Whistleblowing

'Snowden’s two goals - alert people of mass spying, encourage future whistleblowers'

Snowden has said numerous times that without Thomas Drake there would have been no Edward Snowden. And that's because Drake was a much higher official within the NSA. But ten years earlier than Snowden he tried to blow the whistle on the very same allegations as Snowden later revealed - the mass surveillance undertaken without legal warrants by the National Security Agency of the United States. And what's new about these revelations that appeared in The Guardian and in my book Bravehearts this week is that we now know the inside story of what happened inside the Pentagon. And essentially it confirms exactly what Snowden suspected - which is that any whistleblower inside the Pentagon who tried to raise serious concerns about US policy by going through official channels, by following the rules, by trust in the whistleblower laws, that a whistleblower was very likely to end up crushed as Thomas Drake did. And these new revelations coming from John Crane, the former Assistant Inspector General at the Pentagon tell us in quite specific detail how high-up Pentagon officials repeatedly broke the law in their handling of Thomas Drake’s whistleblowing case, including by withholding and destroying documents, and lying to a Federal judge and other clear crimes and felonies. So, that is really what has come to light this week.