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How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers
The Guardian ^ | 5/22/16 | Mark Hertsgaard

Posted on 05/22/2016 6:35:59 PM PDT by Nachum

By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did. He leaked top-secret documents revealing that the National Security Agency was spying on hundreds of millions of people across the world, collecting the phone calls and emails of virtually everyone on Earth who used a mobile phone or the internet. When this newspaper began publishing the NSA documents in June 2013, it ignited a fierce political debate that continues to this day – about government surveillance, but also about the morality, legality and civic value of whistleblowing. Sign up to the long read email Read more

But if you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance programme were largely ignored.

“The government spent many years trying to break me, and the more I resisted, the nastier they got,” Drake told me.

Drake’s story has since been told – and in fact, it had a profound impact on Snowden, who told an interviewer in 2015 that: “It’s fair to say that if there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there wouldn’t

(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: drake; edwardsnowden; nsa; pentagon; snowden; thomasdrake; whistleblowers
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Interesting read.
1 posted on 05/22/2016 6:35:59 PM PDT by Nachum
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To: Nachum

“the relevant documents were accidentally destroyed in a ROUTINE PURGE..”

My, my, my...quite infectious, these days.

Good post.

Wow.


2 posted on 05/22/2016 6:55:08 PM PDT by gaijin
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To: Nachum

There should be 50 comments here, at least.

This is pretty discouraging.

Great article, all the same.

It should concern **ALL OF US**.


3 posted on 05/22/2016 7:01:47 PM PDT by gaijin
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To: gaijin

Yeah. And just remember, these are the people who arrest us for jaywalking.

Laws for thee, not for me.

Gee, doya think our ancestors had this in mind when they rebelled against the British Overlords?


4 posted on 05/22/2016 7:03:41 PM PDT by Regulator
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To: Nachum
Very interesting? Absolutely!

It certainly is the most detailed (and verifiable?) summary of the NSA's and the Pentagon's possible transgressions against the former Constitution.

Still, looks like peanuts compared to the complete over-throw of our government that has occurred since 2008.

5 posted on 05/22/2016 7:05:31 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is another agitator for republicanism like Sam Adams when we need him?)
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To: Regulator
"Gee, doya think our ancestors had this in mind when they rebelled against the British Overlords?"

More likely, the founders would have rebelled again anytime between 1904 and 1918 when the Marxists/Progressives first began their long march towards the total destruction of the Constitutional Republic.

6 posted on 05/22/2016 7:09:57 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is another agitator for republicanism like Sam Adams when we need him?)
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To: gaijin

It proves that Snowden was right to do what he did - Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents combined.

The more distant the government grows from the will of the people, the more valuable whistleblowers are.


7 posted on 05/22/2016 7:10:43 PM PDT by thoughtomator
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To: SuperLuminal

Obama vs. your privacy file...

http://nachumlist.com/privacy.htm


8 posted on 05/22/2016 7:13:52 PM PDT by Nachum (ISIS is alive... and Chris Stevens is dead)
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To: Nachum

“...Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.”

To all the FReepers who kept saying Snowden should have “gone through proper channels”, this would have happened too him to, and we would never have heard about the government trying harder to spy on us than it does on our enemies. What say you now?


9 posted on 05/22/2016 7:13:53 PM PDT by Boogieman
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To: Nachum

Over time I have become more and more sympathetic to Edward Snowden.

Never thought that would happen.


10 posted on 05/22/2016 7:29:15 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum ("During a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" --George Orwell)
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To: Boogieman

>> What say you now?

Same as I’ve said before: The agencies aren’t the problem. It’s the feckless “representation” that fails to represent the citizen voter that elected it.


11 posted on 05/22/2016 7:31:00 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: Nachum

It’s a long article, but very much worth the read.

Thanks for posting it.


12 posted on 05/22/2016 7:31:01 PM PDT by justlurking
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To: Nachum

Very good read.

Thanks for making me even more paranoid.


13 posted on 05/22/2016 7:55:06 PM PDT by VanShuyten ("a shadow...draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence.")
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To: VanShuyten
Thanks for making me even more paranoid.

Sorry about that.

14 posted on 05/22/2016 7:55:56 PM PDT by Nachum (ISIS is alive... and Chris Stevens is dead)
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To: gaijin

Bump


15 posted on 05/22/2016 8:03:05 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar
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To: Boogieman
What say you now?

I read the whole article, can't take it all in in one read.

I would have gotten fed up and quit. It's not worth it or the money and tried to train to qualify for a more honorable job if such a thing still exists.

It didn't take me long to realize where whistle blowing would get me but still the only way I would divulge classified material would be under torture. It's all pretty compartmentalized and technical anyway, probably some exceptions.

16 posted on 05/22/2016 8:03:37 PM PDT by Aliska (Trump/Love 2016 has a nice ring to it, now we shall see)
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To: Nachum; null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; TWhiteBear; Salvation; WildHighlander57; ..

“We are now becoming a police state,” Diane Roark said in a 2014 television interview. Referring to herself and the other NSA whistleblowers, she added, “We are the canaries in the coal mine. We never did anything wrong. All we did was oppose this programme. And for that, they just ran over us.”

“They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this to protect you,’” Roark’s fellow whistleblower William Binney told me. “I will tell you that that’s exactly what the Nazis said in Special Order 48 in 1933 – we’re doing this to protect you. And that’s how they got rid of all of their political opponents.”

These are strong statements – comparing the actions of the US government to Nazi Germany, warning of an emerging “police state” – so it’s worth remembering who made them. The NSA whistleblowers were not leftwing peace nuts. They had spent their professional lives inside the US intelligence apparatus – devoted, they thought, to the protection of the homeland and defence of the constitution.

They were political conservatives, highly educated, respectful of evidence, careful with words. And they were saying, on the basis of personal experience, that the US government was being run by people who were willing to break the law and bend the state’s awesome powers to their own ends.

They were saying that laws and technologies had secretly been put in place that threatened to overturn the democratic governance Americans took for granted and shrink their liberties to a vanishing point. And they were saying that something needed to be done about all this before it was too late.

Check out original article *at the link* , and FR comments.

Thanks, Nachum.

17 posted on 05/22/2016 8:18:37 PM PDT by LucyT
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To: Nachum

Outstanding!


18 posted on 05/22/2016 8:28:13 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is another agitator for republicanism like Sam Adams when we need him?)
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To: Nachum

Thank you for posting this piece. It was interesting to consider Snowden and whistleblowing from their point of view.


19 posted on 05/22/2016 9:06:25 PM PDT by Chee Benny Toe
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To: Regulator
Gee, doya think our ancestors had this in mind when they rebelled against the British Overlords?

Nope! Not even close. This is a million times worse than anything the crown ever tried to pull.

20 posted on 05/22/2016 9:20:47 PM PDT by Still Thinking (Freedom is NOT a loophole!)
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