Washington Free Beacon: Communications Crackdown – DNI Directive Forbids Unauthorized Talk with Journalists
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has issued a directive barring intelligence community (IC) employees from speaking to the media about intelligence-related matters, including unclassified matters, without authorization.
The action threatens IC employees making unauthorized contacts with the media with security clearance revocation or termination. The overbroad and vague directive loosely defines media personnel to include those “engaged in the collection, production or dissemination to the public of information in any form related to topics of national security.” That definition could not only include reporters for traditional outlets, but bloggers and activists who write about the intelligence community. The directive requires IC employees to report any inadvertent contact with the broadly defined “media” to superiors.
GAP National Security & Human Rights Counsel Kathleen McClellan is quoted in the article, and GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack is cited in other coverage. Radack called this latest action “a clear extension of the executive branch’s war on national security whistleblowers.”
Key Quote: Kathleen McClellan, the national security and human rights counsel at the Government Accountability Project, called the new policy a “a continuation of that crackdown.”
“The Obama admin has been the most draconian in history on employees talking to the media, even more so than Nixon,” she said.
McClellan said the policy would restrict information to official sources with a history of less than truthful statements.
New Orleans Advocate: 4 Years After Spill Questions Remain About Health Impacts
Four years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, countless unanswered questions remain about the long-term health impact from both the millions of gallons of oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico and the Corexit dispersant used by BP (with permission of the federal government) to “combat” the spill. The article cites GAP’s 2013 report into the matter, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?, which details the devastating effects of Corexit on human health and the ecosystem.
Key Quote: Based on witness interviews, the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower advocacy group, released a report last year that said coming into contact with Corexit could lead to a host of ailments, including abdominal pain, hypertension, kidney and liver damage, inability to withstand exposure to the sun, memory loss and respiratory problems. The report urged a federal ban on the chemical.
Canton Daily Ledger: ‘Ag Gag’ Protects Bad Producers Not Good Consumers
This op-ed from a retired journalism professor details the problems with ‘Ag Gag’ legislation that attempts to silence whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at industrial farms. GAP’s Food Integrity Campaign has been fighting against these bills for years. FIC Director Amanda Hitt is quoted in the piece.
Key Quote: Amanda Hitt from the Government Accountability Project’s Food Integrity Campaign said the trend is like chronic lawbreakers saying, “Hey, we’re sick of getting caught doing crimes. Could you do us a favor and criminalize catching us?”
Main Line Media News: NSA Whistleblowers to Speak at West Chester University
GAP’s American Whistleblower Tour stops at West Chester University at 12:00 p.m. today. The event focuses on national security, with NSA whistleblowers Tom Drake and Bill Binney set to inform students about the dangers of the growing surveillance state. Binney also appeared on local radio station WCHE to discuss the Tour stop and his experience blowing the whistle.
Key Quote: The two will participate in a moderated discussion called “Essential Voices for Accountability in the National Security Era.” The university said Binney and Drake will look at the challenges facing intelligence agency whistleblowers and discuss the collection of personal data. They will also look at the dangers associated with increasing power of a national security state.”
HuffPost Live: Free Speech Zone – ‘Silenced’
This online piece features a live discussion with the director and subjects of the new documentary Silenced, which focuses on the federal government’s treatment of whistleblowers during the past several years. Directed by Oscar-nominee James Spione, the film details reprisals suffered by NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, CIA/torture whistleblower John Kiriakou, and Radack for each one’s distinct action of exposing wrongdoing. Drake, Radack and Spione appear in this piece.
Silenced was also mentioned in a column this morning by New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who explains how the Obama administration is remarkably secretive.
Key Quote (New York Times): And finally, a new film by James Spione, “Silenced,” depicts the high price paid by former government employees who have become whistle-blowers…
Mr. Spione had open access to a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, John Kiriakou, whom Scott Shane wrote about last year in a front-page article. The activist and lawyer Jesselyn Radack, a whistle-blower herself, has a key role, and the former National Security Agency executive and whistle-blower Thomas Drake steals the show with his intelligence and dignity.
The Guardian: Vladimir Putin Must be called into Account on Surveillance Just Like Obama
Last week on live television, NSA whistleblower and GAP client Edward Snowden asked Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Does Russia intercept, analyze or store millions of individuals’ communications?” Longtime critics of the whistleblower were quick to proclaim that Snowden was participating in a propaganda campaign, but as the former NSA contractor explains in this op-ed, his challenging of Putin was a “rare opportunity to lift a taboo on discussion of state surveillance before an audience that primarily views state media … I hoped that Putin’s answer – whatever it was – would provide opportunities for serious journalists and civil society to push the discussion further.”
Key Quote: The question was intended to mirror the now infamous exchange in US Senate intelligence committee hearings between senator Ron Wyden and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, about whether the NSA collected records on millions of Americans, and to invite either an important concession or a clear evasion.
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When this event comes around next year, I hope we’ll see more questions on surveillance programs and other controversial policies. But we don’t have to wait until then. For example, journalists might ask for clarification as to how millions of individuals’ communications are not being intercepted, analysed or stored, when, at least on a technical level, the systems that are in place must do precisely that in order to function. They might ask whether the social media companies reporting that they have received bulk collection requests from the Russian government are telling the truth.
CIA/Torture whistleblower John Kiriakou, currently incarcerated for his whistleblowing actions, recently penned another correspondence in his ongoing “Letters from Loretto” series. His latest writing details how his children – who only visit him once a month – were ordered to leave the visitation room because of “overcrowding,” according to prison officials. Kiriakou believes this is another form of retaliation for his letter writing. This article mentions Radack.
Key Quote: Jesselyn Radack, a Justice Department whistleblower and director of National Security & Human Rights division at the Government Accountability Project who advised Kiriakou while the government was prosecuting him, told Firedoglake it seems like the Bureau of Prisons is using his family against him in retaliation for writing letters. She recalled that Kiriakou took a plea deal where he would only be sentenced for 30 months in prison because he wanted to “get back to his family as soon as possible.”
This “shows how petty, bureaucratic and senseless the justice system” can be. If they were concerned the facility would be “overcrowded,” they could have told him before his family packed up early in the morning to come visit him. (The prison eavesdrops on all his phone calls so it would have been easy for them to figure out his family was visiting.)
Fayetteville Observer: Our View – Whistleblower Gone; UNC Officials Not Off the Hook
Mary Willingham, the courageous whistleblower who exposed both the “paper-class” scandal and questionable revenue-sport student-athlete literacy levels at the University of North Carolina, has decided to resign at the end of the semester. Willingham made the decision after meeting with UNC Chancellor Carol Folt on Monday. According to one of Willingham’s associates, Folt “spent much of the meeting berating Willingham for her comments about the scandal in recent months, which included interviews with national media that gave the scandal a wider audience and had become a major embarrassment for the university.”
Willingham, who had been contemplating leaving at the end of the semester for some time, stated “It’s been a hostile work environment the entire year … I stuck it out because I wanted to make good on promises to my students, but it has not been fun.”
Willingham’s decision comes just a couple of weeks after UNC released reports it commissioned from outside academic personnel that the school claims to illustrate how the whistleblower misinterpreted data regarding the literacy levels. But Willingham stated that the other reviewers could not replicate her analysis because “they were denied access to the full range of test scores … that formed the basis of my critical judgment.” As the Raleigh News & Observer points out, “neither the full data set nor the underlying tests the athletes took have been made public.”
The Fayetteville Observer masthead editorial shows that independent observers blame the school for this turn of events and for UNC officials’ terrible treatment of Willingham.
Key Quote: The university should have thanked Willingham for her role in upholding its honor, unmasking a pattern of fraud. Instead, she encountered hostility.
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In regard to illiteracy assertions, the university accused Willingham of violating athletes’ privacy. Experts the university brought forward to criticize her work weren’t even given access to all of her information, she said.
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Sooner or later, someone higher up will have to answer for the cheating, the cover-up and the way this public servant was treated.
Related Article: Daily Tar Heel
Dylan Blaylock is Communications Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.