“High-profile whistleblowers have joined forces for the first time in demanding that the United Nations change a global system they say deters its thousands of staffers from exposing crime, corruption and other wrongdoing.”

Whistleblowers: Little UN Protection for Exposing Wrongdoing
Associated Press

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“By Memorial Day weekend, Congress will likely have decided whether the federal government’s mass surveillance programs — exposed first by The New York Times in December 2005 and more broadly by National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 — will be partially reined in or will instead become a dominant, permanent feature of American life.”

Interestingly, this all could have been avoided. Beginning in the early 90s, a team of Crypto-mathematicians including Bill Binney, and his colleagues Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis, created a collection, analysis and dissemination program called “Thinthread” that would have safeguarded the privacy of American citizens.

“[Former] NSA Director Michael Hayden had other ideas. He killed Thinthread in the fall of 2000 in favor of a far more expensive and untested system called Trailblazer, which turned into a boondoggle that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars without producing a single piece of actionable intelligence.”

Confronting the surveillance state
Washington Times

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Whistleblower advocate Tom Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project, said the Washington organization is “flooded” with retaliation complaints from VA employees. There have been more, per capita, from the VA than from any other federal agency in the 36 years he has been helping whistleblowers, he said.

“There’s lots of pockets of ugliness at the (VA),” Devine said. And it has earned the agency a dubious distinction: “It’s really set the standard for whistleblower retaliation. It’s set the pace.”

For one VA whistleblower, getting fired was too much
Gannett Wisconsin Media Washington bureau