Snowden Wins Ridenhour Prize: Prominent American Award for Truth-Telling

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Monday April 07, 2014 · 6:18 AM PDT

2014/04/07 · 06:18

National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden to receive Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. The New York Times reports:

The Ridenhour prize for truth-telling will be given to Edward J. Snowden and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker and journalist who helped Mr. Snowden disclose his trove of documents on government surveillance.
The award, named for the Vietnam veteran who helped expose the My Lai massacre and later became an investigative journalist, is expected to be announced on Monday morning.

The Ridenhour Prize is validation for Snowden from the U.S. First Amendment, transparency and open government community.

While he has received some 25 international awards, the Ridenhour is only his second major U.S. award. (Snowden received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in October 2013). Snowden joins winners like Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, and fellow NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake.

Laura Poitras, a key journalist and documentary filmmaker who received Snowden's revelations will receive the Truth-Telling prize with Snowden, a deserving recognition of her courageous effort to report Snowden's revelations. Poitras, along with Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman will receive the prestigious Polk Award for their reporting later this week.

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday April 02, 2014 · 8:15 AM PDT

2014/04/02 · 08:15

This week's round of leaks are unlikely to result in more Espionage Act prosecutions. They are leaks of ostensibly classified information that appear to be aimed at a particular policy goal and blessed by high level government officials.

The Washington Post reported that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture program is even worse than we already knew.

The report describes previously undisclosed cases of abuse, including the alleged repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a detention site in Afghanistan — a method that bore similarities to waterboarding but never appeared on any Justice Department-approved list of techniques.

Trickling out details of even more sadistic tactics serves to anesthetize us about them for when the Senate Report - or a redacted part of it - is finally released.

Yet, the Obama administration gave everyone who ordered, authorized or participated in torture "look forward, not backward" immunity (except, the whistleblower John Kiriakou, who helped expose torture and got a 30 month prison sentence). And, the Obama administration, with great fanfare, ended and condemned the torture program. Why then is the CIA fighting tooth and nail to keep a defunct, ineffective program secret?

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday March 19, 2014 · 5:55 AM PDT

2014/03/19 · 05:55

Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency's mass surveillance operations include the content of telephone calls as well as the metadata.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Since documents from Snowden revealed that the NSA is sweeping up en masse hundreds of millions of phone records, surveillance supporters have argued that because the information "is just metadata" it is not mass surveillance. (For anyone who hasn't been following, metadata generally means phone record of who called who and for how long, but not the voice data). The argument fails first because metadata is highly revealing, as countless technology and intelligence experts have articulated over the past nine months.

WAPO's report confirms that it's also factually incorrect to claim "it's just metadata:"

Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17 pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

Yet again, despite assurance from the President himself that NSA is not spying on innocent Americans, when given facts instead of government talking points, the public learns NSA is sweeping up innocent Americans' phone conversations on under the guise of protecting national security. Read More

Latest Snowden Smear in Rotation Courtesy of Totally Discredited NSA: Co-Worker's Credentials

Jesselyn Radack

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Friday February 14, 2014 · 11:22 AM PST

2014/02/14 · 11:22

The National Security Agency (NSA) should be focused on reforming its out of control mass surveillance operations, including the bulk phone records collection program that a federal judge and the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Board have said violates the law. Instead, NSA is spending countless man hours investigating how the public found out about the law breaking, smearing the whistleblower who told the public the truth (Edward Snowden), and - in classic NSA fashion - spreading around blame for whistleblowing among low-level officials.

The latest Snowden smear back in NSA's rotation surfaces in an account NBC itself describes as "sketchy." NBC nonetheless reports that Snowden may have used "an element of trickery" to gain access to information. However, rather than punishing the officials who authorized wasteful and illegal spying, NSA is bragging to Congress about punishing Snowden's co-worker:

As a result, the employee’s security clearance was revoked in November and the NSA has notified the Justice Department that he recently resigned.

The main stream media is salivating to publish and repeat any inkling of anti-Snowden material. (It is certainly easier than asking how the Intelligence Community leaders, secret court, and Presidents of both parties signed off on surveillance that violates the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans.)

While the original piece didn't include a statement from Snowden's legal representative, to his credit, Michael Isikoff of NBC updated the article today to include a statement from me:

In response to a request for comment, Jesselyn Radack, a legal adviser to Snowden in the U.S., said, “Edward Snowden stands by his denial on Jan. 23. NSA has a documented history of scapegoating innocent employees for its own failures, … manufacturing evidence against them and misleading Congress.”

There is no reason to take at face value anything NSA tells Congress considering its history of misleading Congress and the public. But, this sort of scapegoating is right in NSA's wheelhouse. When the New York Times published the Pulitzer Prize-winning story on warrantless wiretapping, NSA blamed whistleblowers who had nothing to do with the Times story - pulling their security clearances and blacklisting them from contract jobs.

The fact that NSA finds time to write a memo to Congress about accountability for the public finding out about NSA waste and illegality, but cannot give a clear answer to simple oversight questions like "does the NSA collect data on millions of Americans?" should call into question all of NSA's defensive smears of the messenger that are really transparent attempts to distract from the message.

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday February 12, 2014 · 5:57 AM PST

2014/02/12 · 05:57

While thousands of Americans called and e-mailed Congress to object to the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance operations during yesterday's "Day We Fight Back," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was feeding Congress contradictory explanations for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations with a side of traditional surveillance state apologist fear mongering.

The New York Times reported:

The director, James R. Clapper Jr., testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Snowden had taken advantage of a “perfect storm” of security lapses.

True to form for an official who lied to Congress about mass surveillance, Clapper later contradicted his earlier testimony when he warned that the so-called "perfect storm" could easily happen again:

On Tuesday, for example, he warned that “there are no mousetraps that we could say that we can guarantee that we’ll never have another Edward Snowden.”

Contrary to the Obama administration's mud-slinging characterization of Snowden as a "29-year-old hacker," Clapper complimented the whistleblower's intelligence:

“He knew exactly what he was doing,” Mr. Clapper said. “And he was pretty skilled at staying below the radar, so what he was doing wasn’t visible.”

Snowden's clear intellect is really no longer a matter of debate considering his articulate and powerful public statements, and the NSA's incompetence at protecting the vast troves of information it is vacuuming up is certainly of concern to the hundreds of millions of Americans whose private data is sitting in NSA's databases. But, Clapper's focus on Snowden and how to stop the "next Snowden" serves to distract from the true confluence of events that led to the Snowden revelations: NSA systematically breaking the law and invading the privacy of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans and spying on entire innocent populations, with no discernible benefit to national security.

It was not Snowden's smarts or the NSA's quite disturbing security failures that caused his revelations. There were no safe internal channels for Snowden to disclose this gross abandonment of NSA's charter, betrayal of the Constitution and massive waste of taxpayer money. The NSA whistleblowers who preceded him used internal channels and were investigated for Espionage.

It was massive illegality and lack of whistleblower protections, not NSA's inability to effectively keep secret the wrongdoing, that created an atmosphere where Snowden used the safest channel available to him by going to the press.

Jesselyn Radack

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Tuesday February 11, 2014 · 5:41 AM PST

2014/02/11 · 05:41

Today is The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance.

Here are several easy things you can do to participate today:

(1) Call or write to Congress. Urge them to support and strengthen the USA FREEDOM Act - a bi-partisan effort that will start to reign in the out of control surveillance state, including ending the bulk collection under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Urge them to oppose the FISA Improvements Act - the Intelligence Community dream bill that would codify bulk collection.

(2) Add a warning and protest signature line to your e-mails:

This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately.

(3) Check here for events happening all across the country and overseas.

(4) Share www.thedaywefightback.org on social media. On Twitter, use the hashtag #StoptheNSA

(5) If you have a website,add The Day We Fight Back banner. (Instructions are here).

Jesselyn Radack

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Monday February 10, 2014 · 6:20 AM PST

2014/02/10 · 06:20

New reports thanks in part to National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal the disastrous collision of two secret, unaccountable and legally dubious U.S. programs - targeted assassination by drone and NSA mass surveillance.

First Look Media reports:

The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.

The former drone operator also says that he personally participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was known, but other unknown people nearby were also killed.
“They might have been terrorists,” he says. “Or they could have been family members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities.”

The Obama administration expanded and has consistently defended the secret, programmatic extra-legal killing of admittedly innocent people, including Americans like 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Despite that the drone program's margin of error is drastically more significant than senior Obama administration officials publicly claim, the drone assassination program - in collaboration with the NSA's equally-flawed mass surveillance - continues to expand:

The government’s assassination program is actually constructed, he adds, to avoid self-correction. “They make rushed decisions and are often wrong in their assessments. They jump to conclusions and there is no going back to correct mistakes.” Because there is an ever-increasing demand for more targets to be added to the kill list, he says, the mentality is “just keep feeding the beast.”

The Associated Press reports that Obama administration, having learned nothing from the tragic mistake in killing an innocent 16-year-old American citizen, is considering its morally bankrupt assassination-by-drone brand of justice for another American. The AP describes in detail that intelligence officials are "making a case" internally to assassinate the American. Due process requires far more than some secret, internal condemnation of guilt from the Executive branch or in the words of the ACLU's National Security Project Director:

The government’s killing program has gone far beyond what the law permits, and it is based on secret evidence and legal interpretations.

"Innocent until proven guilty" has become "innocent until suspect enough to drone according to a secret and shifting Executive branch 'standards.'" The drone assassination program is a natural outgrowth of the US torture program. There can be no politically troublesome debate over where or how to detain and interrogate "targets" when the U.S. government can simply wipe them from the face of the earth, along with any innocent people unluckily located in blast radius.
Read More

Turn Every E-mail Into a Stand Against Mass Surveillance

Jesselyn Radack

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Thursday February 06, 2014 · 5:45 AM PST

2014/02/06 · 05:45

In one simple step, you can turn every e-mail you send into a warning and protest against the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance programs. My organization, the Government Accountability Project, is distributing and encouraging use of a Privacy Statement for all Internet users to adopt as part of their signature line in their online communications:

This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately.

The NSA is making no effort to filter out communications that the government knows fall within the ambit of legally-recognized confidentiality, such as the doctor-patient, attorney-client, or priest-penitent privileges. Consider all of the privileged and confidential information communicated electronically: an e-mail to your therapist about an upcoming appointment, an e-mail to your doctor to refill a prescription, or to your attorney about an upcoming divorce.

These violations of privacy are not speculation. The Nation reported earlier this week that many attorney-client communications are not subject to NSA's minimization procedures:

Such calls are normally sacrosanct under the principle of attorney-client privilege, the ability to speak confidentially with your lawyer. But a leak to The Guardian last summer of National Security Agency (NSA) procedures that are supposed to protect privileged calls showed that some attorney-client privileged calls are not subject to internal rules that detail the instances when a wiretap should be turned off.

Just as Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General James Cole told the House Judiciary Committee that the phone records of members of Congress were not filtered out of the NSA's bulk telephony metadata collection program, there is no indication - even from surveillance state proponents - that NSA weeds out the privileged communications of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans. Read More

Oversight Fail as Clapper Targets the Press: Note to SSCI, "SC" Does Not Stand for "Saving Clapper"

Jesselyn Radack

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Thursday January 30, 2014 · 7:05 AM PST

2014/01/30 · 07:05

To call yesterday's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) "oversight" hearing "under-sight" would be giving SSCI too much credit. (WaPo has a transcript.) With far too few noteworthy exceptions, such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), SSCI members gave Director of National Intelligence James Clapper a platform to trash National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, call journalists criminal "accomplices" and shamelessly fear-monger about the damage done now that the public knows the extent of the NSA's mass surveillance programs.

Politico reported on Clapper's chilling accusations:

". . . I call on [Snowden] and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed to prevent even more damage to U.S. security,” Clapper said at a Senate hearing.
Clapper did not specify who he considered Snowden’s “accomplices," but in statements to the media, DNI spokesperson Shawn Turner said he was referring "to anyone who is assisting Snowden to further threaten our national security through the unauthorized disclosure of stolen documents related to lawful foreign intelligence collection programs.”

By "accomplices" Clapper is undoubtedly referring to journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post who have reported on Snowden's revelations, which sparked a public debate that even the President agrees was necessary. Clapper's shockingly broad definition could also apply to lawyers like myself and the ACLU, who are advising Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who risked her life to rescue him.

Clapper's position that whistleblowers are criminals and journalists who report information in the public interest are criminal accomplices should send a chill down the spines of all Americans who value the First Amendment. The war on whistleblowers has morphed into a war on journalists and a war on information and control of information. Clapper and his powerful surveillance apparatus would have the government know more about the American people than the American people know about their government. Such an undemocratic scenario violates the Americans' fundamental rights of individual privacy and shields the government from necessary accountability.

Jesselyn Radack

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Thursday January 23, 2014 · 6:50 AM PST

2014/01/23 · 06:50

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent oversight agency, will release a report today concluding that the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk telephone records collection program is illegal and ineffective. The New York Times reported on PCLOB's assessment and conclusion that PATRIOT Act Section 215 does not justify mass surveillance:

The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”

PCLOB joins a growing consensus that the NSA should end its illegal and ineffective bulk metadata collection program, a program the American people only know about thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) warned that the Executive branch had a twisted interpretation of Section 215. PATRIOT Act author Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) have said the mass surveillance is not what Congress intended in passing Section 215.

Federal Judge Richard Leon described the program as an "almost Orwellian" "likely unconstitutional" invasion of innocent Americans' privacy that would make Constitution author James Madison "aghast."

The White House's own review panel said the program "create[d] potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty," and "was not essential to preventing attacks."

With such a broad consensus, the Obama administration cannot fall back on the usual fear mongering or "legal" rationalizations, all of which have proven time and again to be either gross misrepresentations or blatant falsehoods intended to preserve the surveillance programs, surveillance which serve no legitimate national security purpose but compromise the constitutionally-guaranteed privacy rights of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans.

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday January 22, 2014 · 7:11 AM PST

2014/01/22 · 07:11

Most Americans oppose the NSA's vast mass surveillance phone records program, but the whistleblower who told Americans about the program - Edward Snowden - has been forced to seek political asylum after the U.S. government stranded him in Moscow by revoking his passport. The U.S. has charged Snowden the Espionage Act, an arcane law meant to go after spies, not whistleblowers. Having represented NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou throughout their own prosecutions under the Espionage Act, I have a piece in the Wall Street Journal (you can view the whole article without a subscription if you find it via search) articulating exactly what an Espionage Act prosecution of a whistleblower looks like:

Under the Espionage Act, no prosecution of a non-spy can be fair or just. . . .
The Espionage Act effectively hinders a person from defending himself before a jury in an open court, as past examples show.

In the case of Mr. Drake, who disclosed massive fraud, waste and abuse in NSA surveillance programs, the government moved to preclude the word "whistleblowing" from trial. All felony counts against him were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to a minor misdemeanor not involving classified information.

Kiriakou, the first CIA officer to tell the media about waterboarding, could not tell the jury about his lack of intent. He accepted a plea bargain on a non-Espionage Act count.

And Manning's salutary motive and intent, for revealing the military gunning down innocent civilians in Iraq as if they were playing "Call of Duty," was ruled inadmissible until sentencing. The court found Manning guilty.

Mr. Snowden can expect the same unfair treatment.

Trevor Timm for the Freedom of the Press Foundation (which recently named Snowden to its Board of Directors) similarly explained that,

If Edward Snowden comes back to the US to face trial, he likely will not be able to tell a jury why he did what he did, and what happened because of his actions. Contrary to common sense, there is no public interest exception to the Espionage Act.

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday January 15, 2014 · 9:18 AM PST

2014/01/15 · 09:18

The National Security Agency (NSA), Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) are engaged in a shameless public relations full court press heading into the President's speech on Friday, where he is expected to announce NSA "reform." "Reform" is in quotes because it's looking more and more like the changes will be more cosmetic than meaningful.

The FISC weighed in on the policy debate opposing any reform. The New York Times calls the letter from the "nation's judiciary," but if the FISC were a proper court, it would not be weighing in on policy debates.

DNI General Counsel Robert Litt has been trotting out the surveillance state's talking points that everything NSA does is legal and proper.

Rep. Bernie Sanders, who was unable to get a clear answer about whether or not the NSA is spying on Congress, is not reassured. Well, to be more precise, in classic NSA fashion, NSA Director Alexander says NSA doesn't spy on Congress but doesn't include collecting congressional phone records as "spying."

The fact that the FISC and the surveillance apparatus are teaming up to oppose meaningful reform in advance of the President speech demonstrates to an even greater extent why such reforms are necessary.

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Snowden Wins Ridenhour Prize: Prominent American Award for Truth-Telling

This Week's Leaks: From Ice Drowning to Collection Communications' Content

To the "It's Just Metadata Crowd" - The NSA Collects Content

Latest Snowden Smear in Rotation Courtesy of Totally Discredited NSA: Co-Worker's Credentials

Clapper's Spin Unravels in Congressional Testimony: Cannot Keep His Story Straight on Snowden

The Day We Fight Back: Easy Things You Can Do To Protest Mass Surveillance

Two Disastrous Programs Collide: Drone Assassination & NSA Mass Surveillance

Turn Every E-mail Into a Stand Against Mass Surveillance

Oversight Fail as Clapper Targets the Press: Note to SSCI, "SC" Does Not Stand for "Saving Clapper"

PCLOB: Bulk Metadata Collection is Illegal (Edward Snowden Was Right, Again)

The Shadowy Ugly Truth About Espionage Act Prosecutions & the Inflammatory Lies About Snowden

Shameless Full Court Press by NSA, DNI, & FISA Court to Stop Reform