Six Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act

[unhappycamper]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16120-six-whistleblowers-charged-under-the-espionage-act

Six Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act
Thursday, 02 May 2013 09:10
By John Light and Lauren Feeney, Moyers & Company | Report

The Obama administration has been carrying out an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers, particularly on those who have divulged information that relates to national security. The Espionage Act, enacted during the first World War to punish Americans who aided the enemy, had only been used three times in its history to try government officials accused of leaking classified information — until the Obama administration. Since 2009, the administration has used the act to prosecute six government officials. Meet the whistleblowers.

~snip~



Thomas Drake is a former senior executive at the NSA who was charged under the Espionage Act for the unauthorized “willful retention” of classified documents. Drake’s problems with the agency started when he found himself on the minority side of a debate about two new tools for collecting intelligence from digital sources. One program, called Trailblazer, was being built by an outside contractor for $1.2 billion; the other, known as ThinThread, was created in-house by a legendary crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney for about $3 million.

~snip~



In 2010, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a specialist in nuclear proliferation who worked as a contractor for the State Department, pleaded not guilty to charges of leaking information about North Korea to Fox News. He was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury, but the case has not yet been brought to trial.

~snip~



John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for giving journalists the names of two former colleagues who interrogated detainees using harsh practices including waterboarding. Kiriakou became central to the debate surrounding interrogation tactics in 2007 with an interview on ABC News. By then, he had left the CIA and was working at the auditing firm Deloitte. "Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique, and I struggle with it," he said in his ABC interview. He suggested that our country should abandon the technique because "we're Americans and we're better than this."After the interview, Kiriakou was asked to leave Deloitte but became a source for other journalists investigating torture. Over the course of the next year he gave the name of one former colleague to a freelance reporter and gave the name of another former colleague to a reporter for The New York Times. He pleaded guilty in October 2012 to the leak made to the freelancer; the charge related to The New York Times was dropped.



unhappycamper comment: Other whistleblowers in this article:

Shamai K. Leibowitz (no pic)




PFC Bradley Manning


Jeffrey Sterling (no pic)

[filterfreeradio]

2. War On Whistleblowers film

Finally someone has made available online the brand new documentary from Robert Greenwald titled, "War On Whistleblowers - Free Press and the National Security State" - watch it here:

[unhappycamper]

3. Thanks - I'll try to look at this today. n/t