Obama DoJ indicts important NSA whistleblower on 10 felonies...

[G_j]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-DoJ-indicts-NSA-whis-by-Ross-Levin-100417-242.html

Obama DoJ indicts NSA whistleblower...are you mad yet?

By Ross Levin

<snip>

This is not just a single instance of outrage. It is a microcosm of the Obama presidency, the political success of corporate America, and the failure of its opposition.

So the Obama Administration successfully indicted an important recent whistleblower, a man who revealed a lot about the secret (and very, very possibly unconstitutional, not to mention immoral) wiretapping programs at the NSA. This takes it one step further than the Bush Administration ever took the cat and mouse game they played with whistleblowers, since this is the first one who has actually been prosecuted. The New York Times writes,

The indictment suggests the Obama administration may be no less aggressive than the Bush administration in pursuing whistleblowers and reporters' sources who disclose government secrets. In a little-noticed case last December, a former contract linguist for the F.B.I., Shamai Kedem Leibowitz, pleaded guilty to leaking five classified documents to a blogger.

In the Bush administration, the Justice Department spent several years investigating The New York Times's sources for a 2005 article that revealed the existence of the N.S.A. program of eavesdropping without warrants. No one has been charged in that case.

And just what information was this man supplying to journalist Siobhan Gorman? Well, here's an excerpt of one of the articles written based on that information:

In what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.

But the NSA, then headed by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, opted against both of those tools, as well as the feature that monitored potential abuse of the records. Only the data analysis facet of the program survived and became the basis for the warrantless surveillance program.

The decision, which one official attributed to "turf protection and empire building," has undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats, sources say. In the wake of revelations about the agency's wide gathering of U.S. phone records, they add, ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.

<snip>

[Lost4words]

1. There is no justice in this country anymore. Fat Cats win every time. nt

[Turbineguy]

2. Who can spy on the spies?

Giving state secrets to a blogger is not whistleblowing. The Senate Intelligence Committee would have been a better choice.

http://intelligence.senate.gov/members109thcongress.html

[madokie]

3. Exactly

This is a hit job on the Obama Administration just as sure as i'm typing away right now.
Peace

[rossl]

7. Seeing as I wrote this "hit piece,"

let me tell you, it's not a hit piece. It's some opinionated coverage of an event, and my opinion just happens to not be favorable to Obama, because I don't like this policy and I don't like the general direction of Washington and his administration. But "hit piece" implies intellectual dishonesty, and I'm nothing if not intellectually honest.

[Robb]

11. Welcome to DU. It's a hit piece.

[G_j]

15. thank you, and welcome to DU

your piece is well done, and honest.

Those who imply intellectual dishonesty without providing substance to back up their assertions, are just a very loud handful.

[G_j]

6. what have they done lately?

I agree the information should go there also, but I don't imagine much would be done about it.


Dianne Feinstein, California
Christopher S. Bond,
John D. Rockefeller IV,
West Virginia
Orrin Hatch, Utah
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Evan Bayh, Indiana
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
Richard Burr, North Carolina
Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma
Bill Nelson, Florida
James Risch, Idaho
Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island

[noise]

13. Congress voted for telecom immunity

The talking point at the time was how unfair it was to accuse the telecom companies of betraying the public because they were acting in good faith to help the government spy on terrorists. If anyone were to blame it would be the government officials who wanted the telecom's assistance. And then the Obama administration used state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits against the government.

The same standard of conduct should apply to the Bush and Obama administrations. The 4th amendment hasn't changed.

[TexasObserver]

4. The president finds new ways to disappoint each month.

There's not a dime's worth of difference between the president and his predecessor on so many important civil liberties and domestic spying issues. He's weak, weak, weak when it comes to standing up to excess by government. His lack of commitment to Democratic ideals is a betrayal to all who supported him.

[G_j]

5. What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x530174


Friday, Apr 16, 2010

By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)

The more I think and read about the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the more I think this might actually be one of the worst steps the Obama administration has taken yet, if not the single worst step -- and that's obviously saying a lot. During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush's term (though several were threatened). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.


Aside from the indefensible fact that only crimes committed by high-level Bush officials -- but nobody else -- enjoy the benefits of Obama's "Look Forward, Not Backward" decree, think about the interests being served by this prosecution. Most discussions yesterday suggested that Drake's leaks to The Baltimore Sun's Sibohan Gorman were about waste and mismanagement in the "Trailblazer" project rather than controversial NSA spying activities, but that's not entirely accurate.

Just consider this May 18, 2006, article by Gorman, describing how and why the NSA opted for the "Trailblazer" proposal over the privacy-protecting "Thin Thread" program, in the process discarding key privacy protections designed to ensure that the NSA would not eavesdrop on the domestic calls of U.S. citizens (h/t ondelette). In that article -- which really should be read to get a sense for the whistle-blowing that is being punished by the DOJ -- Gorman described at length how then-NSA head Michael Hayden rejected technologies that could "rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy" and "that monitored potential abuse of the records." As she put it: "Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records -- an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection -- agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it."

It's not hyperbole to say that Bush's decision to use the NSA to spy domestically on American citizens was one of the most significant stories of this generation. It was long recognized that turning the NSA inward was one of the greatest dangers to freedom, as Sen. Frank Church warned back in 1975, after he investigated America's secret surveillance apparatus: "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." It was, of course, the December 16, 2005, New York Times article by Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau which first disclosed that the Bush NSA was illegally eavesdropping on American citizens inside the U.S., but Gorman's articles regarding the Trailblazer program -- in the time period covered by the indictment, using NSA sources (almost certainly including Drake) -- provided crucial details about how and why the Bush NSA dispensed with key safeguards to protect innocent Americans from such invasive domestic surveillance.

..more..

[laughingliberal]

8. I am beyond angry in seeing this

Were we not all looking forward to getting rid of Bush and having the desecration of our rights stop? Is there anyone here who thought what we were voting for was less transparency, less freedom of the press, and more surveillance? Really? Is that what we were casting our votes for? I would say I'm shocked but it's getting harder to shock me, these days.

[truebrit71]

9. Oh goodie..yet another way Obama represents change..

..if by change you mean doing exactly as his predecessor did...

I am almost all out of outrage at this point..*shakeshead*

Don't know what the fuck we fought for...

[Nikki Stone1]

10. When BO said he admired Raygun, he meant it. W's 3rd term...

It's the same insider group, people, no matter what surface they put on it. And they are connected trans-nationally.

Thanks for bringing this to light G_j. Have to admit I am not surprised in the least. Sadly.

[saracat]

12. Wow. Why? What possible justification is there for this? Anyone?But I

I suppose since the Obama Admin has upheld the wiretapping and FISA this is to be expected. This is just wrong.

[Selatius]

14. President Obama is proving to be plainly authoritarian on this issue. nt