Government's Newfound Justification For Seizing AP Phone Records

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Tuesday September 24, 2013 · 6:02 AM PDT

2013/09/24 · 06:02

New York Times reporter Charlie "it's all accidental" Savage reports on "the eighth leak-related prosecution under the Obama administration" complete with the usual government blather that this leak was "potentially devastating" to the security of the country:

“This prosecution demonstrates our deep resolve to hold accountable anyone who would violate their solemn duty to protect our nation’s secrets, and to prevent future, potentially devastating leaks by those who would wantonly ignore their obligations to safeguard classified information,” said Ronald C. Machen Jr., the United States attorney for the District of Columbia.

(Side note: this hardly sounds like an "accidental path" to the war on whistleblowers).

In reality, as Marcy Wheeler so deftly explained, the real "outrage" over the AP story was that AP scooped the White House. In all Espionage Act prosecutions, the government has cried wolf about supposed damage to national security despite the fact that in the collapsed cases against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake, none of the information he was accused of mishandling was actually classified, in the case against Chelsea Manning, the government failed to show any harm, and in the case against Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower John Kiriakou, the charges were based on common knowledge in the journalistic and human rights communities.

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday August 21, 2013 · 5:47 AM PDT

2013/08/21 · 05:47

The United Kingdom used an anti-terrorism law to detain Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald's husband and Brazilian citizen David Miranda for 9 hours. Miranda was denied access to any due process, denied access to an attorney and repeatedly threatened with incarceration if he did not answer questions. The Guardian reported:

Miranda was stopped at Heathrow en route to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives with Greenwald, who has written a series of stories for the Guardian revealing mass surveillance programmes by the NSA. He was returning to their home from Berlin when he was stopped, allowing officials to take away his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.
During his trip to Berlin, Miranda met Laura Poitras, the US film-maker who has been working with Greenwald and the Guardian. The Guardian paid for Miranda's flights. Miranda is not a Guardian employee but often assists Greenwald in his work.

Greenwald and Mirdana described the ordeal on Anderson Cooper last night, and afterward, I debated Jeffery Toobin as he punctuates his nonsensical arguments with a touch of racism, equating Miranda to a "drug mule."

Watch the debate here:

Toobin had no answer for the most pertinent question: What is so dangerous to governments about journalism that a government needs to use a terrorism law to stop journalism?

Jesselyn Radack

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Monday July 15, 2013 · 6:35 AM PDT

2013/07/15 · 06:35

The Washington Post has a front page story featuring embattled National Security Agency (NSA) Director Gen. Keith Alexander's hoarding complex.

“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official who tracked the plan’s implementation. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

While I consider WaPo reporter Ellen Nakashima to be one of the most aggressive national security journalists in the mainstream media and applaud her continued tenacity in covering these issues, she is far too well-informed to be implying that the NSA's massive domestic spying operation began with Alexander in 2005.

Commendably, Nakashima quotes my client, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake in today's piece:

“He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official and whistleblower. The continuation of Alexander’s policies, Drake said, would result in the “complete evisceration of our civil liberties.”

However, Nakashima should know, from her own reporting on the failed Espionage Act case against Drake, that NSA's desire to collect all Americans' domestic communications long predates Alexander. Read More

UPDATED: U.S. Pressures Latin America to Deny Snowden Asylum as He Meets With Human Rights Groups

Jesselyn Radack

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Friday July 12, 2013 · 5:46 AM PDT

2013/07/12 · 05:46

In its desperate attempt to persecute National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, the U.S. government has taken on the role of oafish bully and is pressuring Latin American countries to deny Snowden asylum or expel him if he arrives:

The United States is conducting a diplomatic full-court press to try to block Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American intelligence contractor, from finding refuge in Latin America . . .

It is an affront to human rights for the persecuting country to pressure other sovereign nations to deny asylum Asylum is a human right under the International Declaration of Human Rights, and Snowden quite clearly meets the criteria, even more so considering that the U.S. has expended considerable diplomatic capital to capture him. The U.S. is willing to upend decades of delicate diplomatic relationship-building to prosecute a whistleblower. The U.S. has globalized whistleblower retaliation. Read More

Fooling Americans Abuout FISA

Jesselyn Radack

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Monday July 08, 2013 · 6:51 AM PDT

2013/07/08 · 06:51

Ever since the Edward Snowden story broke, the government has been claiming that the dragnet domestic surveillance done by NSA was, in the words of president Obama and Congress, "approved by a court." This is a disingenuous attempt to give legitimacy to a series of programs that violate at least two federal laws and the Fourth Amendment. It leaves the false impression that an Article III federal court approved domestic surveillance programs, when it fact it was the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). Worse yet, the government has shut down almost all federal lawsuits challenging secret surveillance by asserting the "state secrets" privilege.

Federal courts were created by the Constitution. The FISA Court was created by Congress. There are enormous differences between the two. Federal courts are open to the public, whereas the FISA court operates in secret, hears only one side of the argument (the government's), and approves 99.7% of the applications it considers.

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau, one of the journalists who broke the Pulitzer Prize-winning warrantless wiretapping story back in 2005, has written another blockbuster (or it should be) article, revealing just how expansive FISA has enlarged its own jurisdiction, creating "a parallel Supreme Court" and entire body of surveillance law that vastly broadens NSA's surveillance powers--in secret.

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday July 03, 2013 · 6:50 AM PDT

2013/07/03 · 06:50

For the third time (after not finding him in Hong Kong after 3 weeks, and not detecting his flight to Russia), the US government has once again failed to catch former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has and continues to reveal massive illegal domestic and global surveillance by the NSA.

Yesterday, the Guardian reports that Bolivian President Evo Morales' jet was re-routed based on suspicions that Snowden might be aboard. (Morales was returning from energy talks in Moscow.) Italy, Spain, France and Portugal refused entry to their airspace, with the latter two countries abruptly canceling air permits. Never mind that, as Bolivia's foreign minister, David Choquehuanca said, this

put at risk the life of the President

because the plane was low on fuel. That's how desperate the United States is to silence a whistleblower. Read More

Government's Chilling Arguments To Support "Aiding the Enemy" Charge Against Bradley Manning

Jesselyn Radack

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Tuesday July 02, 2013 · 6:41 AM PDT

2013/07/02 · 06:41

The government's arguments in its overzealous case against Army PFC Bradley Manning should be prompting massive outrage from journalists. From The Guardian:

The US government is seeking to bolster its case against Bradley Manning, the source of the largest leak of state secrets in American history, by presenting the soldier's trial with evidence that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida used the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks and the wider internet as a research and propaganda tool.
As the prosecution approaches the end of its case, government lawyers presented the trial judge, Colonel Denise Lind, with testimony and statements of fact that attempted to underline al-Qaida's familiarity with the web and WikiLeaks specifically. The effort speaks to the most serious "aiding the enemy" charge against Manning in which the prosecution must prove that by passing classified material to WikiLeaks the soldier knowingly gave potentially damaging intelligence to US enemies.

Prosecutors read into the trial record a statement already discussed in court, that reveals that the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden personally asked for WikiLeaks material to be provided to him.

This argument is so radically anti-First Amendment it's hard to know where to begin. If Bin Laden requested a copy of The New York Times or its sources, would the paper be guilty of aiding the enemy? What about if he requested a White House Press Release? The legal theory that Manning aided the enemy by making information publicly available reveals that the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers has morphed into a war on information and a war on journalists, as is the natural progression of an unprecedented effort to chill whistleblowers' freedom of speech. Read More

Government Struggles to Keep Straight All of its Misleading Statements on NSA Surveillance

Jesselyn Radack

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Monday July 01, 2013 · 7:34 AM PDT

2013/07/01 · 07:34

. . . details that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior U.S. officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false.

-The Washington Post reporting on the government's multitude of misleading statements and bald face lies about the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance programs.

The government has trouble getting its story straight because there is no viable defense for the NSA's massive domestic spying operations that sweep up and store data on millions of innocent Americans.

Since its actions are indefensible from a constitutional, legal, and moral perspective, the government instead has focused on the messenger. Despite Obama's claims that he welcomes a debate on civil liberties and his dismissal as Snowden as "29-year old hacker," the Obama administration has launched a worldwide manhunt for Snowden, brought a sealed Espionage Act complaint against him, pressured allies to deny Snowden asylum, and fear-mongered in the media with overblown and unproven claims of "national security," ironically and hypocritically communicated through anonymous leaks.

Yet, much of the mainstream media has lapped up and regurgitated the government's misstatements. (Such as during my appearance yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos).

Jesselyn Radack

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Friday June 28, 2013 · 5:50 AM PDT

2013/06/28 · 05:50

The latest in a series of revolutionary reporting from The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald reveals that under Obama, the NSA continued the Bush-era domestic datamining program Stellar Wind until 2011, and continues today to collect Americans' online data.

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data – despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011. . . . On December 31, 2012, an SSO official wrote that ShellTrumpet had just "processed its One Trillionth metadata record".

The Stellar Wind revelations in The Guardian provide more documentary proof of NSA's massive domestic spying network vacuuming up vast streams of Americans' data, a spying operation my clients NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe have warned the American public about for years. Read More

NSA Whistleblower Snowden Forced to Seek Political Asylum

Jesselyn Radack

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Monday June 24, 2013 · 4:35 AM PDT

2013/06/24 · 04:35

National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has left Hong Kong and is en route today to seek political asylum from Ecuador. The Obama administration charged Snowden under the Espionage Act, demonstrating just how far the administration has strayed from its campaign platform of protecting whistleblowers and promoting government transparency.

As the world eagerly watches Snowden's movements today, the public should put aside the mainstream media frenzy buzzing around Snowden's personal life, and ask the more important question: in a country with the freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, why does a whistleblower have to seek political asylum elsewhere after exposing government wrongdoing?

Criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act, FBI raids, political asylum, prison time: this is what national security whistleblowers have to face in a surveillance state.

My clients and NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, J. Kirk Wiebe, and William Binney went through the proper internal channels to blow the whistle, but that did not protect them. In fact, it made them targets of a years-long federal criminal investigation ending in the now-failed Espionage Act prosecution of Drake. Another client, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower John Kiriakou helped expose the CIA's torture program and is serving 30 months in federal prison.

Jesselyn Radack

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Friday June 21, 2013 · 5:28 AM PDT

2013/06/21 · 05:28

Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a strong statement in defense of national security whistleblowers, who have no safe, effective means of disclosing government misconduct internally:

From a human rights perspective, the punishment of those who leak security information can be problematic because it suppresses information that may be vital for the exercise and protection of human rights. Some of the most significant revelations of human rights violations come from disclosures of once-secret information relating to the misconduct of security agencies.

HRW's statement was prompted by the groundbreaking disclosures of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden's disclosures reveal ongoing, widespread, domestic surveillance and confirmed what my clients NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe have been saying for years. Read More

Greenwald: No Meaningful Checks on NSA Spying, FISA Court is Effectively a Rubber Stamp

Jesselyn Radack

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Wednesday June 19, 2013 · 5:37 AM PDT

2013/06/19 · 05:37

Glenn Greenwald surgically dismantles the Obama administration's reassurances that the recently-revealed National Security Agency (NSA) programs are subjected to rigorous oversight from the surveillance court:

Top secret documents obtained by the Guardian illustrate what the Fisa court actually does – and does not do – when purporting to engage in "oversight" over the NSA's domestic spying. That process lacks many of the safeguards that Obama, the House GOP, and various media defenders of the NSA are trying to lead the public to believe exist.

I discussed the FISA Court on Breaking the Set with Abby Martin: Read More

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Government's Newfound Justification For Seizing AP Phone Records

Journalism as Terrorism

Contrary to WaPo, NSA Massive Domestic Spying Predates 2005

UPDATED: U.S. Pressures Latin America to Deny Snowden Asylum as He Meets With Human Rights Groups

Fooling Americans Abuout FISA

Aerial Acrobatics: US Govt Driven to Distraction by Snowden

Government's Chilling Arguments To Support "Aiding the Enemy" Charge Against Bradley Manning

Government Struggles to Keep Straight All of its Misleading Statements on NSA Surveillance

Despite Government Denials, Documents Show NSA Continues Harvesting Americans' Data

NSA Whistleblower Snowden Forced to Seek Political Asylum

Human Rights Watch Speaks Up for Whistleblowers As Public Learns More About NSA Spying

Greenwald: No Meaningful Checks on NSA Spying, FISA Court is Effectively a Rubber Stamp