EXCERPT FROM HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH ON WHISTLEBLOWERS

FROM HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

STATEMENT ON THE PROTECTION OF WHISTLEBLOWERS

The federal Whistleblower Protection Act exempts from its protections whistleblowers in the intelligence community, including defense contractors. The most legal protection on which such employees can rely is the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which provides a channel for whistleblowers to take matters of “urgent concern” first to the inspector general of the Department of Justice and then to a congressional intelligence oversight committee. However, this law does not provide any legal right of action for such whistleblowers to protect themselves against retaliation for reporting their concerns in these ways, and in practice, even continuing access to congressional committees can be thwarted by agency heads, who usually can identify the whistleblower concerned.[11]In October 2012, the Obama administration released a Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-19) intended to bolster protection for national security whistleblowers; it requires agencies to establish a process by which whistleblowers can seek review of prohibited retaliatory actions. The directive was widely criticized as window-dressing, however, because it explicitly denies whistleblowers the ability to obtain legal enforcement of any rights or procedures set forth under the directive.[12]

The case of the “NSA Four” is illustrative of the effective lack of protection. Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, and Thomas Drake were all targets of a leak investigation beginning in 2007, following aNew York Timesreport on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs.[13] Each had years earlier tried to bring attention to waste and mismanagement in the NSA’s spending billions of dollars on a failed signals intelligence system, Trailblazer, when a much cheaper and more effective one, ThinThread, was at hand. Because they had earlier voiced their concerns internally, to Congress and the inspector general, each suffered retaliation from the government and later was included among the targets of an expansive FBI investigation based on the New York Times report, including gunpoint raids on their homes. Drake was charged with leaking documents under the Espionage Act, charges that ultimately collapsed.