The Guardian has a letter from notable whistle blowers calling for intelligence agency employees and others in government to think long and hard about what the government is doing and where their duty lies. Here's an excerpt:
Hidden away in offices of various government departments, intelligence agencies, police forces and armed forces are dozens and dozens of people who are very much upset by what our societies are turning into: at the very least, turnkey tyrannies.
One of them is you.
You're thinking:
● Undermining democracy and eroding civil liberties isn't put explicitly in your job contract.
● You grew up in a democratic society and want to keep it that way
● You were taught to respect ordinary people's right to live a life in privacy
● You don't really want a system of institutionalized strategic surveillance that would make the dreaded Stasi green with envy – do you?
Still, why bother? What can one person do? Well, Edward Snowden just showed you what one person can do. He stands out as a whistleblower both because of the severity of the crimes and misconduct that he is divulging to the public – and the sheer amount of evidence he has presented us with so far – more is coming. But Snowden shouldn't have to stand alone, and his revelations shouldn't be the only ones.
Read the whole thing, of course. The signers of the letter are:
Peter Kofod, ex-Human Shield in Iraq (Denmark)
Thomas Drake, whistleblower, former senior executive of the NSA (US)
Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, former US military analyst (US)
Katharine Gun, whistleblower, former GCHQ (UK)
Jesselyn Radack, whistleblower, former Department of Justice (US)
Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst (US)
Coleen Rowley, whistleblower, former FBI agent (US)
If this has run anywhere on Daily Kos, or been picked up by any other news media I haven't seen it, so I thought I'd get the word out here. Not all prisons are made of iron bars (to paraphrase Lois McMasters Bujold) - a government that unilaterally decides there are things the public should not know, that decides them in secret, without debate, that punishes anyone who dares dissent and breaks the veil of secrecy... that government is well on the way to becoming a tyranny, no matter how comfortable or well intended.