News
By Charles S. Clark, March 25, 2014
On Wednesday, an alliance of pro-whistleblower activists is set to deliver petitions containing more than 100,000 signatures to the State and Justice Departments demanding that former National Security Agency contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden have his passport reinstated so that he can end his current exile in Russia.
The petitions are addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder. They call Snowden, who formerly worked with highly classified telephone metadata in the Hawaii office of Booz Allen Hamilton, “a whistleblower who has educated the public about threats to our privacy and precious constitutional rights.” The petitions urge officials “to make an unequivocal public commitment not to interfere with [Snowden’s] travels or political asylum process.”
The push comes as President Obama has given some ground to critics and prepared a proposal to reform the controversial NSA domestic surveillance program to limit its scope. (More here.)
“President curbs metadata gathering, but still wants to charge whistleblower Snowden” By Neil Macdonald, CBC News Posted: Mar 26, 2014
Try to find some logic here, if you can. Most Americans disapprove of the blanket electronic eavesdropping carried out by the vast apparatus of U.S. security organs. It is, they tell pollsters, an infringement of their privacy and liberty.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama sympathized: “I think the fears about our privacy in this age of internet and big data are justified,” he told reporters in The Hague. More here.
By Sam Sturgis, McClatchy Washington Bureau, March 26, 2014
Advocates for Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower pressed for the return of his U.S. passport and his freedom to seek political asylum. Snowden, whose revelations about a National Security Agency program to collect Americans’ phone data rocked the intelligence community, is currently in Russia. Read more here.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.
The annual Sam Adams Award has been given in previous years to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; Sam Provance, former US Army Sgt; Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence; Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State; Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks: Thomas Drake, of NSA; Jesselyn Radack, formerly of Dept. of Justice and now National Security Director of Government Accountability Project; Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Director, National Intelligence Council, and Edward Snowden, former contractor for the National Security Agency; Chelsea Manning, US Army Private who exposed (via WikiLeaks) key information on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as State Department activities; and to retired National Security Agency official William Binney, who challenged decisions to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the government’s massive — and wasteful — collection of electronic data.
