Snowden adviser: Hillary "either out of touch, or lying" about US protections for whistleblowers

[Otelo]

Hillary Clinton said that Edward Snowden should not have fled to China because "we have all these protections for whistleblowers. Link

Jesselyn Radack, human rights attorney of the Government Accountability Project said, ""As for her ignorance about the problem with the lack of 'channels' for national security whistleblowers, she's either out of touch or lying,"

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Snowden supporters and advisers say Clinton's remarks were unrealistic and reflect several factual misunderstandings about his predicament. They say he could not have availed himself of whistleblower protections because he was not a government employee (he worked for contractor Booz Allen) and his claims would not have been viewed as exposing any impropriety because authorities in all three branches of government had blessed the NSA telephone program as legal. A federal judge not privy to the program before the leaks later ruled it unconstitutional, but that decision is on appeal.

"Was he supposed to call the Senate Intelligence Committee and say, 'I'd like to report to you a program you approved in secret...'?" Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union said in an interview Friday. "Snowden is not a person who stumbled upon this ltitle secret pocket of misconduct....This wasn’t a situation where it's a question of how to tell the boss and tell Congress—his bosses and Congress were the problem."

Wizner also noted that Clinton never squarely said whether Snowden's disclosures were a net positive or not.