While I was looking for background on the GCSB yesterday, I happened on this AFB article “New York Times backs Snowden in US online spying row”
Washington — The influential New York Times hailed fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden as a “whistleblower” on Thursday and threw its weight behind calls for him to be shown clemency.
The editorial was quickly seized upon by activists campaigning to persuade President Barack Obama’s administration to drop its bid to prosecute the former National Security Agency contractor.
And it touched a nerve with Times readers. More than 1,200 left comments on the daily’s website within hours of the item going online, and it soared to the top of its “most viewed” items of the day.
The editorial from the NYT’s editorial board 1 proved to be interesting and well linked 2 reading.
Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.
The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately,found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden….
Those two other judicial probes are referenced further down in the editorial.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.
A federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.
It is fascinating looking at the extent of the NSA’s activities, which clearly extend far beyond anything that is known in public about the powers they have been issued with.
One of the standard attacks on Snowden has been that he had other avenues to blow the whistle on these activities. Turns out this was not the case.
The president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face those charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower.
“If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”
In fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.
In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not.
Indeed.
I must have a look at our local whistle blower legislation to see if the same contractor hole exists here. Anyone know?
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