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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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DOJ Claims Grossly Disparate Treatment Will 'Promote Respect for the Law'
On Thursday, David Petraeus will be sentenced in North Carolina. If all goes as his lawyers and the government have arranged, he will get a year of probation for leaking some of this country's most sensitive secrets to his mistress.
Apr 21, 2015
On Thursday, David Petraeus will be sentenced in North Carolina. If all goes as his lawyers and the government have arranged, he will get a year of probation for leaking some of this country's most sensitive secrets to his mistress.
On May 11 (the date has been postponed from this week), Jeffrey Sterling will be sentenced for -- the jury decided -- leaking details of the Merlin program, a CIA effort to deal flawed nuclear blueprints to Iran. In a sentencing memorandum, the government argues Sterling should be sentenced for 235 to 293 months -- upwards of 19 years -- for exposing CIA's Merlin (the government argues he exposed a program that might have thwarted Iran's nuclear ambitions, ignoring the evidence they themselves submitted showing it was poorly managed).
The same DOJ that recommends Petraeus should go virtually unpunished for sharing far more sensitive information with Paula Broadwell says that Sterling should go to prison for decades to set an example.
In addition, imposing a substantial prison sentence in this case is necessary to promote respect for the law and afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct. 18 U.S.C. SS 3553(a)(2)(A) & (a)(2)(B). The importance of these factors cannot be overstated. A substantial sentence in this case would send an appropriate and much needed message to all persons entrusted with the handling of classified information, i.e., that intentional breaches of the laws governing the safeguarding of national defense information will be pursued aggressively, and those who violate the law in this manner will be tried, convicted, and punished accordingly.
Now, DOJ isn't making quite as ridiculous an argument as this first appears. It goes on to list several things that might distinguish Sterling -- who leaked to expose CIA dysfunction rather than fluff his own ego -- from David Petraeus. First, Sterling -- who never got the option of a plea deal offering probation -- went to trial.
Most importantly for sentencing-disparity purposes, the defendant exercised his right to a jury trial.
And for that, the government argues, he should get a much harsher punishment.
Then, in a squishy paragraph invoking harm that it did not prove (and then backing off that to "potential harm"), the government argues Sterling's behavior is far worse than any other Espionage Act case that has been prosecuted recently.
Moreover, the degree of harm at issue here further separates the defendant's conduct from other individuals who communicated national defense information to the public through the media. Cf. Abu Ali, 528 F.3d at 263 (finding that the harm contemplated by Ali was much broader in scope and more devastating in terms of its potential impact than the harm contemplated by John Walker Lindh, whose sentence the district court had used for comparison purposes). Here, the potential harm caused by the defendant is far greater in scope than the harm contemplated or caused by a defendant in any recent SS 793 prosecutions.
They can make this argument, of course, because they're not prosecuting James Cartwright (at least not yet), even though he allegedly leaked details of the effort to thwart Iran's nuclear program using StuxNet. There's almost no conceivable way to suggest the Merlin story is a more harmful leak than the StuxNet one; they just haven't chosen to prosecute the latter.
Finally, they misrepresent the trial record to claim they've proved that Sterling leaked this information out of spite and self-interest.
People act in response to all manner of motivation, some more commendable than others. Here, the evidence established that the defendant communicated national defense information for purely selfish and vindictive purposes. It is exactly because this enormous decision-making responsibility cannot be left to the whims of the individual employee that the same secrecy agreement the defendant signed in 1993 made clear that, if he had concerns regarding classified information, he had appropriate, independent outlets through which to address such concerns, including the House and Senate intelligence committees and the CIA's Inspector General.
Earlier in the filing, the government dismissed Sterling's effort to bring his concerns to the Senate Intelligence Committee by falsely claiming he had never expressed concerns before and therefore suggesting his doing so in March 2003 had nothing to do with the Iraq war -- which is what SSCI's own documents and witness testimony indicated -- but instead had to do with spite. But Sterling had raised concerns before. As the government's own witness, the Russian scientist Merlin, testified, Sterling had raised concerns immediately with Bob S, only to be told to "shut up."
In other words, the government is still struggling to explain why Sterling should go to prison for decades when David Petraeus and (thus far) James Cartwright go free, the latter for a very similar kind of alleged crime as Sterling was found guilty of.
Yet they claim -- with no apparent intended irony -- that such a sentence would "promote respect for the law."
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Are FBI and NCTC Trying to Pressure Prosecutors to Charge the Second Intercept Source?
Citing "law enforcement and intelligence sources who have been briefed on the case," Michael Isikoff reports that the government has identified "the second leaker" -- a source of information on drone targeting and terrorist watchlisting for The Intercept.
Oct 28, 2014
Citing "law enforcement and intelligence sources who have been briefed on the case," Michael Isikoff reports that the government has identified "the second leaker" -- a source of information on drone targeting and terrorist watchlisting for The Intercept.
The FBI has identified an employee of a federal contracting firm suspected of being the so-called second leaker who turned over sensitive documents about the U.S. government's terrorist watch list to a journalist closely associated with ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources who have been briefed on the case.
The FBI recently executed a search of the suspect's home, and federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia have opened up a criminal investigation into the matter, the sources said.
Because it raises questions about whether the Administration has the "appetite" to prosecute another source for journalists, the article seems designed to generate pressure to do just that -- to get Congress (among others) to demand that the Justice Department prosecute this source.
But the case has also generated concerns among some within the U.S. intelligence communitythat top Justice Department officials -- stung by criticism that they have been overzealous in pursuing leak cases -- may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media, the sources said. One source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said there was concern "there is no longer an appetite at Justice for these cases."
While Isikoff outlines the content of The Intercept's watchlist story, he leaves out several details that may make DOJ less interested in prosecuting this leak.
First, two courts have ruled that people on the No Fly List receive due process regarding their status. Significantly, in June, an Oregon judge presiding over an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of 13 people on the No Fly List ruled the process unconstitutional and ordered the government to come up with a more meaningful redress system for people on the list.
In [the] ruling, the court agreed with us that the redress procedure "falls far short of satisfying the requirements of due process," and is "wholly ineffective." The court warned that "without proper notice and an opportunity to be heard, an individual could be doomed to indefinite placement on the No-Fly List" - precisely what has happened to our clients and many others on the List.
[snip]
The court ultimately concluded that the lack of any meaningful opportunity to contest their placement on the No Fly List violates our clients' constitutional due process rights. The government now has to come up with a new process that satisfies the Constitution, including officially telling our clients whether they are on the No Fly List, providing reasons for their inclusion, and giving them the ability to contest the basis for that inclusion before a judge.
Earlier this month, 7 of ACLU's clients in that lawsuit got cleared to fly. The government will have to start providing ACLU's other clients some kind of redress process by January.
Whatever process the government develops going forward, it will bring more transparency to precisely the system disclosed in The Intercept's watchlisting story.
At the same time, a number of other disclosures have raised questions about the watchlist. Most notably, Dick Cheney's biographer, Stephen Hayes, briefly got put on the Selectee watchlist requiring additional screening; he believes that's because he booked a one-way flight to Turkey for a Mediterranean cruise. Hayes is probably correct: as the document disclosed by The Intercept make clear, the government may, in fact, watchlist a person for "Travel for no known lawful or legitimate purpose to a locus of TERRORIST ACTIVITY." Just this week, Hayes announced he appears to have gotten off the list.
Additionally, senior officials have had to explain that the numbers -- in the hundreds or even thousands -- routinely offered for the number of Americans who have traveled to fight with ISIL are inflated for precisely that reason: anyone who travels to Turkey without a known reason gets watchlisted -- and counted as an ISIL fighter. In reality, there are maybe 20 to 30 Americans fighting in Syria.
Perhaps most amusing is the story behind the "Jetsetting Terrorist," a blog started in June. As Forbes recently revealed, the "terrorist" is Peter Young, an animal rights activist convicted of a misdemeanor for freeing minks in 3 states in 1997. Young's blog documents the he gets as a frequent flier on the Selectee treatment, including how he invoked his Selectee status to jump to the front of a very longTSA security line. Young has also provided more significant details (details that mirror those in the leaked document), such as that TSA Agents have to call the FBI every time a selectee flies.
The point is, many more details about the No Fly and Selectee processes will be coming out in upcoming months -- both through the ACLU lawsuit and related new redress policy and through Young's blog (unless blogging about being a Selectee gets one removed from the list!). Those details will be coming out against the absurd background of Cheney's biographer being branded a terrorist because he took a Mediterranean cruise.
Not only will aspects of these lists become less justifiable, but they will become public, one way or another.
That likely provides another reason why DOJ may hesitate to charge The Intercept's alleged source: by the time any case went to trial, the alleged source's disclosures would look banal by comparison. Any such prosecution would look like overkill.
That may well be true. But it appears that those requesting and carrying out the investigation want to push for precisely that kind of overkill.
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A Tale of Two Alleged Iran Nuke Leakers
Last week focused a lot of attention on New York Times reporter James Risen, who is facing the threat of jail time for refusing to testify in a leak case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. The Supreme Court refused to hear Risen's appeal of a subpoena to testify in June.
Aug 19, 2014
Last week focused a lot of attention on New York Times reporter James Risen, who is facing the threat of jail time for refusing to testify in a leak case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. The Supreme Court refused to hear Risen's appeal of a subpoena to testify in June.
On Monday, a bunch of fellow Pulitzer Prize winners signed a statement supporting Risen. On Thursday, a coalition of press freedom groups submitted 100,000 signatures calling on DOJ to halt its pursuit of Risen's testimony. In an interview with Maureen Dowd after a press conference on press freedom on Thursday, Risen called President Obama, "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation."
Meanwhile, even as Risen waits to find out whether the Department of Justice will send him to jail to attempt to force him to testify about his source, Sterling also waits, as he has since January 2011, when he was first arrested. The government has done nothing official in Sterling's case since the Supreme Court refusal to take Risen's appeal in June.
Sterling is accused of providing Risen classified information regarding Operation Merlin, a bungled CIA effort to deal Iran bad nuclear weapons information. The information appeared in Chapter 9 of Risen's 2006 book, State of War, which exposed a number of the Bush Administration's ill-considered intelligence programs.
Risen's account revealed not just that CIA tried to thwart nuclear proliferation by dealing doctored nuclear blueprints to American adversaries, but that in this case, the Russian defector the US charged with dealing the blueprints to Iran told them the blueprints were flawed. In other words, Risen's story -- for which Sterling is one alleged source - demonstrated questionable judgment and dangerously incompetent execution by the CIA, all in an effort to thwart Iran's purported nuclear weapons program.
Sterling's story, then, makes an instructive contrast with that of retired General James Cartwright, who is alleged by the press, but not yet -- publicly at least -- by the government, to have served as the source for another story about the intelligence community's questionable judgment and dangerously incompetent execution of counter-proliferation plots targeting Iran.
Over a year ago, NBC reported that General Cartwright had received a target letter informing him he was under investigation as the source for one of David Sanger's stories on US-Israeli efforts to stall Iran's enrichment program with the StuxNet cyberattack.
According to legal sources, Retired Marine Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has received a target letter informing him that he's under investigation for allegedly leaking information about a massive attack using a computer virus named Stuxnet on Iran's nuclear facilities. Gen. Cartwright, 63, becomes the latest individual targeted over alleged leaks by the Obama administration, which has already prosecuted or charged eight individuals under the Espionage Act.
[snip]
As soon as the Times report appeared, Congressional leaders demanded a criminal probe, and President Obama said he had "zero tolerance" for "these kinds of leaks." Republicans charged that senior administration officials had leaked the details to bolster the president's national security credentials during the 2012 campaign.
But, said legal sources, while the probe that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered initially focused on whether the information came from inside the White House, by late last year FBI agents were zeroing in on Cartwright, who had served as one of the president's "inner circle" of national security advisors. Two sources said prosecutors were able to identify Cartwright as a suspected leaker without resorting to a secret subpoena of the phone records of New York Times reporters.
One source familiar with the probe said the Justice Department has not made a final decision on whether to charge Cartwright.
Subsequent reports revealed Cartwright was stripped of his security clearance sometime last year.
The story for which Cartwright allegedly served as a source did not expose StuxNet -cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab did that. Nor was it Sanger's first story confirming US and Israeli involvement; in 2011 he partnered with other New York Times journalists to provide details on US and Israeli collaboration on the attacks.
Sanger's 2012 story provided new details, including that Obama approved an escalation of the StuxNet attack even after it had escaped beyond its target at Iran's Natanz centrifuge facility lab. Perhaps even more sensitive, Sanger's story relayed claims from officials attending a presidential briefing suggesting that Israel had been responsible for the code escaping Natanz.
An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer's computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.
"We think there was a modification done by the Israelis," one of the briefers told the president, "and we don't know if we were part of that activity."
Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. "It's got to be the Israelis," he said. "They went too far."
Sanger's StuxNet story is, then, just like Risen's account of Merlin, a story of the dangerous unintended consequences caused by covert US efforts to combat Iran's claimed nuclear program. Both are issues the American public deserves to debate. Should the US risk further proliferation in its effort to counter proliferation? Should NSA launch offensive attacks against an adversary we're not at war with? What kind of blowback do such operations invite?
Both stories have been critical to bringing necessary public attention to the bungling behind our Iran policy.
Yet the alleged leakers in the two stories have thus far been treated differently. Sterling has been fighting prosecution for 3.5 years. Cartwright has lost his security clearance but, two years after the Sanger story, DOJ has not charged him or anyone else.
There may be any number of explanations for the apparently different treatment: DOJ may still be crafting a case against Cartwright -- and we may all be defending Sanger's right to protect his sources sometime in the future. Given the sensitivities of StuxNet, DOJ may be unable to prosecute the leak without exposing even more classified information. Cartwright's different treatment may reflect DOJ's efforts -- announced last year -- to "explore ways in which the intelligence agencies themselves, in the first instance, can address information leaks internally, though administrative means, such as the withdrawal of security clearances."
Then there's the possibility that if you're "Obama's favorite general," as Cartwright reportedly was, you don't get prosecuted. Unlike Cartwright, Jeffrey Sterling didn't sit in on White House briefings. On the contrary, the government claimed Sterling only leaked this information after losing an Equal Employment Opportunity suit against the CIA, in which he claimed he had not been given certain assignments because he is African-American. In fact, as Risen reported in a 2002 story on Sterling, CIA Director John Brennan -- then the Agency's deputy executive director -- played a role in denying Sterling's claim, after which the CIA subjected Sterling to an early security investigation.
Both Risen's and Sanger's stories provided citizens important information on America's ham-handed efforts to combat Iran. Both leaks served to provide important information about the ill-considered covert actions done in our name. Thus far, the leaks have not been treated the same.
Hopefully, the inaction on Sterling's case and against Cartwright -- if he is, indeed, Sanger's source -- reflects reconsideration on the part of the Obama Administration of its counterproductive criminalization of whistleblowing. Hopefully, what we're seeing is a belated recognition that attacking journalism doesn't serve the country.
But for now, Jeffrey Sterling and James Risen remain under direct threat from DOJ for telling us just how problematic some of CIA's programs against Iran are.
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New Billboards in DC Encourage Whistleblowers to Come Forward
"Don't wait until a new war has started," says Daniel Ellsberg
Jul 09, 2014
ExposeFacts, a new advocacy organization led by whistleblowers and veteran journalists, announced today that 13 six-foot billboards have gone up in strategic places around the nation's capital, encouraging citizens to come forward with disclosures that are in the public interest.
"These billboards urge people in the nation's capital to consider the consequences of silence, conformity and fear -- which the Bush and Obama administrations have tried so hard to inculcate and enforce." -- Norman Solomon, ExposeFacts.org
The billboards feature former U.S. military analyst and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg imploring the public: "Don't do what I did. Don't wait until a new war has started, don't wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war's worth of lives."
The billboards can be found near the White House, Department of Justice, FBI, Iraqi Embassy, Defense Intelligence Agency, and in other locations (see a full list, with maps, here).
Launched by last month, ExposeFacts will utilize the SecureDrop submission system to protect whistleblowers' identities, allowing people to securely submit information anonymously. An editorial board comprised of big names like Barbara Ehrenreich (of the Nation), Sonali Kolhatkar (of KPFK Radio), and Norman Solomon (executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy) will then assess the information and arrange for media coverage where appropriate.
"These billboards urge people in the nation's capital to consider the consequences of silence, conformity and fear -- which the Bush and Obama administrations have tried so hard to inculcate and enforce," said Solomon in an email to Common Dreams. "The words from Daniel Ellsberg are powerful because they connect a lack of truth with horrific consequences of wars waged and lives lost."
"The consent of the governed is real only if it's the informed consent of the governed," he continued. "That's what genuine democracy requires. That's what the Ellsberg billboard is saying to all who will listen."
At Firedoglake, Kevin Gosztola writes:
From the moment that a whistleblower's disclosures begin to be discredited by the government and the government begins to accuse a source of betraying their country, ExposeFacts.org will be capable of generating media attention that beats back efforts to kill the messenger. The organization will amplify the message and ensure what is exposed has the biggest impact possible.
It appears it could develop into an invaluable organization to counteract the conduct on the part of the government to clamp down on the free flow of information and zealously enforce secrecy by pursuing a record number of leak prosecutions in recent history.
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