Whistleblowers
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Other examples include Sherron Watkins, whose infamous memo to Enron founder Ken Lay warned of the company’s nefarious accounting practices and the ultimate destruction of the company, and Jeffrey Wigand, an American biochemist and former vice-president of research and development at tobacco company Brown & Williamson, who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry and its attempts to cover-up the documented link between cigarettes and lung cancer.
In 2015, an anonymous source leaked what are known as the Panama Papers – 11.5 million documents that disclosed the financial information for over 214,000 offshore entities. The documents were taken from Mossack Fonseca & Co. which, at the time, was the fourth largest offshore financial services provider in the world.
The leaked documents – which reveal how wealthy clients of Mossack Fonseca hid billions of dollars in tax havens – were originally given to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung but eventually ended up in the hands of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which said of the papers:
The Panama Papers is one of the biggest leaks and largest collaborative investigations in journalism history. The Papers are a massive leak of documents that exposes the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.
The records reveal a pattern of covert maneuvers by banks, companies and people tied to Russian leader Putin. The records show offshore companies linked to this network moving money in transactions as large as $200 million at a time. Putin associates disguised payments, backdated documents and gained hidden influence within the country’s media and automotive industries.
So, these whistleblowers sound defendable, right?!? BUT here is where it gets way more complicated:
The Right of the Public to Know Versus National Security.
The clearest way to illustrate our position on the appropriate balance to this is to compare the leaking of the Pentagon Papers with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released, without authorization, the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force – otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers – a top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study of the U.S. government’s decision-making process during the Vietnam War. The documents detailed massive policy and leadership failures, and the revelations proved that the Johnson Administration lied to the public and the U.S. Congress about the scope of activity in Vietnam.
In our assessment, Ellsberg disclosed only information that the American people needed to know. To us, this is where the line should be drawn: appropriate discretion. Ellsberg’s leak didn’t include everything in the Vietnam report. He purposefully omitted, for example, everything concerning ongoing diplomatic efforts, including those underway to negotiate the safe release of prisoners of war.
In contrast, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange spectacularly failed to use such discretion, and that is when they all crossed a bright line.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush launched an aggressive campaign to “secure” the nation, authorizing activities that went far beyond the parameters of traditional law enforcement. At the same time, Congress passed sweeping legislation designed to enhance American counterterrorism efforts. This included the USA PATRIOT Act, which significantly increased the federal government’s authority to gather, analyze and investigate private information related to U.S. citizens.
However, the American public did not know any of this...
...until Edward Snowden took top-secret documents from the National Security Agency (NSA). Working as an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, Snowden “touched” up to 1.5 million NSA files. In 2013, the Guardian began to publish the stolen material, the first of over 7,000 top-secret documents that journalists have since released. Through these documents, American citizens learned that the NSA: collected millions of telephone records from Verizon customers; had a program named EvilOlive that collected and stored large quantities of Americans’ Internet metadata; and gathered the private communications of the users of nine popular Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Google and Facebook.
We also discovered that the Obama administration continued to allow the NSA to collect vast amounts of our email and Internet metadata under a Bush-era program called Stellar Wind until 2011 – all, of course, without a warrant.
Edward Snowden’s actions sparked a heated debate about domestic surveillance that eventually forced the U.S. government to pass laws to better protect the American public’s privacy, which was a very positive development. In fact, had Snowden just left it there we would probably consider him a hero.
But unfortunately, Snowden crossed the line. Unlike Daniel Ellsberg, Snowden also released classified information that greatly jeopardized our national security, compromising our foreign intelligence operations, handing valuable information to our enemies, and harming relationships with many of our allies.
Below are just a few juicy tidbits of the damaging information he released, compiled by Paul Szoldra for The Business Insider:
An 18-page presidential memo showing President Obama ordered intelligence officials to draw up a list of overseas targets for cyber-attacks; that the U.S. carried out 231 offensive cyber-attacks in 2011; that the NSA hacked into Qatar-based media network Al Jazeera’s internal communications system; that NSA surveillance played a key role in the targeting for overseas drone strikes; and that the NSA stationed surveillance teams at 80 locations around the world.
That Britain’s GCHQ (its intelligence agency) and other European spy agencies worked together to conduct mass surveillance; strategic missions of the NSA, which include combatting terrorism and nuclear proliferation as well as pursuing U.S. diplomatic and economic advantage; and that the NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malware designed to steal sensitive information.
That the NSA gathered evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a plan to discredit Muslim jihadists; that Intelligence operatives with NSA and GCHQ infiltrated online video games such as World of Warcraft in an effort to catch and stop terrorist plots; that the NSA had the ability to decrypt the common A5/1 cellphone encryption cipher; and that, with a $79.7 million research program, the NSA was working on a quantum computer that would be able to crack most types of encryption.
That, using radio transmitters on tiny circuit boards or USB drives, the NSA could gain access to computers not connected to the Internet; that the U.S. ‘targeted killing’ program of drone strikes relied mostly on cellphone metadata and geolocation rather than on-the-ground human intelligence; and that the NSA developed sophisticated malware ‘implants’ to infect millions of computers worldwide.
But wait! There’s more! (and we’re fairly certain our allies did not appreciate this information getting out on our watch) ...
Britain intercepted phone and Internet communications of foreign politicians attending two G-20 meetings in London in 2009; Britain’s GCHQ tapped fiber-optic cables to collect and store global email messages, Facebook posts, Internet histories, and calls, and then shared the data with the NSA; seven of the world’s leading telecommunications companies provided GCHQ with secret, unlimited access to their network of undersea cables; Britain ran a secret Internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept emails, phone calls, and web traffic; and Britain’s GCHQ launched a cyber-attack against Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian telecommunications company.
Canada’s signals intelligence agency, CSEC, spied on phone and computer networks of Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy and shared the information with the Five Eyes intelligence services of the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand; Australia’s DSD spied on the cellphones of top Indonesian officials, including the president, first lady, and several cabinet ministers; the British government struck a secret deal with the NSA to share phone, Internet, and email records of UK citizens; working with Canadian intelligence, the NSA spied on foreign diplomats at the G-8 and G-20 summits in Toronto in 2010; and a draft document revealed Australia offered to share information collected on ordinary Australian citizens with the NSA and other Five Eyes partners.
Swedish intelligence was revealed to be spying on Russian leaders, then passing it on to the NSA; the Norwegian Intelligence Service was developing a supercomputer, called Steel Winter, to decrypt and analyze data from Afghanistan, Russia, and elsewhere; Australia’s intelligence service had surveillance teams stationed in Australian embassies around Asia and the Pacific; and Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate and the NSA worked together to spy on Indonesia during a UN climate change conference in 2007.
And our allies probably weren’t too happy to see in print that we were spying on them as well...
The U.S. government bugged the offices of the European Union in New York, Washington, and Brussels; the U.S. government was spying on at least 38 foreign embassies and missions, using a variety of electronic surveillance methods; the NSA spied on millions of phone calls, emails, and text messages of ordinary German citizens; and using a program called Fairview, the NSA intercepted Internet and phone-call data of Brazilian citizens.
The NSA conducted surveillance on citizens in a number of Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and others. The agency also sought information on oil, energy, and trade; the NSA provided surveillance to U.S. diplomats in order to give them the upper hand in negotiations at the UN Summit of the Americas; and the NSA spied on former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto (then a candidate).
Using a ‘man in the middle’ attack, NSA spied on Google, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, and the Brazilian oil company Petrobras; the NSA spied on Indian diplomats and other officials in an effort to gain insight into the country’s nuclear and space programs; the NSA tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel; the NSA spied on Italian citizens, companies, and government officials; the NSA monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders and encouraged other government agencies to share their ‘Rolodexes’ of foreign politicians so it could monitor them; the NSA spied on Spanish leaders and citizens; and the NSA spied on the Vatican.
The NSA spied on millions of cellphone calls in Norway in one 30-day period; widespread spying was revealed in Italy, with the NSA spying on ordinary Italians as well as diplomats and political leaders; and the NSA closely monitored the Chinese technology firm Huawei in attempt to reveal ties between the company and the Chinese military. The agency also spied on Chinese banks and other companies, as well as former President Hu Jintao.
Not to be outdone, in the largest leak in U.S. military history, Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) a former American Army soldier and intelligence analyst, leaked a massive amount of classified and unclassified but sensitive documents to WikiLeaks in early 2010. The leaked information included videos of airstrikes, U.S. diplomatic cables, and 391,832 United States Army field reports. These Army field reports, now known as the Iraq War Documents or Iraq War Logs, contain almost 400,000 military logs recorded between 2004 to 2009. Again, there were certainly things that Americans needed to know – like unreported civilian deaths, prison abuse by U.S. troops, and the widespread use of torture – but, because she indiscriminately leaked everything, Manning also crossed the line.
Luckily, reputable media outlets such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism redacted sensitive information before they published the information, but Wikileaks showed no such concern for the well-being of our troops or to anything else having to do with our national interests. Manning was eventually convicted by court-martial and sentenced to 35 years at Fort Leavenworth. In January 2017, President Obama commuted her sentence to time served, which amounted to almost seven years behind bars.
Julian Assange not only crossed the bright line, he blew right through it over and over and over again. He is not a hero, a journalist or a whistleblower. He’s just a straight up criminal hacker.
Even before the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (the “Mueller Report”) was released in April 2019, it had become clear that Wikileaks and Assange gave zero thought to the real-life consequences of indiscriminately publishing stolen material. What started out as a website for so-called “transparency” and “accountability” turned into nothing more than a vehicle for revenge and personal agenda.
We already knew that putting people at risk meant nothing to Wikileaks – publishing Chelsea Manning’s unredacted material proved that. But Assange and Wikileaks took it to a whole new level when they published almost 300,000 emails from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice & Development Party (AKP). What was supposedly damaging information about Erdoğan was instead personal information about everyday Turkish citizens, including their home addresses, phone numbers, and political party affiliation. This is beyond inappropriate anytime, but it’s especially dangerous at a time when thousands of people – including soldiers and judiciary members – were still being detained and arrested after a failed military coup.
This is all unconscionable behavior, but then came the icing on the cake: Wikileaks’ interference in America’s 2016 U.S. presidential election, including its work with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker, to obtain 20,000 stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta, the chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Worse, in an uber prick move on Assange’s part, Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that Assange and Wikileaks, in order “to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing,” made the blatantly false claim that Seth Rich – a former DNC staff member who was brutally murdered on the streets of Washington, D.C. in July 2016 – was the one who stole the DNC emails.
Ultimately, in an 18-count indictment for multiple violations of the Espionage Act, the U.S. Department of Justice charged that “cables that WikiLeaks published included names of persons throughout the world who provided information to the U.S. government in circumstances in which they could reasonably expect that their identities would be kept confidential.”
“These sources included journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents who were living in repressive regimes and reported to the United States the abuses of their own government, and the political conditions within their countries, at great risk to their own safety.”
In June 2024, the U.S. Justice Department reached a plea agreement with Assange, who pled guilty to a single felony count of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information in exchange for no further prison time. In the end, Assange spent fourteen years in some form of confinement trying to avoid prosecution by the United States. Anyone looking for any sort of contrition from Julian Assange was disappointed. Three months after the pleas deal, he said: “I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.”