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Re: Edward Snowden Asylum To Be Offered By Venezuela,President Nicolás Maduro Says[W:
By the way, the people saying that Snowden should have gone through proper channels to report this info, there were not any proper channels to go through that would have worked.
More can be seen here: Why Didn’t Snowden Go through “Proper Channels” to Blow the Whistle? | Washington's Blog
By the way, the people saying that Snowden should have gone through proper channels to report this info, there were not any proper channels to go through that would have worked.
For example, when NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake tried to blow the whistle on fraud and corruption within the NSA – based upon the NSA spying on all Americans instead of targeting only suspected criminals – he was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
Drake notes:
I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.
By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You’re identified as someone they don’t like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.
But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.
When NSA whistleblower Russel Tice (later a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping) questioned spying on innocent Americans, NSA tried to have him labeled “crazy”, and fired him.
When the head of the NSA’s global digital communications program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, the Feds tried to scare him into shutting up:
[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.
NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe didn’t get anywhere through proper channels either.
More can be seen here: Why Didn’t Snowden Go through “Proper Channels” to Blow the Whistle? | Washington's Blog