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exposefacts.org
Is the Vault 7 Source a Whistleblower?
Mar 14, 2017
It is the leakiest of times in the Executive Branch. Last week, Wikileaks published a massive and, by all accounts genuine, trove of documents revealing that the CIA has been stockpiling, and lost control of, hacking tools it uses against targets. Particularly noteworthy were the revelations that the CIA developed a tool to hack Samsung TVs and turn them into recording devices and that the CIA worked to infiltrate both Apple and Google smart phone operating systems since it could not break encryption. No one in government has challenged the authenticity of the documents disclosed.
We do not know the identity of the source or sources, nor can we be 100% certain of his or her motivations. Wikileaks writes that the source sent a statement that policy questions "urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency" and that the source "wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyber-weapons."
The FBI has already begun hunting down the source as part of a criminal leak investigation. Historically, the criminal justice system has been a particularly inept judge of who is a whistleblower. Moreover, it has allowed the use of the pernicious Espionage Act--an arcane law meant to go after spies--to go after whistleblowers who reveal information the public interest. My client, former NSA senior official Thomas Drake, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act, only to later be widely recognized as a whistleblower. There is no public interest defense to Espionage Act charges, and courts have ruled that a whistleblower's motive, however salutary, is irrelevant to determining guilt.
The Intelligence Community is an equally bad judge of who is a whistleblower, and has a vested interest in giving no positive reinforcement to those who air its dirty laundry. The Intelligence Community reflexively claims that anyone who makes public secret information is not a whistleblower. Former NSA and CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden speculated that the recent leaks are to be blamed on young millennials harboring some disrespect for the venerable intelligence agencies responsible for mass surveillance and torture. Not only is his speculation speculative, but it's proven wrong by the fact that whistleblowers who go to the press span the generational spectrum from Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to mid-career and senior level public servants like CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake to early-career millennials like Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The lawbreaker does not get to decide who is a whistleblower.
Not all leaks of information are whistleblowing, and the word "whistleblower" is a loaded term, so whether or not the Vault 7 source conceives of him or herself as a whistleblower is not a particularly pertinent inquiry. The label "whistleblower" does not convey some mythical power or goodness, or some "moral narcissism," a term used to describe me when I blew the whistle. Rather, whether an action is whistleblowing depends on whether or not the information disclosed is in the public interest and reveals fraud, waste, abuse, illegality or dangers to public health and safety. Even if some of the information revealed does not qualify, it should be remembered that whistleblowers are often faulted with being over- or under-inclusive with their disclosures. Again, it is the quality of the information, not the quantity, nor the character of the source.
"Whether an action is whistleblowing depends on whether or not the information disclosed is in the public interest and reveals fraud, waste, abuse, illegality or dangers to public health and safety."
Already, the information in the Vault 7 documents revealed that the Intelligence Community has misled the American people. In the wake of Snowden's revelations, the Intelligence Community committed to avoid the stockpiling of technological vulnerabilities, publicly claiming that its bias was toward "disclosing them" so as to better protect everyone's privacy. However, the Vault 7 documents reveal just the opposite: not only has the CIA been stockpiling exploits, it has been aggressively working to undermine our Internet security. Even assuming the CIA is using its hacking tools against the right targets, a pause-worthy presumption given the agency's checkered history, the CIA has empowered the rest of the hacker world and foreign adversaries by hoarding vulnerabilities, and thereby undermined the privacy rights of all Americans and millions of innocent people around the world. Democracy depends on an informed citizenry, and journalistic sources--whether they call themselves whistleblowers or not--are a critical component when the government uses national security as justification to keep so much of its activities hidden from public view.
As we learn more about the Vault 7 source and the disclosures, our focus should be on the substance of the disclosures. Historically, the government's reflexive instinct is to shoot the messenger, pathologize the whistleblower, and drill down on his or her motives, while the transparency community holds its breath that he or she will turn out to be pure as the driven snow. But that's all deflection from plumbing the much more difficult questions, which are: Should the CIA be allowed to conduct these activities, and should it be doing so in secret without any public oversight?
These are questions we would not even be asking without the Vault 7 source.
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One Day After Sentencing, CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling Tells His Side of the Story
"They already had the machine geared up against me. The moment that they felt there was a leak, every finger pointed at Jeffery Sterling."
May 12, 2015
One day after a federal court sentenced the former CIA officer to 42 months in prison for allegedly blowing the whistle on a botched CIA mission, Jeffrey Sterling is sharing his side of the story.
In The Invisible Man: Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, a short documentary released Tuesday, Sterling describes how his experience with racial discrimination within the CIA took him from working as an Agency case manager to living out of his car, to years later facing charges under the Espionage Act for supposedly leaking national intelligence secrets to New York Times journalist James Risen.
The film was directed by Judith Erlich, whose past works include the Oscar-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
"They already had the machine geared up against me," Sterling said. "The moment that they felt there was a leak, every finger pointed at Jeffery Sterling."
Sterling, who has maintained his innocence, says he had lawfully approached the Senate Intelligence Committee to express concerns over certain CIA operations and the impact those missions might have on the safety of troops in Iraq.
Prior to reporting those concerns, however, Sterling had filed racial discrimination charges against the CIA, becoming the first CIA case officer ever to do so. That case was eventually dismissed on the grounds that its details might compromise national security and Sterling was eventually fired.
Years later, after meeting his wife and moving on to a job in the healthcare industry, Sterling was told by his attorneys that he was being looked at as a possible leak.
Sterling, who was convicted on January 26, 2015, said, "It was a shock. It's still a shock. He added, "They shut me up with my discrimination case and they closed the door on me with the criminal case."
Throughout the case, Sterling's supporters have denounced the injustice of the charges and sentencing, particularly as it contrasts with the recent plea bargain deal granted to former CIA chief General David Petraeus, who leaked troves of classified material to his mistress and biographer Paula Broadwell.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and coordinator of whistleblower advocacy organization ExposeFacts.org, who produced the Sterling documentary, told Democracy Now! on Tuesday that the sentence marks a "continuation of the war on whistleblowing and journalism and a clampdown on the essential flow of information for democracy" under the Obama administration.
"General Petraeus's 'fondle on the wrist' by the government was hovering over the courtroom yesterday," Solomon continued, "showing the absurdity and tyranny of what the administration continues to do."
In a press statement following the sentencing, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern said: "It seems clear that the White House told the Department of Justice to make an example of Jeffrey Sterling--an example of what one can expect if s/he decides to blow the whistle."
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Sterling Verdict Another Measure of Declining Government Credibility on Secrets
Yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to 42 months in prison for leaking information about a dubious CIA plot to deal nuclear blueprints to Iran to New York Times journalist James Risen.
Given how circumstantial the case against Sterling was -- consisting largely of metadata -- not to mention the hand slap David Petraeus got weeks ago for leaking far more sensitive information and then lying about it to the FBI, that's a tough sentence.
May 12, 2015
Yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to 42 months in prison for leaking information about a dubious CIA plot to deal nuclear blueprints to Iran to New York Times journalist James Risen.
Given how circumstantial the case against Sterling was -- consisting largely of metadata -- not to mention the hand slap David Petraeus got weeks ago for leaking far more sensitive information and then lying about it to the FBI, that's a tough sentence.
But given the government's call, in sentencing memoranda, that Sterling spend up to 24 years in prison, it was, as Government Accountability Project lawyer Jesselyn Raddack said, the least worst outcome.
The sentence should also be seen as a rebuke to the government and its frenzied claims about secrecy, most notably the claim they made in this case that leaking information to a journalist is worse than leaking it directly to our adversaries.
The sentencing "guidelines are too high," Judge Brinkema told Sterling and his lawyers yesterday. She then proceeded to sentence Sterling along the same lines she did former CIA officer John Kiriakou -- 3 years for leaking an officer or asset's identity -- plus 6 months in Sterling's case because he did not admit guilt. In doing so, Brinkema treated this as one discrete leak and not the 7 incidences of espionage that the government charged it as. Indeed, Brinkema's sentence seemed to accept an argument Sterling's lawyers had made in their own sentencing memorandum, that the Espionage Act was never meant to cover leaks to journalists.
The government's insistence that whistleblowing and accountability equate to spying is coming under increasing scrutiny, even mockery.
And yet they refuse to learn. Even as Brinkema announced Sterling's sentence yesterday, a rogue's gallery of former CIA Directors and Deputy Directors wrote to the Times complaining that the newspaper had published the names of three top counterterrorism officials who have overseen significant screw-ups and criminal acts during the war on terror. They claimed that, "Officials who work on covert operations do not escape accountability."
And yet among the men who signed this letter were: Michael Hayden, who ran an illegal wiretap program encompassing all Americans and repeatedly, egregiously lied to Congress; George Tenet, who oversaw a torture program that exceeded even the expansive guidelines approved by DOJ; Leon Panetta, who exposed the identities of SEAL team members who killed Osama bin Laden so Hollywood could celebrate their role in a film falsely proclaiming of the value of torture.
And David Petraeus.
David Petraeus, the man who leaked the identities of classified officers to his mistress so she could write a fawning biography of him, who will not spend a day in prison for a crime akin to what Sterling committed, signed a letter claiming that those who work on covert operations -- as Petraeus himself did at both DOD and CIA -- "do not escape accountability."
There is no better evidence that those who work on covert operations do escape accountability than this list of signatories, many of whom have done just that.
In a speech given last week at an Intelligence Community legal conference, former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith warned the IC's lawyers that, "Your credibility about national security harm is a limited and diminishing resource and must be spent carefully."
That credibility is indeed diminishing quickly.
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