Report: Devin Nunes' Aide Going Around Leaking Ukraine Call Whistleblower's Name

from the proper-channels dept

We've been highlighting lately how the situation with the whistleblower, who first tried to ring the alarm bells about President Trump's now confirmed quid pro quo call with Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political opponent, showed why the "official channels" are useless for whistleblowers. Some suggested that we were premature in making that claim. However, since then, we've seen the President himself repeatedly try to attack the whistleblower while repeatedly demanding that the whistleblower be revealed. Now come reports that a staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes is going around revealing the name of the whistleblower:

A top aide to Rep. Devin Nunes has been providing conservative politicians and journalists with information—and misinformation—about the anonymous whistleblower who triggered the biggest crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency, two knowledgeable sources tell The Daily Beast.

Derek Harvey, who works for Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, has provided notes for House Republicans identifying the whistleblower’s name ahead of the high-profile depositions of Trump administration appointees and civil servants in the impeachment inquiry. The purpose of the notes, one source said, is to get the whistleblower’s name into the record of the proceedings, which committee chairman Adam Schiff has pledged to eventually release. In other words: it’s an attempt to out the anonymous official who helped trigger the impeachment inquiry.

Nunes, of course, has a bit of a history pushing mis- and dis-information in support of President Trump, so this seems par for the course. In the Daily Beast link above, one of the lawyers for the whistleblower, Mark Zaid, notes that revealing the name only serves to put the whistleblower in danger and seems to aim to "deter future whistleblowers from coming forward."

So, once again, it highlights exactly what we've been saying. Even in this case, where the whistleblower tried to use the "proper channels," everything is designed to go against the whistleblower, starting with the failure to turn over the complaint to Congress, as required by the law. The fact that a Nunes staffer is now apparently putting that whistleblower "at risk of harm" (according to Zaid) highlights just how ill-prepared our government is to deal with whistleblowers at a time when we need more, not fewer, whistleblowers.

Filed Under: cia, derek harvey, devin nunes, leaks, proper channels, ukraine, whistleblower

DOJ And DNI's Attempt To Bury Whistleblower Report Yet Another Indication Of The Official Channels' Uselessness

from the when-in-doubt-leak-it-out dept

The official channels don't work. That's the message Snowden sent -- one that was countered by multiple high-level government officials who'd never had the whistle blown on them.

Government entities protect their own. Whistleblowers who attempt to bring things through the proper channels are deterred almost every step of the way. The few times they manage to get their reports to someone who might actually be able to do something about it -- like Congressional oversight or the various Inspector General offices -- those affected by the report will do everything they can to silence it.

The New York Times discusses what happened when the whistleblower report about President Trump's phone call to the president of Ukraine was routed through the official channels. The whistleblower (who the NYT questionably outed as a CIA officer) used a third party to bring the complaint to the CIA's counsel. The CIA's top lawyer needed to find out whether the allegations about the content of the phone call were accurate. So, she called the White House to get the transcript of the call.

You can see where this is going. The New York Times fills in the details, showing why doing things the way the government wants you to do them seldom results in blown whistles. (This is taken from the NYT's podcast transcript, which is why it doesn't read like a NYT article.)

[I]t turns out that the lawyers in the White House have apparently also heard rumblings about the July 25 call. They don’t know how serious it is, but there are a series of calls on the week of August 5 between the C.I.A.‘s lawyers and the White House lawyers. And they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. And very quickly, they learn that a number of people within the White House have concerns about this July 25 call.

The White House took it seriously as well. Seriously enough to start trying to track down the whistleblower. The whistleblower decided to take his complaint directly to the Intelligence Community's Inspector General since it appeared the White House was more interested in silencing the whistleblower than addressing the complaint.

The IG's office started questioning people, alerting even more members of the administration about the severity of the complaint. And once the CIA's counsel arrived at the conclusion that this was a serious allegation, the CIA's legal office informed the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI then decided to contact the DOJ, since the normal process involves bringing it directly to the President -- something that's not really an option when the complaint involves the president.

[B]ecause the Department of Justice has gotten a heads up about this through the C.I.A. complaint, when this official more formal, supposedly independent whistle-blower complaint arrives, the people inside the Department of Justice, they know what they’re going to do. And what they’re going to do is basically say, there’s nothing to see here, this ends here.

If the CIA officer had solely utilized the proper channels, the CIA's office would have brought it to the administration's attention and the administration would have buried it. Utilizing the Inspector General helped prevent this burial from happening, but even the DNI's office stood in the way of the report being brought to Congress, at least temporarily.

Nothing about this works well, if at all, if there's enough people in power interested in making a report disappear. This one managed to make its way to the public due to actions taken by the House Oversight Committee. Without the public being informed a whistleblower report containing serious allegations was being hidden from it by the DNI, the DNI and DOJ would have swept it under the rug. And then the administration would have gone after the whistleblower, much like Trump has threatened to do already.

Just because this report ultimately ended up being made public does not mean the official channels work. That the House Intelligence Committee decided to do something rather than nothing when approached by the IC Inspector General is an anomaly, not the usual course of action. If the entity committing the alleged misconduct has enough power, the whole thing can be made to go away, along with the whistleblower and their career. And, in this case, there's still the question of whether it would have been done at all (Rep. Adam Schiff's decision to call public attention to the report) if it wasn't politically expedient. Stopped clocks are right twice a day. The official channels for whistleblowing need to be right a lot more often before they'll even approach that rhetorical low bar.

Filed Under: cia, inspector general, intelligence community, leaks, oversight, proper channels, whistleblowers

Current Whistleblower Scandal Shows (Again) That The Official Channels Are Useless

from the no-sense-fixing-what-no-one-really-wants-fixed dept

The official channels for whistleblowing are meant to deter whistleblowers. Just look at what has happened to the whistleblower currently at the center of accusations against President Trump. Despite raising concerns urgent enough the IC's Inspector General felt compelled to notify Congress, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided the allegations were too sensitive to be shared with its oversight.

Ed Snowden saw how useless the official channels were. That's why he and a ton of sensitive documents headed to Russia via Hong Kong. The United States government has no time for whistleblowers. Hunting down and punishing whistleblowers is the national pastime -- one that Barack Obama particularly enjoyed.

The Trump Administration isn't any better. Obama may have passed some mostly-worthless protections for IC whistleblowers before he left office, but the current administration is engaging in a demonstration of just how worthless those protections are.

Nick Baumann's detailed examination of the flawed whistleblower procedures is worth a read. It shows exactly why Snowden chose the path he did, and why the whistleblower behind this latest report is probably headed towards a premature exit from public service.

This system, in which even those who follow the rules are persecuted for talking out of turn, is not new, [former DOJ legal ethics advisor Jesselyn] Radack noted. “Thomas Drake — an NSA surveillance whistleblower pre-Snowden — was prosecuted under the Espionage Act after following the procedures in the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act,” she said. Seeing what happened to Drake, she added, led “Snowden to correctly conclude that using the same channels that entrapped Drake to make his disclosures ... would be an exercise in futility.”

Snowden’s government critics should have known this better than anyone. Obama’s administration used the Espionage Act against more alleged leakers than any administration before or since. An interagency review panel later found that Ellard, the NSA inspector general who said Snowden should’ve come to him, had himself retaliated against a whistleblower. The panel, composed of inspectors general from outside the Defense Department, recommended Ellard be fired; the Defense Department later overruled that decision.

The basic problem with government whistleblowing, as Snowden noted in October 2013, is that “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.”

In this case, the person involved in the alleged wrongdoing is none other than the President himself. The person making the allegations comes from the same governmental branch they're making accusations against. It's little surprise the ODNI -- an executive agency -- is in no hurry to allow Congressional oversight to examine the report or speak to the whistleblower. The ODNI may not be directly involved in the alleged wrongdoing, but it made a decision to protect the alleged violator, rather than the person utilizing the proper channels to have their concerns addressed.

The only thing going for the whistleblower now is that the publicity surrounding this report will likely prevent direct retaliation from the President and the administration. But that still leaves the agency the whistleblower works for, as well as the ODNI itself. Both of these could engage in direct retaliation without it being noticed (at least not immediately) by anyone outside of these entities. By the time anyone gets around to addressing these violations, the whistleblower will likely be out of a job and informally blacklisted by the federal government. In the United States, whistleblower protections are just another way to ensure no good deeds go unpunished.

Filed Under: ed snowden, espionage act, intelligence community, leaks, proper channels, prosecution, whisteblowers, whistleblowing

NSA Will Try To Stop Turning Whistleblowers Into Leakers With Kinder, Gentler Official Channels

from the ALL-WHISTLES-MUST-BE-BLOWN-INSIDE-THE-HOUSE----The-management dept

The NSA is promising to be kinder to whistleblowers.

The U.S. National Security Agency’s top oversight official, Robert Storch, is working to repair the spy agency’s reputation with whistleblowers in an effort to encourage staff to report wrongdoing internally, rather than go public.

“It’s really important we encourage whistleblowers to come forward and that they feel comfortable doing so and if there are allegations of reprisal then we take that very seriously,” Storch said in an interview with Reuters last week.

This is important, at least to the NSA, because its most famous whistleblowers have eventually gone outside the system to deliver news of systemic surveillance program abuse to the masses. I don't think NSA officials necessarily want to handle internal complaints and scale back abusive collection programs. I think they just want to make sure no one outside of the NSA and its direct oversight hear about it.

That being said, the NSA definitely needs to work on its interpersonal relationships with disgruntled employees. People yelling about Snowden not going through the proper channels didn't have much to say about his proper channel being on the chopping block for retaliating against a whistleblower. And protections for contractors are still weaker than those offered to federal employees, which means the NSA can keep complainers quieter by continuing to rely on outsiders to handle the dirty work of analyzing incoming intel.

To be fair, this effort to protect whistleblowers seems a lot more earnest than past efforts. At least in this case, the NSA consulted with outside groups for input on anti-retaliation policies.

Storch said he has made progress by working with civil rights and privacy groups.

That effort included a February meeting with the non-profit Project on Government Oversight and other similar organizations.

Even so, whistleblower protections work better in theory than in practice. The NSA is the government's most secretive agency and has a long history of abusing its surveillance authorities. It's been resistant to internal change for much of its lifespan and change is something nearly every whistleblower is seeking. If it can keep whistleblowers from becoming leakers, it can better hide its misdeeds from the public. And that's something we need to be wary of anytime the NSA starts talking about protecting employees who aren't happy with its programs, policies, or practices.

Filed Under: leaks, nsa, official channels, proper channels, whistleblowers

Inspector General For Intelligence Community Buried Report Showing Whistleblower Retaliation

from the to-end-career,-blow-whistle dept

A report by Kevin Poulsen for The Daily Beast shows, once again, that those suggesting Ed Snowden should have used the proper channels to voice his concerns about domestic surveillance are either ignorant or deliberately obtuse.

Just prior to the Snowden leaks, President Obama enacted Presidential Policy Directive 19, which was supposed to prevent retaliation for whistleblowing. It was issued in 2012 and went into force just months before Snowden left the NSA with a trove of documents. However, it did not protect contractors like Snowden. Those protections were added by Congress years later. Not that it really matters. It has been well established those protections are mostly worthless.

Over the past year, there's been a concerted effort to oust Dan Meyer -- the person Intelligence Community whistleblowers are supposed to take their complaints to. Meyer filed his own whistleblowing complaint against the Defense Department, claiming IC officials retaliated against him for exposing waste and misuse of funds. Those gunning for top-level positions in Trump's Intelligence Community have histories of retaliatory behavior against whistleblowers, which would further cement the reputation of the "official channels" as a good way to jettison your career.

According to The Daily Beast, the problem is larger than previously thought. The implementation of PPD-19 hasn't changed anything. Whistleblowers are still facing retaliation or being ignored completely.

The investigators looked into 190 cases of alleged reprisal in six agencies, and uncovered a shocking pattern. In only one case out of the 190 did the agencies find in favor of the whistleblower—and that case took 742 days to complete. Other cases remained open longer. One complaint from 2010 was still waiting for a ruling. But the framework was remarkably consistent: Over and over and over again, intelligence inspectors ruled that the agency was in the right, and the whistleblowers were almost always wrong.

This damning report has never been presented to intelligence oversight nor to the general public. It was buried by the new head of the IC Inspector General's office.

The report was near completion following a six-month-long inspection run out of the Intelligence Community Inspector General office. It was aborted in April by the new acting head of the office, Wayne Stone, following the discovery that one of the inspectors was himself a whistleblower in the middle of a federal lawsuit against the CIA, according to former IC IG officials.

Stone also sequestered the mountain of documents and data produced in the inspection, the product of three staff-years of work. The incident was never publicly disclosed by the office, and escaped mention in the unclassified version of the IC IG’s semiannual report to Congress.

In essence, the IC has no independent oversight. That's not going to prevent whistleblowers from losing their jobs or security clearances. If the oversight is burying reports and withholding findings from its Congressional oversight, then there's really no reason whistleblowers should stick to the proper channels. If the IC wanted to shut down leaks, this was completely the wrong way to handle it. If careers are on the line, IC employees may as well take their complaints to the press, where they'll get heard, rather than to their supervisors or the Inspector General's office.

The numbers quoted in the Daily Beast's report show there's scant chance the Inspector General's office will be of any help to whistleblowers. Even if whistleblowers aren't suffering direct retaliation, the office's ability to "wait it out" prevents whistleblowers from escalating complaints further than the office uninterested in investigating complaints. To move forward, there must be some form of ruling or determination from the Inspector General. Without it, complainants have almost zero chance to seek other remedies, including suing agency officials for workplace retaliation.

The burial of this report by the Inspector General shows the official channels have suffered a perverse form of regulatory capture. The IG is no longer independent. It's owned and operated by the Intelligence Community, highly-deferential to officials who have nothing to gain if whistleblower complaints are sustained. It was arguably worse when Snowden left for Hong Kong. The bad news is it hasn't gotten any better over the last five years.

Filed Under: ed snowden, intelligence community, proper channels, retaliation, surveillance, whistleblowers

Defense Department Oversight Finds More Evidence Of Retaliation Against Whistleblowers

from the government-shutdown dept

More evidence has surfaced showing the US government really doesn't care for whistleblowers. A Defense Department Inspector General's report [PDF] obtained by MuckRock contains details of Air Force supervisors turning against a civilian employee who reported time card abuse.

The heavily redacted report, which MuckRock requested following on an announcement in the January newsletter of the Department of Defense Inspector General, found that the supervisor accused the whistleblower of being a mentally unstable drug abuser in addition to revoking his security clearance for the offense of reporting that colleagues were allowed to leave work hours early and lie on their time cards.

After that, things apparently became personal. (Well, they were already personal, what with supervisors accusing the whistleblower of being crazy/on drugs.) The relationship between the employee and his supervisors went from bad to worse to toxic. The report says "several verbal altercations" were noted as the work relationship became "mutually hostile."

The Air Force then pulled some more crap, resulting in another whistleblowing attempt by the same employee. When told not to perform an asbestos test before drilling into walls to install surveillance equipment, the employee bypassed the proper channels (which had already proven useless and retaliatory) and went straight to the Inspector General.

Having been notified of this, the IG dug deeper, uncovering the Air Force's vengeful tactics. In response to the employee's report to the IG, the Air Force supervisor doubled down on his "crazy drug user" claims -- the ones he used in support of having the employee suspended and his security clearances revoked.

The supervisor justified that suspension by telling IG investigators that his subordinate “had difficulty getting along with fellow employees, that employees were afraid of Complainant and locked the office door because of that fear and that he suspected Complainant was using drugs.”

Citation please.

[T]he Inspector General concluded that the supervisor “could not provide any evidence to support these allegations,” and that the clearance revocation was reprisal.

The statement given by the retaliatory supervisor to explain away the lack of documented evidence supporting his "crazy drug user" claims is a joy to read, filled with multiple layers of truly-terrible CYA logic.

When queried as to why he did not document these "bizarre" behaviors in either the December 22, 2011, or April 29, 2012, memo to support Complainant's suspension, [redacted] testified he had been "hamstrung" on documenting anything because Complainant grieved everything that was documented. [Redacted] further testified he believed his chain of command did not want documentation of these things for fear that there would be complaints filed by Complainant. [Redacted] testified he received no support from the Civilian Personnel Office or his chain of command when it came to dealing with Complainant. [Redacted] testified [redacted] told him [redacted] that he had handled the issues regarding Complainant correctly; but he was going to order a CDI [Commander-Directed Investigation] to throw Complainant a bone and so, "maybe Complainant would not file a bunch of IG complaints."

That seems to have worked out well.

Not every whistleblower ends up without a career or investigated by the agency they work for, but far too many face this sort of response when calling out government wrongdoing. Efforts have been made to shore up protections for whistleblowers, but it's illustrative of where these efforts fall short to note that this employee -- a civilian -- would not have been protected by federal whistleblower laws. Perhaps that's why Air Force supervisors felt so comfortable acting in retaliation. The government routinely uses civilian contractors and is under no statutory obligation to behave any better when dealing with their whistleblowing than the Air Force did here.

Filed Under: defense department, dod, inspector general, nsa, proper channels, retaliation, whistleblowers

Snowden's 'Proper Channel' For Whistleblowing Being Booted From The NSA For Retaliating Against A Whistleblower

from the proving-Snowden's-point-for-him dept

NSA oversight and whistleblowing through proper channels: both pretty much worthless.

Members of the intelligence community and members of its supposed oversight have said the same thing repeatedly over the past few years: oh, we'd love to cut Edward Snowden a break, but he should have taken his complaints up the ladder, rather than outside the country.

As if that would have resulted in anything other than Snowden being cut loose from his job and his security clearance stripped. The NSA's Inspector General -- supposedly part of the agency's oversight -- was even more harsh in his assessment of Snowden's actions.

During a day-long conference at the Georgetown University Law Center, Dr. George Ellard, the inspector general for the National Security Agency, spoke for the first time about the disclosures made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In addressing the alleged damage caused by Snowden’s disclosures he compared Snowden to Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent and convicted spy who sold secrets to the Russians.

[...]

“Snowden, in contrast, was manic in his thievery, which was exponentially larger than Hanssen’s. Hanssen’s theft was in a sense finite whereas Snowden is open-ended, as his agents decide daily which documents to disclose. Snowden had no background in intelligence and is likely unaware of the significance of the documents he stole,” Ellard suggested.

These are the words of the "proper channel." Ellard went on to state that had Snowden approached him with his concerns he would have pointed to the series of judicial rubber stamps that backed up the government's post-9/11 national security assertions as they approved more and more bulk surveillance.

That Inspector General -- the official channels, the oversight -- is now (mostly) on his way out of the agency for actions undertaken in direct conflict with his position, as reported by the Project for Government Oversight.

[L]ast May, after eight months of inquiry and deliberation, a high-level Intelligence Community panel found that Ellard himself had previously retaliated against an NSA whistleblower, sources tell the Project On Government Oversight. Informed of that finding, NSA’s Director, Admiral Michael Rogers, promptly issued Ellard a notice of proposed termination, although Ellard apparently remains an agency employee while on administrative leave, pending a possible response to his appeal from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

"Bring your complaints through the proper channels," said the proper channel, all the while making sure whistleblowers regret blowing the whistle. Ellard still has an appeal left to reclaim his position as a dead end for whistleblowers, but it seems unlikely the agency will be interested in welcoming a liability back into the fold. Ellard didn't just violate standard government policies on workplace retaliation but a fairly-recent presidential directive as well.

[The decision] was reached by following new whistleblower protections set forth by President Obama in an executive order, Presidential Policy Directive 19.

President Obama issued this in 2012, and it was put into force the next year, a few months before Snowden began dumping documents. The new directive created better protections but would have done nothing to aid Snowden in taking his complaints to the proper channels because he was only a government contractor, not an actual government employee.

It's somewhat of a surprise that Ellard managed to get caught in this loosely-protective framework, suggesting whatever he did was fairly egregious. Officials of his stature rarely see retaliation claims against them substantiated. But that's exactly what happened here.

Following PPD-19 procedures, a first-ever External Review Panel (ERP) composed of three of the most experienced watchdogs in the US government was convened to examine the issue. The trio -- IG’s of the Justice Department, Treasury, and CIA – overturned an earlier finding of the Department of Defense IG, which investigated Ellard but was unable to substantiate his alleged retaliation.

Also receiving a bit more substantiation are Snowden's claims that utilizing the proper channels within the NSA would have been fruitless -- something that has been pointed out by earlier whistleblowers, nearly all of whom have seen their careers ended and their lives turned upside down by government prosecutions for their actions.

Filed Under: ed snowden, george ellard, inspector general, nsa, proper channels, whistleblowing

Another Whistleblower Highlights The Futility Of The 'Proper Channels'

from the shut-up,-they-investigated dept

Yet another whistleblower is detailing their depressing experiences with the "proper channels." Writing for The Intercept, former CIA imagery analyst Patrick Eddington discusses the attempts the CIA made to prevent information on US soldiers' exposure to chemical weapons during the Gulf War from being made public.

My own experience in 1995-96 is illustrative. Over a two-year period working with my wife, Robin (who was a CIA detailee to a Senate committee at the time), we discovered that, contrary to the public statements by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and other senior George H. W. Bush administration officials (including CIA Director John Deutch), American troops had in fact been exposed to chemical agents during and after the 1991 war with Saddam Hussein. While the Senate Banking Committee under then-Chairman Don Riegle, D-Mich., was trying to uncover the truth of this, officials at the Pentagon and CIA were working to bury it.

When Eddington objected to the burial attempts, he was placed under investigation by the CIA. The agency also questioned his wife, asking if Eddington would find his "conscience" more important than his secrecy agreements with the CIA. What the CIA seemed completely unconcerned with was the subject matter it obviously didn't want anyone to discuss.

The agency didn’t care about helping to find out why hundreds of thousands of American Desert Storm veterans were ill. All it cared about was whether I’d keep my mouth shut about what the secret documents and reports in its databases had to say about the potential or actual chemical exposures to our troops.

With the proper channels in lockdown mode, Eddington went in another direction. He published a book on his whistleblowing experience, but only after his lawsuit forced the agency to declassify documents it hastily reclassified when it became apparent Eddington was going public. Faced with the inevitable, the CIA finally disclosed to the public that it had been burying information on troops' exposure to chemical weapons during the operations in Kuwait and Iraq.

And while Eddington had to deal with the CIA's investigation and attempts to bury both him and the info he was trying to alert lawmakers about, those actually involved in the suppression escaped unscathed.

None of the CIA or Pentagon officials who perpetrated the cover-up were fired or prosecuted.

Eddington goes on to note that Bill Binney suffered through the same experience when trying to blow the whistle on NSA surveillance. Binney's experience at the hands of the proper channels -- following an attempt to institute a less intrusive surveillance program -- led directly to Snowden's decision to cut and run after being thwarted in his attempts to have his concerns addressed.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from years of whistleblower prosecutions is that the government truly isn't interested in listening to blown whistles.

We now live in a country where the committees charged with reining in excessive domestic spying instead too often act as apologists and attack dogs for the agencies they are charged with regulating.

Filed Under: cia, patrick eddington, proper channels, punishment, whistleblowers

The Proper Channels For Whistleblowing Still Mostly A Good Way For Messengers To Get Shot

from the snitches-get-unsustained-retaliation-complaints dept

Whistleblower protections offered by the federal government are great in theory. In practice, they're a mess. This administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The proper channels for reporting concerns are designed to deter complaints. Those that do use the proper channels are frequently exposed by those handling the complaints, leading to retaliatory actions that built-in protections don't offer an adequate remedy for.

Perhaps the ultimate insult is that the proper channels lead directly to two committees that have -- for the most part -- staunchly defended agencies like the NSA against criticism and any legislative attempts to scale back domestic surveillance programs. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are the "proper channels," whose offered protections can only be seen as the hollowest of promises, especially after the House Intelligence Committee's lie-packed response to calls for Snowden's pardon.

What the federal government offers to whistleblowers is a damned if you do/don't proposition. Bypass the proper channels and brace yourself for prosecution. Stay within the defined lanes and expect nothing to change -- except maybe your security clearance, pay grade, or chances of advancement within the government.

Congress doesn’t have much legal power to protect intelligence community employees from such retaliation. The Pentagon’s inspector general website concedes Congress cannot “grant special statutory protection for intelligence community employees from reprisal for whistleblowing.”

In most cases of personal or professional retaliation, it ends up being the whistleblower’s problem, says Tom Devine, the legal director for the Government Accountability Project. “The problem is that whistleblowers making most complaints proceed at their own risk,” he said in an interview. “There are no independent due process protections for any intelligence community whistleblowers. And contractors don’t even have the right to an independent investigation unless there’s security clearance retaliation.”

The limited evidence that has surfaced about using the "proper" whistleblower channels suggests the protections granted by the government are mostly meaningless. The intelligence committees won't comment on the treatment of government employees who have approached them to blow the whistle. Government contractors working within the intelligence community are even more tight-lipped, suggesting even civilians are on their own when when attached to government programs or projects.

The few reports that have made it out into the open indicate it's almost impossible for a whistleblower to prove any actions taken against them post-whistleblowing are actually retaliatory. An Inspector General's investigation of a whistleblower's retaliation complaints determined that anything that had happened to the whistleblower could not be conclusively linked to the Defense Department employee's whistleblowing.

All that can be determined is that dozens of whistleblower complaints do make their way to the intelligence committees every year. But even this is based on the assertions of the House Intelligence Committee, which refused to provide any further details. The outcome of the whistleblowing remains under wraps and there are no publicly-released statistics that total the number of complaints, much less which percentage of complaints are found substantial and investigated further.

Government employees and contractors are just expected to trust the federal government which, given its response to whistleblowers over the past two decades, isn't going to nudge edge cases away from bypassing the laughable "protections" and proceeding directly to journalists willing to actually protect their sources.

Filed Under: ignored, proper channels, whistleblowing

Another Whistleblower -- One Who Tried To Protect Other Whistleblowers -- Says The 'Official Channels' Are Worthless

from the an-empty-complaint-box-is-not-an-indicator-of-a-well-run-spy-agency dept

There are no safe routes for intelligence community whistleblowers. The proper channels are pretty much guaranteed to end your career. The same goes for the unofficial channels, which route through countries uninterested in complying with extradition requests.

The administration has prosecuted more than its share of whistleblowers over the last eight years. (In fact, its share of prosecutions outnumbers all those in previous presidential administrations combined.) Another whistleblower has come forward to provide details on… the government's treatment of whistleblowers.

John Crane, a former senior Defense Department official, details his firsthand experience with the government's zealous pursuit of previous NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and William Binney. He was part of the "official channels" and actively fought to protect these individuals from government retaliation. As Mark Hertsgaard of The Guardian notes, Crane carried with him at all times two essential documents: a copy of the Constitution and a copy of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. These were often pulled out to settle disputes over treatment of whistleblowers.

According to Crane, these whistleblowers followed all of the correct protocols when expressing their concerns about warrantless domestic surveillance and the NSA's failure to move forward on communications it had collected from the terrorists who would go on to perform the 9/11 attacks. While this did budge the Congressional needle on a couple of NSA programs, it did nothing to protect the whistleblowers from FBI raids, criminal charges, and the end of their careers with the US government.

The person most instrumental in the prosecution of these whistleblowers was the DoD's general counsel, Henry Shelley. It was Shelley who stripped away the protections granted to whistleblowers in order to serve them up to a highly-irritated Bush White House.

According to Crane, his superiors inside the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office were eager to help. Henry Shelley, the general counsel – the office’s top lawyer – urged that the IG office should tell the FBI agents investigating the Times leak about Drake and the other NSA whistleblowers.

Crane fought back, pointing out that whistleblowers are supposed to be protected (using the copy of the Whistleblower Act he always carried with him). Shelley was unimpressed by Crane's citation of applicable statutes and told him he was in charge and would do things his way.

There were no further discussions between Crane and Shelley. The next move was made by the DOJ, which sent the FBI after four NSA whistleblowers. Crane suspected Shelley had used information obtained from the Inspector General's office to identify the whistleblowers. Shelley refused to discuss the raids with Crane. Four months later, the FBI raided Thomas Drake's house based on an indictment that seemed all too familiar to Crane.

The complaint from Drake’s lawyers seemed to confirm his suspicion that someone in the IG’s office had illegally fingered Drake to the FBI. Worse, the indictment filed against Drake had unmistakable similarities to the confidential testimony Drake had given to Crane’s staff – suggesting that someone in the IG’s office had not simply given Drake’s name to the FBI, but shared his entire testimony, an utter violation of law.

Crane also claims the Inspector General's office told him to stonewall a FOIA request crucial to Drake's defense against the government's charges until after his trial. The IG's office also "accidentally" destroyed records related to Drake's retaliation complaint against the government. Crane was told by Shelley that this "wasn't a problem" and could continue not being a problem if Crane was a "good team player."

Crane -- like other whistleblowers and those who fight for them -- was forced out of his job. The Inspector General's second-in-command ordered him to resign in 2013. He's been fighting back ever since.

Crane filed a complaint against Shelley and Halbrooks, detailing many more alleged misdeeds than reported in this article. The Office of Special Counsel, the US agency charged with investigating such matters, concluded in March of 2016 that there was a “substantial likelihood” that Crane’s accusations were well-founded. The OSC’s choice of the term “substantial likelihood” was telling. It could have ruled there was merely a “reasonable belief” Crane’s charges were true, in which case no further action would have been required. By finding instead that there was a “substantial likelihood”, the OSC triggered a process that legally required secretary of defense Ashton Carter to organise a fresh investigation of Crane’s allegations.

Unfortunately, the investigation is back in the DOJ's hands because the Department of Defense -- like other government agencies -- isn't allowed to investigate itself. The DOJ is being entrusted with investigating yet another whistleblower's claims, but its history of zealous prosecutions suggests it's far more comfortable investigating the whistleblowers themselves.

John Crane was part of the "proper channels" for whistleblowers and, despite his best efforts, several whistleblowers were raided, indicted, and prosecuted. Crane himself was ousted from his position. The logical conclusion whistleblowers like Ed Snowden will reach is that the official channels are no less dangerous than the "unofficial" options. The latter option may be more unpredictable, but it gives whistleblowers a much better chance of being heard.

Filed Under: john crane, persecution, proper channels, thomas drake, whistleblowers, whistleblowing, william binney