NPR: Before Snowden – The Whistleblowers Who Tried To Lift The Veil
This piece from NPR’s Morning Edition relays the reprisal that GAP clients and former NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Tom Drake faced after attempting to expose the agency’s wrongdoing several years ago. The retaliation that each one experienced has been cited by fellow whistleblower (and GAP client) Edward Snowden as one reason for his decision to work with journalists in exposing the agency’s multiple unconstitutional surveillance programs. The piece quotes GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack.
Key Quote: For Binney, the decision to quit the NSA and become a whistleblower began a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he says he discovered the spy agency had begun using software he’d created to scoop up information on Americans — all without a court order.
“I had to get out of there, because they were using the program I built to do domestic spying, and I didn’t want any part of it, I didn’t want to be associated with it,” he says. “I look at it as basically treason. They were subverting the Constitution.”
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Drake had taken his case both to the NSA and to Congress. After concluding his complaints were going nowhere, he showed unclassified information from the NSA to a newspaper reporter. For that he was charged with violating the Espionage Act. The FBI raided his home, too — four months after Binney’s.
“Your life’s never the same. All your colleagues and people you used to work with all disappear. You’re persona non grata, you’re radioactive,” he says.
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“The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act says you can’t retaliate against someone for blowing the whistle but provides no remedy[for intelligence workers] when you are retaliated against.” Radack says.
ValueWalk: SEC Whistleblower Program Increasingly Stymied
Additional coverage of yesterday’s announcement that GAP, law firm Labaton Sucharow, and a coalition of more than 250 organizations are urging the SEC to strengthen its Whistleblower Program. The recent success of the whistleblower protections contained within the Dodd-Frank Act has resulted in new corporate legal maneuvers aimed at silencing whistleblowers. More on the coalition’s efforts can he found here.
Related Article: Corporate Counsel, Law 360
In this Huffington Post column, GAP Executive Director Bea Edwards expands on an article by Jesse Jackson about the problem of racial discrimination at the World Bank. She explains this issue is not new, but unfortunately “casts a long shadow.” Edwards also addresses how this problem relates to multilateral development banks’ (MDBs) problematic continued funding of the Millennium Development Goals, aimed at eradicating terrible ongoing problems in developing countries. Dating back to well before GAP’s 2009 study of racial discrimination at MDBs, the institutions fail to promote racial equality in “hiring, retention and promotion practices.”
Key Quote: And as Jackson showed, the World Bank does not fairly recruit and promote Afro-descendants either. The fact that so few representatives of Afro-Descendent groups occupy senior policy-making positions at the institutions charged with implementing the MDG program goes a long way toward explaining why many of the goals will not be achieved next year. Programs designed to reach the poorest groups lack knowledgeable and committed advocates at the institutions designing projects to help them.
Most unsettling, as the international organizations line up at the development aid spigot for additional billions to promote the next set of 15-year social goals, there will be little evidence of their current failure. Although they collect data on age, gender, place of residence, level of schooling, access to water, etc. in Latin America, they somehow forgot to get the numbers for race.
Wall Street Journal: Mistrial Declared in Trinity Whistleblower Suit
Last week, a Texas judge declared a mistrial in a whistleblower lawsuit concerning the safety of guardrail ends made by Trinity Industries Inc., saying the case has been “replete with errors, gamesmanship and inappropriate conduct.”
Dylan Blaylock is Communications Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.