GovExec.com - Whistleblowers meet to share stories, plot strategies

[cascadiance]

Looks like the various whistleblowers are getting together to plot strategies. Wonder how much they are discussing what's going on in the Fitzgerald hearings, etc... Folks like Sibel Edmonds, Russ Tice, Daniel Ellsberg, Tony Shaffer were all getting together to plot legislative and publicity strategies in Virginia according to this report.

From:
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1005/101105c1.htm

October 11, 2005

Whistleblowers meet to share stories, plot strategies

By Chris Strohm
[email protected]

CHINCOTEAGUE, Va. - More than two dozen national security whistleblowers, lawyers and public interest advocates gathered Monday night in a pristine fishing village on Virginia's eastern shore to discuss strategies for strengthening legal protections against reprisal and to exchange stories.

Participants in the three-day National Security Whistleblowers Conference include former and current employees of some of the government's most secretive agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, CIA and FBI. The event was funded by five advocacy groups: the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, the Project on Government Oversight, the Fund for Constitutional Government, the Cavallo Foundation and the Fertel Foundation.

As night settled over Chincoteague Bay, NSA whistleblower Russ Tice chatted with noted national security lawyer Roy Krieger. Members of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, a group founded by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, plotted legislative and publicity strategies. And Daniel Ellsberg, the former Marine who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War to the media in 1971, met the latest military whistleblower on the block: intelligence specialist Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who has stirred up a frenzy in Washington by reporting that a classified Army program identified one of the main ringleaders of the Sept. 11 attacks more than a year before they occurred.

Most of the whistleblowers at the conference said they were ardent conservatives or lifelong Republicans. But their experiences have brought them into a world where they mingle with representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union and Democratic lawmakers.

...

[Peace Patriot]

1. There should be "Patriot stamps" for them all. I'm very heartened by this

post. Thank you for it!

We need Diebold and ES&S whistleblowers as well. Lord, lord!

And somebody really needs to look into the death of David Kelly, the Brits chief WMD expert, who was whistleblowing to the BBC about the "sexed up" Iraq WMD intel, and was found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances, four days after Valerie Plame was outed. I believe there is a connection between the two--possibly having to do with Bush Cartel efforts to plant WMDs in Iraq (for Judith Miller to "find").

[cascadiance]

4. I've looked in to cafepress.com and/or stamps.com to do stamps

They have "real" custom postage that we can customize for the different whistleblowers. Unfortunately Stamps.com is even more stringent than cafepress.com on what they allow on their stamps, and there's a lot of language to have to work around. Cafepress.com partners with stamps.com to offer stamps.com service for cafepress shops, so they have a separate usage agreement statement for stamps than other shop content.

In particular it's hard to get:
1) around the Stamps.com restriction to not have celebrities or other persons in the news photos in it. Cafepress.com at least allows you to do so if you have that persons' permission to use their photo likeness. Stamps.com doesn't seem to have that out clause, though perhaps we can press them on this. Otherwise, we'll have to pull out photos of the individuals.
2) You are not allowed to have URLs on these stamps. They don't mention email address as being restricted though. So as a workaround, one could just put an email "burst" alias instead of an URL where interested people can get info instead of going to an URL.
3) No "Call to Action Statements". Is calling someone a "Patriot" a call to action statement? Perhaps just having each of these people's name as a "Patriot" and an information email address underneath wouldn't break this rule too.

Additionally, these stamps are rather pricey. To get big organizations to use these stamps for mass mailings to get the attention we want these whistleblowers to get, it might be helpful to somehow attach a paypal or other donation account to help offset the difference of the markup to a price that's just slightly above normal postage cost, so that there isn't a big cost disincentive to use these stamps by big organizations like moveon who are trying to keep their costs low. Perhaps only offset the costs when people buy them in large bulk purchases to encourage people using a lot of them.

If some folks here want to work with me on this, send me a note. I've not had a lot of time to spend a lot of time doing this recently, but I still think there's a good idea here to pursue. Perhaps it's a bit late now to do this, since the court case decisions should hopefully be heard in the next week or two, but there still may be need for some activism like this soon, if not for whistleblowers, perhaps for other similar issues that need a similar effort.

[cantstandbush]

2. What can we do to support them?

It would be great if MoveOn and DU could help them.

[tanyev]

3. Kick.

[SoCalDem]

5. This is kind of scary to me.. Just makes the "disgruntleds"

easy to pick off. I hope they are using way to avoid the prying eyes..

[goforit]

6. Hell...Its about time they start their own think-tank!!!

Hats off to them!!!:bounce:

[goforit]

7. Kicxk!!!

[cascadiance]

8. Russians are now concerned about States Secret privilege use...

This link from an online Russian language site came up when searching for Sibel Edmonds, which has a section which talks about their concern about states secret usage and how it also affects patent and intellectual property rights laws. I took the liberty of using an online translator to translate the Russian text on this page which is translated here:

http://www.online-translator.com/url/tran_url.asp?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerra.ru%2Ffocus%2F233117%2F&direction=re&template=General&cp1=NO&cp2=NO&autotranslate=on&transliterate=on&psubmit2.x=69&psubmit2.y=10

Original Russian language link is here:

http://www.computerra.ru/focus/233117/

The relevant translated text reads:

Who in the house to patents the owner

The Author: Kivi Berd
It is published on October, 12th, 2005

...

Simply speaking, inventors have elementary inflated. And as soon as they, after several years of unsuccessful negotiations "in an amicable way", have tried to submit on Lucent to court for infringement of a patent right, theft of trading secrets and default of conditions of the contract, against them " the heavy artillery " has been there and then put forward. Infringement of the patent legislation has been rejected by court on the ground that under the federal law of the company in similar affairs are incompetent, if their development is intended for exclusive use by the government. And from all other charges and from a duty to give to court documentation Lucent have released, having resorted to legal dodge under the name " the privilege of the state secrets ". As the American lawyers testify, this "privilege" has got to justice of the USA in the inheritance from the colonial past and its application by the executive government while misfires did not give.

The State administration recollects this privilege every time when it is necessary to hush up without noise the dark business - for example, in operations of special services. So judicial suit of the active workers protested in 70th years against war in Vietnam has been stopped and tried to achieve the truth about illegal shadowing them from ANB. In 1991 in the same image of a distance on hands to the banker involuntarily involved in illegal operations of CIA on money-laundering and as a result broken career by attempts to get out of this bog. More recently, in 2004, Bush's administration pribegla to the same privilege to silence was perevodchitse FBI Sibel Edmonds (Sibel Edmonds) which have dismissed for criticism Bjuro where it is wrong, in its opinion, use programs of machine translation.

For protection of the rights of the state on giving of another's inventions "privilege" used, similar, for the first time (the appeal court recently has confirmed, that is lawful) and is obvious to not open a detail about a concrete scope of the technical device. Though, in opinion of independent experts, special secret here, apparently, no. Well-known, that since second half 1990th years the Agency of national safety actively is engaged in interception of the information from underwater transoceanic fibre-optical highways (see "KT" *581). And if Crater Coupler it has appeared very convenient socket for reliable connection to a underwater cable, that, possibly, it and use in similar espionage operations.

[cascadiance]

9. US News aritcle on this Whistleblowers meeting...

A more comprehensive article on this meeting from U.S. News is here. Talks about how another "gagged" security whistleblower, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, had to have his lawyer speak here instead of himself because of his gag order on his issues with Abel Danger.

From:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051011/11natsec.htm

National Security Watch: Disquieted whistle-blowers


Charlie Archambault for USN&WR
A group gathers at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va.

Posted 10/11/05
By Kevin Whitelaw

CHINCOTEAGUE, Va. – The first annual National Security Whistleblowers Conference, held on this tiny resort island, has to be one of the more unusual gatherings of intelligence veterans in recent years. The nearly 20 current or former officials from the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and even the supersecret National Security Agency who make up the core of the conference share an unusual distinction: They are all deeply out of favor with their longtime employers.

After speaking up, either internally or publicly, about alleged wrongdoings, many have been pushed out, typically under a cloud of usually unrelated but classified personal allegations. Many are still fighting to preserve their careers or at least their reputations. Most cannot discuss the allegations they are making in detail because the specifics are highly classified. Some even have trouble outlining the alleged violations that ended their own careers. The agencies they work for also refuse to answer questions about the specific cases.

So this disparate lot of intelligence and law enforcement veterans came together this week to see what they might all have in common. The tone was deeply pessimistic. In the wake of 9/11, many in Washington had voiced strong support for whistle-blowers like Colleen Rowley, the FBI analyst who wrote a memo laying out a series of failures in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been arrested while attending flight school a month before the al Qaeda attacks. But the current and former officials at the conference said that today's climate in Washington has never been worse for whistle-blowers. Citing what many referred to as the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy amid their war on terrorism, several panelists bemoaned the difficulty of government officials raising allegations of government abuse, fraud, or incompetence without suffering retribution in their careers.

...