The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing on NSA surveillance programs that was a response to all the coverage of disclosures former NSA contractor Edward Snowden made to The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald. It was titled, “How Disclosed NSA Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries.” It was one of the [...]

Jesselyn Radack is the National Security & Human Rights Director at the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and is a contributing editor at Firedoglake. The following is a press release from GAP. Recently, the American public learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) has conducted, and continues to conduct, wholesale surveillance of U.S. citizens through a [...]

Forty-six percent of Americans, according to an Ipsos/Reuters poll, do not know whether the NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who disclosed information on top secret surveillance programs, is a patriot or a traitor. They probably do not know if he is a whistleblower either, but, perhaps, they are interested in more information so they could decide. [...]

On Friday, I participated in one of the better chats or discussions that I have done with others on Bradley Manning, government secrecy, the broken system of classification and the pursuit of whistleblowers or truth-tellers by the Obama administration. The chat also discussed the disclosures a whistleblower in government is now making on the National [...]

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein is passionately defending National Security Agency surveillance and calling for a leak investigation into the source, who provided a copy of a top secret order issued by a United States secret surveillance court, even as whistleblowers repeat warnings about surveillance they have been making for years. On “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed he has never been involved in the “potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material,” but the Justice Department under President Barack Obama has been more than willing to criminalize the press in order to enable or enhance the ability of the department to pursue leak investigations. [...]

A legal group of criminal defense attorneys has formed to combat what they describe as the FBI and Justice Department’s use of harassment and over-prosecution to chill and silence those who engage in journalism, Internet activism or dissent. The group, the Whistleblower Defense League, will, according to attorney Jason Flores-Williams, defend individuals engaged in investigating [...]

Following Pfc. Bradley Manning’s statement in court, Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn Radack shares her reaction to the statement and thoughts on his case. She addresses whether Manning is a whistleblower and considers the prosecution she went through, along with her work at the Government Accountability Project representing whistleblowers. *** According to the regular Whistleblower Protection [...]

National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake delivered a speech at the National Press Club luncheon on March 15. He addressed the “long shadow of government secrecy” that increasingly “obscures the view of democracy in our constitutional republic or what’s left of it.” Video of the entire speech given during the luncheon appears at the top [...]

The trailer for the documentary in production opens with a quote from writer George Orwell: If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. It is an appropriate setup for a film that Oscar-nominated filmmaker James Spione has set out to produce to show [...]