TIME Magazine joins the Obama administration in equating whistleblowers with spies, a characterization aimed at silencing other potential whistleblowers. As I wrote yesterday, the magazine's cover story is a complete disaster. It pictures hacktivist Aaron Swartz, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden & WikiLeaks defendant Bradley Manning under the screaming words, "THE INFORMERS." Worse, it ignores key facts, the law, and the magazine's prior recognition of whistleblowers when it named "The Whistleblowers" persons of the year in 2002.
The article reads like government propaganda rather than journalism, and fumbles around looking for a "reason" why Manning, Snowden and Swartz strongly objected to the surveillance state.
TIME posits that youth and the Internet are to blame for these disclosures. Firedoglake's Kevin Gosztola eviscerates that argument:
It hypes the threat of hacking to present an argument that there are a strain of youth willing to break the law, as if the country does not have a historical tradition of civil disobedience.
None of these scapegoating arguments hold water considering that my clients, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers Bill Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake were experienced veterans when they objected to the same unconstitutional domestic surveillance that Snowden disclosed. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg supported Manning. TIME's ill-conceived notion that youth and the internet are the creators of whistleblowers and hacktivists ignores that fact that countless other individuals, like whistleblowers Drake, Binney and Wiebe, civil liberties organizations including
ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and 84 others, and a bi-partisan group of Members of Congress are equally alarmed by the NSA's massive domestic spying program.
The article implies that instead of selling secrets to a foreign government, spies now release them to the world. There is no evidence that Snowden, Swartz or Manning intended to harm the U.S. in any way, and there is ample evidence to the contrary, including their own very credible statements. In fact, the governemnt has not submitted any convincing evidence that Manning's disclosures actually harmed national security and Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee (Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO)) have objected to the Obama administration's assertions that the NSA's spying programs foiled terrorist plots. Rather, Manning's disclosures are credited with helping spark the Arab Spring and Snowden's have already brought forth a much-needed debate on civil liberties and privacy, a debate the President himself claims to welcome.
Meanwhile, Coleen Rowley, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) whistleblower who TIME named one of its persons of the year has spoken out in support of Snowden:
Equating whistleblowers to spies is not only completely inaccurate, but it implies that the problem is whistleblowers when in fact the problem is an ever-expanding surveillance state so secretive that the responsibility to uphold the Constitution,which should have been on the courts, Congress and Executive branch, has fallen on the shoulders of whistleblowers.
