautious, she has sedate brown hair that goes just below her chin with fine streaks of gray and wears red lipstick. Only faint hints remain of the 16-year-old girl who drove her Trans Am too fast down North Texas country roads.

At the University of Houston, Menendez dreamed of a career as a scientist but those plans were derailed when his girlfriend became pregnant. He switched to accounting because he could get a job more easily, married his girlfriend and had a daughter. Eager to establish himself in a solid profession, Menendez took a job at Ernst & Young as an auditor, a job that required a great deal of travel. One day, Menendez was on a business trip a hundred miles from Houston, where they were living. He called home and, unusually, there was no answer. He returned home to discover that his wife had left and when he finally spoke to her a few weeks later, she told him she couldn’t be a mother right then. His daughter was only about a year and a half old. Menendez raised her by himself for the next year and a half. Eventually, his wife returned and they divorced.

Menendez worked various accounting jobs before landing an executive position at Halliburton in March 2005. The job came with a fancy title, Director of Technical Accounting Research and Training, and was the most responsibility he’d ever had. Only months earlier, Halliburton had settled with the SEC after a two-year accounting probe. In hiring him, Mark McCollum told Menendez that he should be his “Smokey the Bear,” helping Halliburton prevent accounting fires from flaring. Menendez was 34, and now remarried to Ondy. They had two young children. He felt his life was on course.....

from 1st amend;

Here’s what passes for good news when it comes to a free press these days: two weeks ago, the Supreme Court refused without comment to hear a case involving New York Times reporterJames Risen. It concerned his unwillingness to testify before a grand jury under subpoena and reveal a confidential source of information in his book *State of War* on the secret U.S. campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. The case will now go back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which has already ordered him to testify. He says he will instead go to jail, if necessary.

That’s the bad news, right? Really bad news! The Supremes, the highest court in the land, refused to protect a reporter protecting a source at a moment when the Obama administration is in the midst of a wide-ranging crackdown on leakers and whistleblowersof all sorts (and those in the media considered to be aiding and abetting them). Actually, in a world in which Congress has not yet managed to pass a federal shield law that would protect reporters, it turns out that that’s actually the good news -- or so at least various media commentators say. Follow the logic here (and it is logic of a sort). Right now the Richmond, Virginia-based Appeals court decision applies only to courts in states under its jurisdiction. Had the Supremes agreed to take on the case, given their conservative and generally government-friendly bent on matters of executive power and what passes for national security, they would likely have ruled against Risen and that ruling would have applied nationally.

So, phew! Their rejection was a “blessing” (in disguise). The only harm they did, after all, was to confirm the atmospherics of a moment in which the Obama administration has been eager to shut down the leaking of unauthorized government information in a big way -- oh yes, and drive another modest nail into the coffin of a free-to-report-what-our-government-actually-does media. That’s the minimal, not the maximal damage claim; so say various relieved commentators. As for Risen, he now has to depend on the kindness of strangers, of in fact Attorney General Eric Holder, who may briefly declare a truce in the administration’s “war on the press” and not jail him.

Best news we’ve had in a while! And should Congress pass that shield law (even if it leaves national security out), uncork the champagne! And we’ll all toast the Supreme Court and the attorney general and the president and his top officials for their grace under pressure. Or rather, hold on just a sec there. Maybe that isn’t quite the classic American way of preserving our freedoms -- i.e, allowing our government free rein to preserve them for us, if its officials happen to be in the mood. In fact, as State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren suggests, we may be entering a grim new era when it comes to our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Tom

What We've Lost Since 9/11

Taking Down the First Amendment in Post-Constitutional America

By Peter Van Buren

America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process, or privacy when it came to protecting his power.

In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government's power. Now, we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a time when that government is abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges far more daunting than terrorism. Those ideas -- enshrined in the Bill of Rights -- are disarmingly concise. Think of them as the haiku of a genuine people's government.

Deeper, darker waters lie ahead and we seem drawn down into them. For here there be monsters.

The Powers of a Police State Denied

America in its pre-constitutional days may seem eerily familiar even to casual readers of current events. We lived then under the control of a king. (Think now: the imperial presidency.) That king was a powerful, unitary executive who ruled at a distance. His goal was simple: to use his power over “his” American colonies to draw the maximum financial gain while suppressing any dissent that might endanger his control.

In those years, protest was dangerous. Speech could indeed make you the enemy of the government. Journalism could be a crime if you didn’t write in support of those in power. A citizen needed to watch what he said, for there were spies everywhere, including fellow colonists hoping for a few crumbs from the king's table. Laws could be brutal and punishments swift as well as extra-judicial. In extreme cases, troops shot down those simply assembling to speak out.

Among the many offenses against liberty in pre-constitutional America, one pivotal event, the Stamp Act of 1765, stands out. To enforce the taxes imposed by the Act, the king's men used "writs of assistance" that allowed them to burst into any home or business, with or without suspicion of wrongdoing. American privacy was violated and property ransacked, often simply as a warning of the king’s power. Some colonist was then undoubtedly the first American to mutter, “But if I have nothing to hide, why should I be afraid?” He soon learned that when a population is categorically treated as a potential enemy, everyone has something to hide if the government claims they do.

The Stamp Act and the flood of kingly offenses that followed created in those who founded the United States a profound suspicion of what an unchecked government could do, and a sense that power and freedom are not likely to coexist comfortably in a democracy. A balancing mechanism was required. In addition to the body of the Constitution outlining what the new nation's government could do, needed was an accounting of what it could not do. The answer was the Bill of Rights.

The Bill's preamble explained the matter this way: “...in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of [the government's] powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added.” Thomas Jefferson commented separately, "[A] bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth."

In other words, the Bill of Rights was written to make sure that the new government would not replicate the abuses of power of the old one. Each amendment spoke directly to a specific offense committed by the king. Their purpose collectively was to lay out what the government could never take away. Knowing first-hand the dangers of a police state and unchecked power, those who wrote the Constitution wanted to be clear: never again.

It needs to be said that those imperfect men were very much of their era. They were right about much, but desperately wrong about other things. They addressed “humanity,” but ignored the rights of women and Native Americans. Above all, they did not abolish the institution of slavery, our nation’s Original Sin. It would take many years, and much blood, to begin to rectify those mistakes.

Still, for more than two centuries, the meaning of the Bill of Rights was generally expanded, though -- especially in wartime -- it sometimes temporarily contracted. Yet the basic principles that guided America were sustained despite civil war, world wars, depressions, and endless challenges. Then, one September morning, our Post-Constitutional era began amid falling towers and empty skies. What have we lost since? More than we imagine. A look at the Bill of Rights, amendment by amendment, tells the tale.

The First Amendment

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The First Amendment was meant to make one thing indisputably clear: free speech was the basis for a government of the people. Without a free press, as well as the ability to openly gather, debate, protest, and criticize, how would the people be able to judge their government's adherence to the other rights? How could people vote knowledgeably if they didn’t know what was being done in their name by their government? An informed citizenry, Thomas Jefferson stated, was "a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

That was how it was seen long ago. In Post-Constitutional America, however, the government strives to "control the message," to actively thwart efforts to maintain a citizenry informed about what’s done in its name, a concept that these days seems as quaint as Jefferson's powdered wig. There are far too many examples of the post-9/11 erosion of the First Amendment to list here. Let's just look at a few important ones that tell the tale of what we have lost since 9/11.

(Lack of) Freedom of Information

In 1966, an idea for keeping Americans better informed on the workings of their government was hatched: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Strengthened in 1974, it began with the premise that, except for some obvious categories (like serious national security matters and personal information), the position of the government should be: everything it does is available to the public. Like the Bill of Rights, which made specific the limits of government, FOIA began with a presumption that it was the government’s duty to make information available -- and quickly -- to the people, unless a convincing case could be made otherwise. The default position of the FOIA switch was set to ON.

Three decades later, the FOIA system works far differently. Agencies are generally loath to release documents of any sort and instead put their efforts into creating roadblocks to legitimate requests. Some still require signatures on paper. (The State Department notes, “Requests for personal information cannot be submitted electronically and should be submitted by mail.”) Others demand hyper-detailed information like the precise dates and titles of documents whose dates and titles may be classified and unavailable. The NSA simply denies almost all FOIA requests out of hand, absent a court order.

Most federal agencies now regard the deadlinemandated for a response as the time period to send out a “request received” note. They tend to assign only a few staff members to processing requests, leading to near-endless delays. At the State Department, most FOIA work is done on a part-time basis by retirees. The CIA won’t directly release electronic versions of documents. Even when a request is fulfilled, “free” copying is often denied and reproduction costs exaggerated.

In some cases, the requested records have a way of disappearing or are simply removed. The ACLU’s experience when it filed an FOIA-style request with the Sarasota police department on its use of the cell phone surveillance tool Stingraycould be considered typical. The morning the ACLU was to review the files, Federal Marshals arrived and physically took possession of them, claiming they had deputized the local cops and made the files federal property. An ACLU spokesperson noted that, in other cases, federal authorities have invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of records.

John Young, who runs the web site Cryptome and is a steadfast FOIA requester,stated, “Stonewalling, delay, brush-off, lying are normal. It is a delusion for ordinary requesters and a bitch of a challenge for professionals. Churning has become a way of life for FOIA, costly as hell for little results.”

Sealed Lips and the Whistleblower

All government agencies have regulations requiring employees to obtain permission before speaking to the representatives of the people -- that is, journalists. The U.S. Intelligence Community has among the most restrictive of these policies, banning employees and contractors completely from talking with the media without prior authorization. Even speaking about unclassified information is a no-no that may cost you your job. A government ever more in lockdown mode has created what one journalist calls a “culture where censorship is the norm.”

So who does speak to Americans about their government? Growing hordes of spokespeople, communications staff, trained PR crews, and those anonymous “senior officials” who pop up so regularly in news articles in major papers.

With the government obsessively seeking to hide or spin what it does, in-the-sunlight contact barred, and those inside locked behind an iron curtain of secrecy, the whistleblower has become the paradigmatic figure of the era. Not surprisingly, anyone who blows a whistle has, in these years, come under fierce attack.

Pick a case: Tom Drake exposing early NSA efforts to turn its spy tools on Americans, Edward Snowden proving that the government has us under constant surveillance, Chelsea Manning documenting war crimes in Iraq and sleazy diplomacy everywhere, John Kiriakou acknowledging torture by his former employer the CIA, or Robert MacLean revealing Transportation Safety Administration malfeasance. In each instance, the threat of jail was quick to surface. The nuclear option against such truthtellers is the Espionage Act, a law thatoffended the Constitution when implemented in the midst of World War I. It has been resurrected by the Obama administration as a blunt “wartime” tool for silencing and punishing whistleblowers.

The Obama administration has already charged six people under that act for allegedly mishandling classified information. Even Richard Nixon only invoked it once, in a failed prosecution against Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Indeed, the very word “espionage” couldn’t be stranger in the context of these cases. None of those charged spied. None sought to aid an enemy or make money selling secrets. No matter. In Post-Constitutional America, the powers-that-be stand ready to twist language in whatever Orwellian direction is necessary to bridge the gap between reality and the king's needs. In the Espionage Act case of State Department contractor Stephen Kim, a judge departed from previous precedent,ruling that the prosecution need not even show that the information leaked to a Fox news reporter from a CIA report on North Korea could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power. It could still be a part of an “espionage” charge.

A final question might be: How could a law designed almost 100 years ago to stop German spies in wartime have become a tool to silence the few Americans willing to risk everything to exercise their First Amendment rights? When did free speech become a crime?

Self-Censorship and the Press

http://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-06-monsanto-cash-helped-fund-bill-to-stifle-whistleblowers-in-iowa/

Monsanto cash helped fund bill to stifle whistleblowers in Iowa

By Tom Laskawy

.Speaking of Monsanto, it turns out they are playing a role in Iowa’s proposed anti-whistleblower bill — a bill focused primarily on agriculture. Should the bill pass, it will become illegal to produce undercover videos at various types of agricultural facilities (as well as to get a job at a facility with the express intent of producing a video). Sarah Damian of the Government Accountability Project, a “whistleblower advocacy organization,” observes over at the Food Integrity Campaign’s blogthat Monsanto has been throwing lobbying dollars behind Iowa’s effort to draw a steel curtain around food production. And not without reason:

… Monsanto has more facilities in Iowa than in any other state in the country, with more than 25 offices. The company is heavily invested in the bill’s outcome because “crop operations” are also covered, which would apply to Monsanto’s seed houses, pesticide manufacturing plants and research facilities throughout Iowa. The biotech and crop chemical giant wouldn’t want any undercover videos produced on its clock, apparently.

That’s a bit ironic, however, given the fact that Monsanto investigators are notorious for trespassing on farmers’ property and going to extreme measures to produce evidence of seed patent infringement, including posing as land mappers or even joining a local Alcohol Anonymous group to gain the farmers’ trust and gain video access to their fields. Talk about undercover.

And don’t think that Monsanto hasn’t planned ahead. According to Damian, there are provisions in the bill that would allow Monsanto to continue snooping around farmers’ fields in its ongoing search for so-called “seed thieves” aka “patent infringers.”

Despite occasional setbacks and even uncertainty in the marketplace, let it not be said that Monsanto has lost its taste for playing the heavy.

A 17-year veteran of both traditional and online media, Tom Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. Tom's long and winding road to food politics writing passed through New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Florence, Italy, and Philadelphia (which has a vibrant progressive food politics and sustainable agriculture scene, thank you very much). In addition to Grist, his writing has appeared online in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He is on record as believing that wrecking the planet is a bad idea. Follow him onTwitter.

Legendary whistle-blower girds for another round in marathon legal fight

Jeremy P. Jacobs, E&E reporter

Greenwire: Tuesday, September 17, 2013

A veteran U.S. EPA whistle-blower will get his day in a federal appeals court tomorrow.

Hugh Kaufman, who currently works for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, will argue at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that EPA unlawfully retaliated against him for his work in the agency's now-defunct ombudsman office from 1998 to 2000.

Kaufman claims that a series of public hearings he held as the ombudsman's chief investigator of Superfund and other hazardous waste sites "pissed off" EPA's management. Ultimately, he said, the agency abolished the ombudsman's office, transferring those responsibilities to the inspector general's office.

"They moved it to the IG," Kaufman said in an interview. "Then they told me, 'You cannot apply for the IG doing ombudsman work.'" He added: "They tried to stop me, and they had to find all types of excuses."

Kaufman has been a controversial figure at EPA for some 40 years and a legend among federal whistle-blowers. A former Air Force captain, Kaufman has in recent years spoken out about toxic chemicals to which cleanup workers were exposed after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He made similar remarks about ground zero first responders after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan (*_{Greenwire}_*, Jan. 6, 2011).

Tomorrow's case, which has been ongoing for a dozen years, focuses on fewer than 10 public hearings that Kaufman oversaw during his time with the ombudsman office. The hearings occurred across the country and typically centered on allegations that EPA wasn't doing enough to clean up toxic waste.

Some allegations are strong. According to court documents filed by the Labor Department, Kaufman at times claimed EPA was in collusion with the party responsible for pollution. At one hearing, he claimed the public was being "used as pawns" by EPA. In another he compared EPA to the Soviet Union.

The hearings led EPA to conclude Kaufman "did not always perform his Ombudsman duties in an objective, impartial, and civil manner." Further, he "demonstrated a blatant lack of objectivity" and was "aimed at inciting public angst, rather than objective fact-finding."

The agency would not comment on the lawsuit, referring press requests to the Labor Department. Labor did not return requests for comment in time for publication.

Arguments tomorrow will focus on whether Kaufman's retaliation claims are moot because he took too long to file them. Initially, the Labor Department found Kaufman's claims to have merit and said EPA retaliated against him for being "too effective" in the ombudsman office.

However, an administrative law judge, on appeal, dismissed Kaufman's claims in 2009, ruling that he took too long to file them under relevant environmental statutes. The judge also held that Kaufman was retaliated against not for whistle-blowing but for criticizing EPA employees.

To which Kaufman replied: "That's what whistle-blowing is!" Kaufman also claims the judge erred by viewing his retaliation claims collectively, instead of one at a time.

The case also highlights what many lawyers consider insufficient protections for government whistle-blowers. Gary Baise, a lawyer who served as EPA's first chief of staff, said Congress has not done enough to assure whistle-blowers -- and potential whistle-blowers -- will not face retaliation. Kaufman echoed that sentiment, noting that his case has taken 12 years to resolve so far and there is no end in sight.

"This thing may not come to ultimate resolution for another 10 years," he said. "You're talking about over 20 years of litigation to try and resolve a whistle-blower dispute gentlemanly. That means for all intents and purposes, there really are no whistle-blower protections." Baise said Kaufman's work shouldn't be simply dismissed.

"There is always a kernel of truth in some of his stuff," Baise said, "but you never know if it's the whole story."

Kaufman said he doesn't want money from the lawsuit. He was in talks to settle the case for a small sum before EPA's lawyers pulled out of the negotiations. He said he likes his current job and has "a great boss now." Asked what he hopes will come of the lawsuit, Kaufman said he hopes for a return of the ombudsman.

"Ultimately, maybe we can get an ombudsman function back," he said. "That would be nice."

:{:{Kathleen Carroll, a former government lawyer turned whistleblower at the California Commission On Teacher Credentialing CTC has filed a potentially explosive suit against CTC officials and the state government that charges that the Commission attorneys and management of the commission were engaged in numerous illegal acts possibly resulting in thousands of improperly sanctioned teachers in the state of California. Some of the charges in Carroll's charged the commission with tampering with the selection and composition of the Committee of credential members, CTC attorneys improperly tampering with case outcomes, acting outside their legal jurisdictional scope to go after teachers, promoting the existence of a high level of nepotism, cronyism, favoritism and conflicts of interest throughout the CTC and improperly maintaining underground regulations in violation of the administrative procedures act. It also alleges that CTC employees were retaliated against if they questioned the practices of anyone within CTC management.

This case which was filed on November 14, 2012 in the Superior Court in Sacramento County also has national implications as teachers continue to be demonized, bullied, retaliated against for reporting wrongdoing by school administrators and continually losing their jobs all under the guise of education reform.

Carroll v Commission on Teacher Credentialing et al., Sacramento Superior Court, Case No. 34-2012-00135527

http://www.upwa.info/documents/Carroll-v.-CTC.pdf

The above suit implies that the critical Commission on Teacher Credentialing might have been used as a vehicle to illegally prevent credentialing of public school teachers so that they would be forced to go to work at non-union charters throughout California and top staff including it's lawyers were involved in violating the California Education Code and other state and federal laws protecting the rights of teachers and students in California. The complaint also cites potential violations of the privacy rights of student records, found in the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

The Commission is a critical education administrative body funded by the Credential holders themselves through application fees and exam fees. CTC is in charge of licensing California teachers, school administrators, and other school personnel. It is also involved in investigating misconduct complaints against credential holders and applicants, approving teacher preparation programs, including through charter chains and entering into contracts with private entities such as NCS Pearson in the development of education testing, teacher evaluations and curriculum development in California. The CTC also has a Committee on Accreditation which presumably accredits credential preparation programs.

It has played a key role in approving alternative routes to teacher certification, approval of teacher preparation programs within charter chains and for-profit colleges and has been intimately involved in teacher evaluations through its contract with the testing and publishing giant NCS Pearson. All of this government decision making while a number of its Commissioners were connected personally or financially with the industry they are supposed to regulate.

Carroll, who was a lawyer at the Commission on Teacher Credentialing for four years was fired after she blew the whistle and helped initiate an audit of the state commission which is directly under Governor Brown and the executive branch. In fact, her firing took place right in the middle of a state audit which included her reporting on the numerous illegal acts.

The California state auditors never independently verified the magnitude of the backlog, instead relying on the assertions of CTC management; individuals Carroll asserted were being dishonest about the existence of and specifics of the backlog in the first instance. CTC management asserted that over 12,000 misconduct reports were backlogged, but the actual number of delayed misconduct reports is still unknown due to the manipulated state audit.

Under the California Education Code section 44242.5, the CTC can investigate teachers by their receipt of particular types of information as outlined in the education code. The commission attorneys according to Carroll, were fishing for information about teachers and opening up cases in which they did not have jurisdiction. This could mean that thousands of teachers have been illegally sanctioned and prevented from receiving credentials in California. Without a credential, they cannot work, which would destroy their careers forcing many into bankruptcy, and possible loss of their homes.

This suit is critical as the push to deprive teachers of their due process rights continues throughout the state. Teachers at Los Angeles Unified report being detained unlawfully for hours in small cubicles without any means of communicating with anyone while detained. If these teacher jails sound shocking, they are- they are meant to break down the will of fully credentialed teachers in the push to replace them with less qualified, non-unionized staff.

As a result of not getting their state credentials because of illegal actions by government officials, potentially thousands of California teachers were also forced into non union low paying charters throughout the state, many of which do not require state teaching credentials. If true, the public has been defrauded, numerous teachers and others have been illegally harmed and thrown into abject poverty. And public education has been purposefully thrown into chaos at the hands of very dishonest, unethical and illegal actors.

It should be noted that NCS Pearson Inc., a third party contractor of CTC is being criminally investigated by the NY Attorney General along with other states for illegal kickbacks to officials who were voting on contracts for k-12 tests and certification tests. Pearson is also involved in the design of the common core standards and teacher assessments.

NCS Pearson controls a large part of public education funding through their publishing empire, evaluations of teachers, tests and through their design of the "common core" standards. In essence Pearson has a virtual monopoly grip on public education funds in the United States.

Ting Sung was chair of the CTC commission at the same time she worked at the Natomas charter school that she founded with her husband, was also being paid by the California Charter Association CCA and Cambridge education as a senior education consultant and was supposed to be a "public" representative of the CTC. Sun is also on the board of the Turkish Gulen charter school chain called Magnolia Public Schools which is the largest charter operator in the US and has schools in the Sacramento area and throughout the state. The Gulen school chain has been involved in corrupt practices throughout the US in which teachers from the cult which runs the school, have been forced to give kickbacks to the Gulen cult and public funds have flowed only to Gulen owned businesses. CBS 60 minutes did a story on this chain and the Iman, Fatullah Gulen, who runs it from Pennsylvania.

It appears that Ting Sun failed to disclose a number of economic conflicts on her Fair Political Practices Commission FPPC form 700 which are required of all commission members since they are voting on contracts with public funds going to private companies. The question again arises where was the senate rules committee in performing their required due diligence on Sun before her senate confirmation to the CTC?

According to the suit, Carroll reported to Ting Sun that Mary Armstrong, Director of Professional Practices at the commission had lied to the commission about the specifics of the backlog of misconduct reports and cases. Carroll also reported to CTC Director Dale Janssen that misconduct reports and cases that were not being timely processed which could cause serious harm to students and also involved delayed sexual misconduct reports, including school district reports. Carroll also reported to Janssen that there was a high level of cronyism, nepotism and favoritism that was creating a negative impact on the working environment as employees of the CTC were fearful of retaliation.

Right after Carroll complained to Janssen, Janssen according to the suit hired an investigator who then sought to discredit Carroll included releasing private medical information about Carroll which was irrelevant to the existence of and specifics of the backlog. Was this an improper use of public funds?

In June of 2010, Janssen, Armstrong and Director of Administrative Services Christa Hill proposed to lay off Carroll supposedly as a "cost cutting" measure. But, when CTC realized the layoff would not be fast enough to get rid of Carroll before the state auditors arrived at CTC, they moved for dismissal.

Carroll had discovered that not only was the CTC illegally investigating some teachers but they were retaliating against CTC employees and educators based on perceived medical health disabilities and retaliated against any employee who questioned these methods. There was an epidemic of bullying at the commission with many employees working in fear.

Carroll was also denied union representation when Pope showed up at her office door demanding that she accompany him to the HR department. This was right in the middle of the audit and after Carroll had numerous meetings with the state auditors.

The California state audit of CTC, requested by California Senate Pro Tem Democratic party leader Darrell Steinberg was based on a complaint by Carroll on the massive systemic backlog of misconduct reports at CTC, illegal actions on part of the CTC attorneys and rampant nepotism, favoritism and potential conflicts throughout the agency. Carroll had met with Steinberg's staff and asked to have the audit but instead of having a real independent investigation, Steinberg and his staff made changes in the audit request. The State Auditor failed to account for a number of items requested by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee at Steinberg's request, citing CTC's failure to track documents and numerous computer problems. Carroll reported numerous violations that never found their way into the audit report. Was this a case of government damage control? Who was suppressing the evidence? Steinberg's office? The state auditor? Or both? Carroll has now suffered severe economic harm as result of reporting serious illegal acts by government officials.

A key player in Steinberg's office was his education advisor Susanna Cooper whose husband it turns out is Eric Douglas who owns Leading Resources inc. Leading Resources Inc has a number of public agency clients including the Bureau of State Audits which was doing the audit of the CTC. Cooper is also on the advisory board of WestEd. On May 5, 2010, the morning before the Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted on the audit request of CTC, Cooper sent an e-mail to Carroll's office e-mail address at CTC essentially sending her the draft of what she would say on behalf of Steinberg at this hearing. Carroll had informed all of Steinberg's staff about the fear of retaliation at the CTC and was shocked that Cooper had sent her this email at CTC since there was a real possibility that her e-mail was being monitored by this time.

After the audit report of CTC was released to the public on April 7, 2011, an oversight hearing took place at the Capitol. Carroll testified at this oversight hearing. As Carroll began to speak about the CTC attorneys looking at teachers they had no right to look at, Assembly member Ricardo Lara cut her off and told her that her time was up. After Carroll spoke, not one assembly person or senator had questions of Carroll about the systemic problems at the Commission despite the extensive material received about the specifics of the backlog and misconduct and the reign of harassment and bullying against CTC employees.

After the state audit oversight hearing, Executive Director Dale Janssen, Director of the Professional Practices Mary Armstrong and Assistant General Counsel Willard Leroy Pope all quickly left the CTC. Pope also had children on the payroll. Others have also left the agency. Willard Leroy Pope was replaced by attorney/ALJ Michael Barth. Barth was an ALJ for the Office of Administrative hearings, the special education division. Query what type of potential conflicts Barth's employment at CTC might pose. Barth previously worked for the CTC after leaving the employ of the law firm of Rothschild Wishek & Sands. The Rothschild firm has a contract with the California Teachers Association and represents teachers who come up for review by the CTC. Previously after Barth left the Rothschild firm, CTC had some sort of conflict cone set up around Barth. Given the numerous potential liability that conflicts pose for any entity, it is a wonder why CTC could not find a more neutral candidate for the job. Was this act purposeful? Time will tell.

This lawsuit has the potential to expose a lot, including the real possibility of criminal violations, including the conflicts of interest in the drive to shutdown public education and turn this system over to privatizers and billionaire speculators who see this as a growing area for high profits and little costs with no regard to a quality accessible public education system and certainly with no regard to human suffering as numerous people who report illegal acts get severely retaliated against. Economic harm is a powerful weapon and is used and abused too frequently by those in positions of power.}:}:

:{:{By Steve Zeltzer

lvpsf@igc.org}:}:

4. Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

Obama signed both the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, expanding whistleblower protections, in November 2012, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) furthering these protections in January 2013. His NDAA signing statement, however, undermines these protections, stating that those expanded protections “could be interpreted in a manner that would interfere with my authority to manage and direct executive branch officials.” Thus, in his signing statement, Obama promised to ignore expanded whistleblower protections if they conflicted with his power to “supervise, control, and correct employees’ communications with the Congress in cases where such communications would be unlawful or would reveal information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential.”

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama administration is targeting government whistleblowers, having invoked the otherwise dormant Espionage Act of 1917 seven times. The Obama justice department has also used the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to obtain a conviction against Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower John Kiriakou for exposing the waterboarding of prisoners, ironically making Kiriakou the first CIA official to be sentenced to prison in connection with the torture program. The justice department charged former National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake with espionage for exposing hundreds of millions of dollars of waste.

The highly visible prosecution of Bradley Manning has become what some may argue to be the most effective deterrent for government whistleblowers. Manning admitted to leaking troves of classified documents to WikiLeaks, but pleaded not guilty on counts of espionage.

Censored #4

Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

Dana Liebelson, “Why Is Obama Bashing a Whistleblower Law He Already Signed?,”Mother Jones, January 10, 2013, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/obama-whistleblower-protections-signing-statement.

Glenn Greenwald, “Kiriakou and Stuxnet: The Danger of the Still-Escalating Obama Whistleblower War,” Guardian, January 27, 2013,http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/27/obama-war-on-whistleblowers-purpose?INTCMP=SRCH.

Paul Harris, “Barack Obama’s ‘Extreme’ Anti-Terror Tactics Face Liberal Backlash,”Guardian, February 9, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/09/barack-obama-extreme-anti-terror-tactics-liberal-backlash?INTCMP=SRCH.

Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning Prosecution to Call Full Witness List Despite Guilty Plea,” Guardian, March 1, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-manning-prosecution-guilty-plea.

Student Researchers:Shannon Polvino, William Scannapieco, Kathyrn La Juett, and Justin Lewis (State University of New York–Buffalo)

Faculty Evaluator:Michael I. Niman (State University of New York–Buffalo)

http://www.ted.com/speakers/margaret_heffernan.html often loyal and conservative

snowden NAS

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/bill-moyers-outrageous-bill-known-animal-and-ecological-terrorism-act-seeks-silence

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175719/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_obama%27s_war_on_whistleblowers_finds_another_target/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=0dc8be1f10-TD_Van_Buren6_30_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-0dc8be1f10-308879753#more

Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn’t have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the U.S. government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the U.S. have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden’s documents.

pyle story led to church hearings DN http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/13/chris_pyle_whistleblower_on_cia_domestic

As NSA director General Keith Alexander blasts the leaks that exposed widespread surveillance of Americans, we’re joined by Chris Pyle, a former military instructor who exposed the CIA and Army’s monitoring of millions of Americans in the 1970s. Pyle discovered the Army and CIA were spying on millions of Americans engaged in lawful political activity while he was in the Army working as an instructor. His revelations prompted Senate hearings, including Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, ultimately leading to a series of laws aimed at curbing government abuses. Now teaching constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College, Pyle says the NSA is known for attacking its critics instead of addressing the problems they expose.1500 agents spying on any group of 20 plus!

...

CHRISTOPHER PYLE: I received a briefing at the U.S. Army Intelligence Command that showed me the extent of the surveillance system. There were about 1,500 Army agents in plain clothes watching every demonstration in the United States of 20 people or more. There was also a records system in a giant warehouse on about six million people. I disclosed the existence of that surveillance and then recruited 125 of the Army’s counterintelligence agents to tell what they knew about the spying to Congress, the courts and the press. As a result of those disclosures and the congressional hearings, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished. This was before Watergate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Pyle, did you, at that time, suffer any repercussions from your willingness to step forward and reveal what was going on to Congress?

CHRISTOPHER PYLE: Well, two things happened. The Army created a 50-man unit in the Pentagon whose sole job was to discredit my disclosures. That effort failed: The disclosures were all quite accurate.[but he said his life was boring!] I was also put on President Nixon’s enemies list, which resulted in a tax audit.

TransCanada Whistleblower Warns Of Shoddy Pipeline Practices

Posted: 06/11/2013 7:37 am EDT

Former TransCanada Corp. employee Evan Vokes' impassioned testimony before a Canadian Senate committee last week painted "a very, very bleak picture of the pipeline industry in Canada, and probably by extension, the States," according to Sen. Betty Unger.

Vokes' allegations on Thursday against TransCanada, the Canadian company leading the controversial proposal to send tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast via the Keystone XL pipeline, were sobering: a "culture of noncompliance" and "coercion," with "deeply entrenched business practices that ignored legally required regulations and codes" and carries "significant public safety risks."

"It's organized crime, in my opinion," Vokes, an expert in pipeline welding and now whistleblower against his ex-employer, told The Huffington Post after the hearing. "The source of revenue is legal, but how they go about it isn't legal."

TransCanada quickly came to its own defense after learning of the attack.

"We take great exception to the claims by Mr. Vokes that we do not take safety and compliance issues seriously," company spokesman Shawn Howard told HuffPost. "Our track record and the safety of our energy infrastructure network shows that we do."

Vokes worked for TransCanada for five years until May 2012, when he said he was fired without cause. From his first days at the company, Vokes recalled raising concerns, or as he put it, "pointing out the obvious." He provided the Canada Senate with evidence supporting complaints of what he said were shoddy safety practices, including management pressure to retract a welding code violation on a natural gas line feeding a tar sands project in Alberta, and the use of "substandard materials" in the original Keystone pipeline that carried the heavy, molasses-like oil into U.S. Midwest markets.

"What I have documented is a mix of politics and commercial interests that has resulted in the false public claims of exceptional industry practice," Vokes told the Senate committee.

Today, Vokes said, he sees the same "breaches of construction quality" in portions of TransCanada's Keystone XL already laid in Texas. The advocacy group Public Citizen Texas posted a highlighting what it says are dents, faulty welds and other anomalies that have been unearthed in recent weeks.

"What else are they cutting corners on? No one knows," said Vokes.

Damon Hill, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Safety Administration, said the agency is "in contact with TransCanada to discuss the results of recent inspections, the excavations of certain portions of the newly constructed pipeline, and to monitor the operator's activities to make any necessary repairs."

The anomalies that have been uncovered don't raise immediate concern for Richard Kuprewicz, president of the Redmond, Wash.-based pipeline safety firm Accufacts Inc. Still, Kuprewicz suggested that the industry is far from immune to safety issues.

"There is a tendency that the bigger the project, the harder it is to maintain control," Kuprewicz said. "You're just trying to do more things and so you've got to be sure management team has appropriate quality-control checks and balances."

One pressure, Kuprewicz added, is the "time value of money." The $7 billion Keystone XL project has now been stalled for three years as it awaits a permit from the Obama administration for the northern portion that crosses the U.S.-Canada border.

"Cash is only flowing when you're moving oil," Kuprewicz said.

Vokes said this industry reality showed itself to him as pressure to "step into unsound practice" and to "stop investigations." He said TransCanada managers forced him to take "stress leave" before he could finish submitting all of his documentation during an internal audit at the company.

"When he brought issues forward, TransCanada took Mr. Vokes' concerns seriously and believes it has treated him fairly and appropriately," said Howard, who would not provide a reason for Vokes' dismissal. "For legal reasons, we are unable to comment any further."

Don Wishart, a senior operations and major projects adviser at TransCanada, spoke in front of the same Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources on Feb. 12. In response to questions about an unnamed whistleblower, Wishart said the allegations were "administrative." He went on to suggest that tar sands oil "floats on water," which some scientists refute.

"What they presented to the Canadian Senate was a lie," Vokes told HuffPost.

"You don't know you're a whistleblower until the retaliation starts," he said. "The wrong-doers in positions of authority will do everything they can to discredit you."

Kuprewicz acknowledged the whistleblower label is something people "want to be careful about seeking," adding that it typically "doesn't go well in industry."

The Canadian senators expressed similar sentiments as they questioned Vokes on Thursday.

"I have enormous respect for you and the courage it's taken to come forward," said Sen. Judith Seidman. "I'm worried about Canadian safety as we look at building an increasingly larger infrastructure across the country."

At the same time, senators also demonstrated the Canadian government's push to get more tar sands oil flowing. "It's important for this country to get bitumen to the U.S.," said Sen. Michael MacDonald. "I also think it's important to do it safely."

On this point, Vokes doesn't disagree. He called oil and gas the "lifeblood" and said he believes it is possible to pipe it all safely. "I don't have a problem with what's in pipeline," said Vokes. "I have a problem if it comes outside the pipeline."

In an interview in April, Joe Oliver, Canada's minister of natural resources, told HuffPost that 99.9996% of oilgoing through U.S. pipelines is delivered safely.

Unger underscored this safety record, and asked Vokes to "rationalize" his seemingly incongruous allegations.

"I've been on several projects that were very nearly disasters. I'm surprised there aren't more accidents," Vokes responded, noting that pipeline problems may not result in accidents until decades later -- often "long after designers and those that constructed them have retired."

"There's thousands of cracks in the system -- it's just which ones will become the problem? It's low probability, high consequence," Vokes said.

"Regardless of my poor experiences with some individuals, there are still a lot of people that would like to do it right," added Vokes. "That's the only thing that is saving us."

collateral damage: AP reporter personal phone record grabbed 5/13

akre tried to use whistleblower law but could not b/c it's not illegal to lie in media?!

monsanto fox milk gmo

gmo bgh

rbst gmo fox killed akre and wilson investigation on milk monsanto hired lawyer who sent letter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JL1pKlnhvg0 invest rept

*** Status of the reports features in this story today (6/20/11): ****

Today, Steve Wilson is Chief Investigative Reporter Action 7 News Detroit were he is making quite a name for himself going after corporate greed/injustice. Many feel he is one of the best reporters in the US today due to the injustice that he experienced. His large following call him the Bulldog. He tirelessly helped to expose Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Search 'Steve Wilson Bulldog'

Jane Akre is the News Editor for the National News Desk of Injuryboard where she is also a great asset.

AlterNet [1] / By Jim Hightower [2]

Why It's Literally Sickening to Ban Whistleblowers from Exposing Cruelty at Factory Farms

April 24, 2013 |

In most state legislatures today, "off the wall" has become the political center, and bizarre bills are no longer unusual.

Still, it seems strange that legislators in so many states — including Arkansas, California, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and Vermont — have simultaneously been pushing "ag-gag" bills that are not merely outrageous, but downright un-American. Each is intended to quash free speech by banning journalists, whistleblowers, workers and other citizens from exposing illegal, abusive or unethical treatment of animals that are incarcerated in the factory feeding operations of huge corporations.

Our nation's founders mounted a revolution to establish our free-press and free-speech rights, enshrining them in the First Amendment to ensure the free exchange of ideas — even when the Powers That Be didn't like the message that such freedoms produce. In fact, the Founders knew from hard experience that the protection of those freedoms was especially essential when the Powers That Be have something they're eager to hide from the citizenry.

Yet here comes a mess of so-called "conservatives" attempting to use state government to outlaw messengers who shine a light on corporate wrongdoing — turning those who expose crimes into criminals. Even kookier, these repressive laws declare that truth-tellers who so much as annoy or embarrass the corporate owner of the animal factory are guilty of "an act of terrorism."

Oddly, each of these state proposals is practically identical, even including much of the same wording. That's because, unbeknownst to the public and other legislators, the bills don't originate from the state lawmakers who introduce them. Instead, they come from a Washington-based corporate front group named ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council.

This infamous "bill mill" periodically convenes its corporate funders to write model bills that serve their special interests. Then ALEC farms out bills to its trusted cadre of state lawmakers across the country, who introduce them as their own, not mentioning the corporate powers behind them.

The secretive ALEC network produced the model ag-gag bill in 2002 and began shipping it from state to state under the ominous tile, "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act."

The freedom-busting terrorists in this fight are not those who reveal the abuse, but the soulless factory-farm profiteers in the corporate suites and the cynical lawmakers who serve them.

Actually, factory farms are not farms at all. They are corporate-run concentration camps for pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys and other food animals.

Held in corporate confinement, these creatures of nature are denied any contact with their natural world, instead being crammed by the thousands into concrete-and-metal buildings, where they are locked in torturously tiny cages for the duration of their so-called "life" — which is nasty, brutish and short. All this merely so food giants like Tyson Foods, Smithfield and Borden can grab fatter and quicker profits. Their abusive industrial system is so disgusting that America's consumers would gag at the sight of it.

That's why they're desperate to keep you from knowing what goes on inside. Nonetheless, word has been getting out, as animal rights advocates, consumer groups, reporters, unions and others have exposed some of the realities of animal confinement to the public, including showing wretch-inducing photos and videos. Rather than cleaning up their act, however, the industrial food powers have simply doubled down on disgusting by getting industry-funded state legislators to go after anyone who reveals their ugly secrets.

Their attack on whistleblowers will gag you almost as badly as viewing the gross animal abuse. But, really, who do they think they're fooling? If they have to pass a law that says, "Don't look here," people will naturally wonder what they're hiding — and will demand to see it and change it. Six states have passed ag-gag laws, and six more are presently moving toward passage. To see what your legislature is doing — and to join the fight to stop factory farming everywhere — go to humanesociety.org.

See more stories tagged with:

factory farm [3],

ag gag [4]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/food/why-its-literally-sickening-ban-whistleblowers-exposing-cruelty-factory-farms

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jim-hightower-0

[3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/factory-farm

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ag-gag

[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

michael decort coast guard radios break when wet, hull problem mil contractor Lockheed #1 in world kpfa doc

deep water aegis sys; went htru channels to top, resorted to youtube.(1st?)

his job eliminated, (lost 20 yr pension?)

cbs 60 min, fed investigation

cf also mwrap armor?

http://www.truth-out.org/print/3631 whitleblower iraq war

Charles Smith is a hero for trying to rein in KBRand their extreme spending in the early part of the Iraq war. Not only did the Army and other parts of the government try to push him to an early retirement and keep him from saving us billions of dollars, the federal agency in charge of helping prevent the system from retaliating against him failed miserably. He has dug into the numbers on cases brought to this agency and has found that he was not the only one screwed, and not just by the system they are trying to change, but by the group we pay to protect federal whistleblowers. Ironically, the Obama administration almost greatly overhauled and fixed this agency with a comprehensive bill that had the votes to pass, but was killed by an anonymous Republican hold in the dying days of the last Congress. The bill has been reintroduced into this new Congress [4]. Here is his story, the statistics that show that the problem is widespread and some ideas of what to do about it.

Palast says BP employee spied on

palast vult pic; http://www.gregpalast.com/vulturespicnic/pages/filecabinet/chapter7/dan_lawn_memo.pdf

chuck hamel took concorde to tell BP pres valdez term problem; ex cia hired to spy,

entraped; failed; used RC toy truck to bug hotel; busted/arrested by navy seal intel team

===

http://billmoyers.com/2013/04/26/whistleblowers-american-heros/

Whistleblowers: American Heroes?

April 26, 2013

by Lauren Feeney

The press, the public and democracy itself have always relied on people of conscience speaking out as witnesses of corruption, misconduct and the abuse of power. The whistleblower’s vital role is even protected by federal law. But the Obama administration has been waging what filmmaker Robert Greenwald calls a “war on whistleblowers,” particularly those accused of exposing information related to national security. His new film “War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State,” tells the story of four government employees who, in the post 9/11 era, spoke out against official wrongdoing and paid a heavy price. We caught up with Greenwald to learn more.

Lauren Feeney: Introduce us to the whistleblowers featured in your film.

Robert Greenwald:The first is Franz Gayl, an amazing American hero who spoke up, took on the military industrial complex and was responsible for saving many, many lives by forcing the institutions to introduce the MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle) in Iraq instead of what they had previously been using. By the soldiers’ admission and by quite a few others, this was literally a lifesaver of enormous importance.

The second whistleblower is Michael DeKort, who discovered that radios being put on Coast Guard boats were not waterproof, which is really hard to even believe.

The third whistleblower is Thomas Drake, who spoke out loudly about the fact that our phones were being tapped, and that there was surveillance software available that could have done a better job, a legal job, and a more inexpensive job that was not used because of a competing project. He was accused and cited under the :{Espionage Act:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:.

And the fourth case is Tom Tamm, whose revelations were part of what led to the original New York Times story about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping.He had worked for the FBI, and his father had worked there, and he lost his job and paid a tremendous price for speaking up.

Feeney: You call this a “war on whistleblowers.” Why the crackdown?

Greenwald:The national security state — the ideologies and institutions created by the 1947 National Security Act, like the CIA and the National Security Council — believes in all secrets, all the time, and is leading the charge for silence. It is important that the administration and citizens resist this pressure. The crackdown on the national security whistleblowers by the Obama administration is a cause of great concern and unhappiness for whistleblowers, reporters and transparency experts.

Feeney: What effect does this “war on whistleblowers” on our democracy?

Greenwald:The effect of silence and secrets is devastating. Think of all the important stories and issues that have been exposed only because of whistleblowers. We must fight hard to make sure that tradition is upheld. Our action guide tells you what you can do to protect whistleblowers and investigative reporters.

Robert Greenwald is an activist and filmmaker whose documentaries include Uncovered: The War on Iraq, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism and Koch Brothers Exposed.

Moyers & Company [1] / By John Light [2], Lauren Feeney [3]

6 Brave Govt. Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act by Obama's Administration

May 2, 2013 |

The Obama administration has been carrying out an unprecedented crackdown [4] on whistleblowers, particularly on those who have divulged information that relates to national security. The Espionage Act [5], enacted during the first World War to punish Americans who aided the enemy, had only been used three times in its history to try government officials accused of leaking classified information — until the Obama administration. Since 2009, the administration has used the act to prosecute six government officials. Meet the whistleblowers.

1. Thomas Drake

Thomas Drake is a former senior executive at the NSA who was charged under the Espionage Act for the unauthorized “willful retention” of classified documents. Drake’s problems with the agency started when he found himself on the minority side of a debate about two new tools for collecting intelligence from digital sources. One program, called Trailblazer, was being built by an outside contractor for $1.2 billion; the other, known as ThinThread, was created in-house by a legendary crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney for about $3 million.

Then, in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11 2001, the NSA, with the approval of the Bush administration, began the illegal warrantless surveillance of American citizens. This did not sit well with Drake, who says that during his time in the Air Force, where he also did surveillance work, the imperative to protect American’s privacy was drilled into him. “If you accidentally intercepted U.S. persons, there were special procedures to expunge it.”

“I was faced with a crisis of conscience,” Drake told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer [6]. “What do I do — remain silent, and complicit, or go to the press?” As a father of five, one of whom has serious health problems, Drake concluded that he’d go to the press with his complaints about the NSA — but he’d only share unclassified information, thinking perhaps he’d lose he’s job but at least not end up in jail. So he leaked the story of ThinThread vs. Trailblazer — a simple story of government waste — to the Baltimore Sun. A few months later, the FBI appeared at his door. Drake at one point faced up to 35 years in prison for various charges, most of which were dropped. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for exceeding authorized use of a computer.

2. Stephen Jin-Woo Kim

In 2010, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a specialist in nuclear proliferation who worked as a contractor for the State Department, pleaded not guilty to charges of leaking information about North Korea to Fox News.He was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury [7], but the casehas not yet been brought to trial [8].

Fox journalist James Rosen, with whom Kim had been in touch in the past, reported in 2009 that North Korea would likely test another nuclear missile in reaction to a pending United Nations Security Council resolution condemning its nuclear tests. The Justice Department said Kim wasFox’s source [9].

Kim, who immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea when he was nine years old, told Bloomberg News [10] that “to be accused of doing something against or harmful to U.S. national interest is something I can’t comprehend.” Kim’s lawyers said that Kim was being charged for participating in the type of exchange between experts and the press “that happen hundreds of times a day in Washington.”

“In its obsession to clamp down on perfectly appropriate conversations between government employees and the press, the Obama Administration has forgotten that wise foreign policy must be founded on a two-way conversation between government and the public,” his lawyers said.

3. John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for giving journalists the names of two former colleagues who interrogated detainees using harsh practices including waterboarding. Kiriakou became central to the debate surrounding interrogation tactics in 2007 with an interview on ABC News. By then, he had left the CIA and was working at the auditing firm Deloitte. "Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique, and I struggle with it," he said in his ABC interview. He suggested that our country should abandon the technique because "we're Americans and we're better than this."After the interview, Kiriakou was asked to leave Deloitte but became a source for other journalists investigating torture. Over the course of the next year he gave the name of one former colleague to a freelance reporter and gave the name of another former colleague to a reporter for The New York Times. He pleaded guilty in October 2012 to the leak made to the freelancer; the charge related to The New York Times was dropped.

4. Shami K. Leibowitz

Shamai K. Leibowitz, a former FBI Hebrew translator and the grandson of Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, pleaded guilty to leaking classified information before a judge who later said he did not know exactly [11] what Leibowitz had disclosed — just that it wasa “very, very serious offense.” Leibowitz was sentenced to 20 months in prison. [12]

Leibowitz had leaked 200 pages of transcribed conversations recorded by FBI wiretaps of the Israeli embassy in Washington. They documented discussions embassy officials had with American supporters of Israel and at least one member of Congress — and a discussion among Israeli officials in which they worry that their exchanges might be monitored. The leak was to a blogger, Richard Silverstein, who writes the blogTikun Olam [13] promoting peace between Israel and Palestine and monitoring U.S. government overreach. Silverstein burned the transcripts when Leibowitz came under investigation.

In an interview with The New York Times [11], Silverstein said that Leibowitz released the transcripts because of Israel’s aggressive attempts to influence public opinion in the U.S., and because Leibowitz worried that Israel would take what he saw as the potentially disastrous step of bombing nuclear facilities Iran. “I should not have done what I did,” Leibowitz said at his sentencing, “and I regret it terribly.”

5. Pfc. Bradley Manning

Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted to leaking 700,000 government documents to Wikileaks [14], including videos of air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq in which civilians were killed. Manning said one of the videos, from 2007, was particularly disturbing to him — it showedAmerican Apache helicopters [15] killing a dozen people in Baghdad, including twoReuters journalists, and then opening fire on a van that arrived to help the victims. Manning noted the “seemingly delightful blood lust” of the airmen.

Manning said in February thathis goal in releasing the materials [16] was to show the public “what happens and why it happens.” “I believed if the public — in particular the American public — had access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

In 2010, while on leave, Manning first tried to leak materials to The Washington Post, but felt the reporter he spoke with was not interested. He then left a message with the ombudsman’s office at The New York Times which was not returned. So he uploaded the files to WikiLeaks. Hewas arrested [17] on May 29, 2010; his trial is set for June 3, 2013.

A military judge ruled earlier this month that for Manning to be convicted under the Espionage Act, the prosecutionwould have to prove [18] that Manning had “reason to believe” that the files could be used to harm the U.S. or to aid a foreign power. Manning said during his February confession that he thought carefully about the information he was releasing, and felt nothing he leaked could be used to harm the U.S.

6. Jeffrey Sterling

Jeffrey Sterling, a former-CIA officer,pleaded not guilty [8] to the charge that he leaked information about a U.S. plan to sabotage Iran’s nuclear operations to Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist James Risen for his book State of War. The book had a chapter ona botched operation [19] to derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions through sabotage, and the Justice Department charged that Sterling had been Risen’s source.

Risen recounts how, in the early 2000s, the CIA sent a Russian nuclear scientist to Iran to leak flawed plans for a nuclear bomb-triggering device in an attempt to set back the country’s efforts to develop a bomb. But the flaw in the bomb plans was so obvious that the Russian scientist spotted it immediately — the scientist then told the Iranians that there was an obvious flaw in the plans so that they would take him seriously. Risen’s source felt the Iranians likely were able to learn from the parts of the plans that weren’t flawed, and that the operation, intended as sabotage, may have in fact brought Iran closer to developing a nuclear weapon.

The CIA had suspected Sterling of leaking information to Risen since 2002, when Risen wrote an article about the effect racial discrimination had on Sterling’s career. In the article, Sterling said he had repeatedly been passed over for advancement because he is black — a superior once told him he was not an ideal spy because “you kind of stick out as a big black guy.”Sterling sued the CIA [20] for racial discrimination in 2000.

After his arrest, Sterling maintained his innocence, and Risen refused to reveal his confidential sources for his book, citing the first amendment in a lengthyaffidavit [21]. As of summer 2012, the Justice Department says it has effectively terminated [8] the case.

See more stories tagged with:

whistleblowers [22]

Whistleblower

Top Amazon official resigns in disgust over whistleblower rightsJulia Conley / Common Dreamsan 5/20

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