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Why Whistleblowers Can't Get a Fair Trial
phantomfive writes "'Seven whistleblowers have been prosecuted under the Obama administration,' writes Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer who advised two of them. She explains why they can't get a fair trial. In the Thomas Drake case, the administration retroactively marked documents as classified, saying, 'he knew they should have been classified.' In the Bradley Manning case, the jury wasn't allowed to see what information was leaked. The defendants, all who have been charged with espionage, have limited access to court documents. Most of these problems happen because the law was written to deal with traitorous spies, not whistleblowers."
When a government is corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent, then a whistleblower and a spy are essentially the same thing, as they threaten the positions and livelihoods of the corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent politicians and bureaucrats who comprise it.
Washington, Adams, Franklin, Hancock, et al would've been hung as traitors if the Brits had quashed the American rebellion.
Bucking the system is courageous for a reason.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Traitorous spies? No, that is false. The law was written to deal with socialists advocating isolationism in WWI.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
its laughable for people to think anyone who challenges deep political and financial power structures are going to 1. somehow be rewarded or applauded for their efforts or 2. get some sort of "fair trial" (whatever that really means in our current legal system) where a positive outcome for the WB would encourage others to follow suit. ...and for those who think otherwise...sorry to tell you...it was your parents putting the money under the pillow, not the tooth fairy :((
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
As an outsider (not a US Citizen) I laugh everytime I read an account of how persecuted US citizens are.
Even in Soviet Russia at the height of the cold war russians had rights. (It's interesting reading the real account of life in russian from people who lived it not the propaganda)
Chinese citizens have more rights than you do (as long as they stay within the political party rules) and the law is mostly clear with clearly defined rules and laws.
The US system of laws and bylaws is so convluded that the Avg person commits 3 felonys a day ("http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds-target-the-innocent#axzz2rEA3eW6J)
USA's Tax law along is almost 4 million pages long.
Implied
Welcome to the Land of the ^ free
Whistleblowing would be reporting to a higher authority wrongdoing within the government. That means that they are reporting to someone within the government that is higher up. These people are reporting outside the government channels, and as such are leaking information. When they leak information it is possible that people get hurt. God knows what undercover agents names, or information that could lead to that agents identity, Snowden has been passing around China and Russia under the guise of freedom of information.
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
When you call Bradley Manning a whistle blower, you lose all credibility. And I know its not popular on this site, but I would say the same about Edward Snowden. In both cases there is way too much indiscriminate collateral damage to hide behind the whistle blower defense. If either one had identified illegal activity and released information about that, it would be one thing. What they did was narcissism, pure and simple.
As for the other examples sited, I don't know enough to have an opinion.
Let the flames begin.
There is the answer to all the people who say, "He should have just been a whistleblower". He would have been silenced, and we would never have found out about how we are being spied upon by the NSA.
Man that is some lame ass shit to come here spamming like that.
Snowden is in Russia and In Mother Russia whistles blow you.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I too would like to know why whistleblowers can't get a fair trial. Could someone put up the full text?
Send him to prison so he can enjoy bubba ramming in his rear end, and record those sound for his next CD (will sound better than anything he's recorded so far!)
and cradle of democracy and human rights.
I thought changing law retroactively does have an effect on people that did 'wrong' in the mean time. That seemed like a good principle to have. Well I guess nothing is as it seemed to be.
The link is to a news story behind the Wall Street Journal's paywall; I think such stories should be reconsidered. Such situations are acceptable with posts on science, which often link both to a popular-science write-up and to the original journal article: probably those readers with the expertise to read the original literature are subscribers. Links to ordinary news stories should follow the same policy: if there must be a link to a paywalled story, a link to a generally accessible version should be expected as well.
Pretty sure that those things are not problems to do with how these specific laws are written, they're fundamental flaws in the trial process and thus the judiciary itself. If such basic rules are being ignored then by definition you wouldn't know if an accused person was actually a traitorous spy or not, would you, because the system would be unable to come to any trustworthy conclusion.
my understanding (& no, IANAL but had some basic law classes in undergrad) is you can't pass a law that makes an act retroactively illegal but it seems like (at least in the "spirit" of the law) that would also apply to retroactively changing designations of persons/objects to make previous acts criminal under existing laws as well. as an example: if I kill a non-endangered species on my property & EPA subsequently declares it endangered by administration's "logic" I could be charged w/killing an endangered specie (maybe I shouldn't be giving them ideas).
I know this is something of an exercise in mental masturbation since the administration, courts & congress ignore the constitution anyway but can any lawyers cite any precedent for this sort of thing outside the magical constitution-free zone of "national security"?
Slashdot should not consider anything news if the original article is behind a paywall.
"As Americans, we can take enormous pride in the fact that courage has been inspired by our own struggle for freedom, by the tradition of democratic law secured by our forefathers and enshrined in our Constitution. It is a tradition that says all men are created equal under the law and that no one is above it."
"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones weâ(TM)ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
"Iâ(TM)m in this race not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation."
"Change doesnâ(TM)t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington."
Now watch me get modded down for using Obama's own words against him. Remember, citizens, report suspicious subversive activity immediately!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Only fat Americans assume that traveling requires driving your own car.
Pretty well sums up the NSA.
7 out of 100 ... would tell me that the those 7 _did_ do something odd
7 out of 7 ... okay let's get paranoid.
7 out of 5 ... NSA at work?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
There is a continuum from objection to whistleblowing to traitor, not a stark line. How many whistleblowers have there been in the last decade who have indicated waste, fraud, and abuse that exists in the 2 million people who form the federal government? In terms of dangerous or classified documents leaked to the public, where do these 7 stand wrt quantity, sensitivity, and content related to those who were not prosecuted?
Without this data, the fine article is merely clickbait.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In the Bradley Manning case, the jury wasn't allowed to see what information was leaked.
When you're on a jury, you have a duty to both the accused and your nation to consider evidence fairly, within Constitutional constraints. Being prevented from seeing evidence would, to me, be all the reason necessary to give a verdict of 'not guilty.'
All accused American citizens have a right to confront their accusers and the evidence presented against them, in a fair and speedy trial conducted within due process. Period, end of story; don't like it? Amend the Constitution or GTFO.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
In every one of those cases, the nation security statutes, are in direct conflict with higher law, and it's the higher law which prevails. Especially since a jury with classified security clearance could have been selected.
If the court does not stand behind the law, then the court does not have the weight of law. Anybody cn break any of these individuals out of prison and it is fully legal to do so, in both letter and spirit of the law.
I work for a large defense contractor. The unenforced, known by few, rule is that anything not marked is considered Top Secret. This is more enforced in locked rooms.
Because a document is not marked, does not automatically make it unclassified. Marking it unclassified makes it unclassified. At one time, this led to a film buff's $2000 collection of DVDs that he stored at work being destroyed because it had no markings on the discs and security noticed it.
As a life-time Democrat it pains me to say it, but it is true.
...is character assasination.
"God knows what undercover agents names, or information that could lead to that agents identity, Snowden has been passing around China and Russia under the guise of freedom of information."
Nice smear.
If you or anyone else could cite one shred of evidence that this was Snowden's intent, or that he even has such information, or that he's done anything approaching this, you MIGHT have an argument.
According to every statement he's made, and every action he's taken, Snowden's intent was to take and expose documents that prove that massive systematic government surveillance by the US of innocent people exists, and what it's scope is. He's not talking about spies or secret agents (which, by the way, would more likely be run by the CIA, not the NSA). The NSA doesn't do deep undercover moles passing secret notes. They do their business in telecom offices and secret courts. They don't enter countries under false names, they're not disavowed if they're caught. The NSA isn't a cold war spy novel.
You're parroting Fox News here. Once you accept Snowden leaked "secrets," he's a dirty traitor who wants to leak ALL our secrets! Let's wrap ourselves in the flag and talk sanctimoniously about all our poor secret agents that Snowden is clearly out murdering. Evidence? Who needs it! Throw dirt until it sticks.
Trying to start a rational discussion on editorial policies on Slashdot?
And under the expectation that anyone at Dice has given a rat's ass about the quality of the editing since they bought the place?
Heck, expecting editors to so much as read the submission, let alone click the links, before posting them?
Everybody knows that to be a whistleblower is to condemn yourself to a life of deprivation and pain, but you do it because you feel that your suffering is worth the societal good. Whistleblowing is an altruistic act. Sometimes a whistleblower is incidentally rewarded, but nobody does the act in hopes of reward.
There's sort of a bunch of related behaviors
Tattletales - people who disclose what other people are doing wrong, often in hopes of currying favor in some way
Whistleblowers - people who are willing to sacrifice all, for the greater good
Whiners - people who are willing to tell everything that is wrong, although generally they're not the cause of it.
informers, stool pigeons - people who are willing to disclose in exchange for monetary or other compensation
Hmm.. lots of these aren't considered "good", are they.
Manning didn't have a jury did he?
Do you see how this goes?
But insisting that only the two big ones are the only allowed choices or you've "thrown your vote away" insists that you'll get 2 parties with 45% of the vote each.
Sadly, the math pretty much guarantees this outcome. The people who designed the system we use had few models to look to and did not have the background to anticipate the problems that would arise.
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
Letter to Jonathan Jackson (2 October 1780), "The Works of John Adams", vol 9, p.511
When organized/war criminals are the ones in charge, can you really blow ANY whistle without being technically, legally a traitor?
Those that spoke out against Toto, Josef, Adolf and the like are all technically traitors as well.
Or because when someone whistle-blows they are then tried by the very people they are accused of wronging... anyone see an issue with that?
It's like having a murder on trial where the victims mother is the judge, and their extended family is the Jury.
Not to say you are wrong or to defend Obama doing the indefensible as he has done (or that has been done in his name), but I suspect power influence and decisions like these are all taken in a similar way to the satirical British series "Yes, Minister". An excellent must watch series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
The obstruction ran all the way up to the highest authorities of the highest branches of our government.
So what else is there above the country but *the world*?
Bradley Manning was lucky under the UCMJ he may of gotten the death penalty
Manning wasn't a whistle blower.
Manning might have been a whistle blower had Manning only reported government misdeeds. But instead Manning dumped every single document he could get his hands on.
He should have a pretty good case in appeals court, then: It's utterly unconstitutional to be punished for an action that wasn't a crime when you took the action. Whether it should have been classified or not is completely not his fault or responsibility.
Who did what now?
This was on WSJ; so all I saw was a bunch of faded text behind a window telling me to pay up or leave. I wish slashdotters wouldn't link to pay-wall sources. Some of us currently can't afford to pay for this stuff, so we're left wondering just what the hell the rest of you are talking about.
What campaign promise?
Show me one instance where Snowden gave ANYTHING to the Russians instead of the British press.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
If a 3rd party managed to get a candidate with the charisma, connections, and rhetorical skills of Obama in 2008, it certainly could be possible for a party shift to occur like that which destroyed the Whigs 150 years ago.
The GOP didn't destroy the Whigs by electing Abe Lincoln as POTUS. They destroyed the Whigs by slowly and methodically building a party from the bottom up. By the time Lincoln got to Washington he already had GOP Congressmen and Senators to work with. There were already GOP Assemblyman, State Senators, Mayors, Town Councilmen, Justices at all levels of the judiciary, etc.
It's fashionable these days for third parties to try and run for POTUS but that's a fools errand if they can't be bothered to compete for and win at the lower levels first.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Snowden took American national secrets and gave them to the Russians, our enemies.
I didn't realize he gave specific things to the Russians and no one else. I didn't realize the Russians were our enemies. Just out of curiosity, did this "National Secrets to Russian Enemies" thing happen before or after Snowden was accused of being a traitor?
A whistleblower goes up the chain of command to the person above the obstruction; a traitor goes to the enemy.
How does one go above the president? How does one go above organizations that are trained in both character assassination and real-life assassination?
And finally: Who do you work for and how did you get modded to a 3?
I'm not American so don't really know, but it seems to me that Obama probably had little or nothing to do with this. The timeline is just coincidental. Am I right?
I mean it would be like saying someone in the Clinton administration invented the internet. Oh wait....
In a military trial the term jury doesn't mean what it does in the real world. The jury is hardly the defendant's peers. Manning knew this and went for a trial by the judge only.
The headline says it all. Why on earth would a whistleblower be placed on trial?
Who knew that being a Constitutional Law Professor would become the perfect qualification for sabotaging the Constitution?
Are you a Russian? I'm not. He gave me plenty of information... If you can list a way he could have released his information to the US as a whole without also letting it be seen by the Russians (who are opponents of ours on multiple political issues, but not our enemies by any stretch of the definition) then I will grant there is *some* point to what you said. Otherwise, it's complete bullshit.
Also, as others have pointed out, he did try going through proper channels. He was told to drop it. How high did you expect him to go, and what good did you expect it to do? The president himself has expressed support for the NSA's programs *and* branded Snowden a criminal *before* he took asylum in Russia, so that part of your argument is bullshit. Enough members of congress have said (or voted in favor of) much the same things that I doubt it would do much good to have gone to them, either. With the heads of the executive and legislative branches complicit in this travesty, Snowden *did* go over their heads: to the people who elect those scum. We, the citizens of these United States of America.
So, I ask you again: how was Snowden supposed to reveal the information to We The People, without also revealing it to our "enemies"? (If you wanted to pick examples of enemies, you could do much better than Russia).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The "Rule of Law" is a slogan just like about everything else. Sure, nothing is or was perfect but as we continue our gradual fall into despotism, real actual things fade into metaphor and then into meaningless emotional trigger phrases. Unlike in history, where they lacked the social sciences we have today which enhance the skilled sheep herders control.
If you are their enemy, they can drag you into court over ANYTHING what so ever and the only protection you have is which judge you happen to get - who may "interpret" it anyway they seem fit to; including pulling out old common law that isn't actual law -- that is just if they want to cite something instead of pull some total BS like "corporations are people." Sure, you may win eventually after they wreak your life and freeze your funds (or lose your job) so you can't pay for a defense even if you have the money... which most people do not. The political pressure the press can provide when such abuses happen is the last resort but we all know how that doesn't happen...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If you can't get an objective opinion from a defendant's counsel, where can you get it?
It's irrelevant what kind of people a law is targeted at. If you can't prove them guilty in proper style you have to let them go. If they (or the jury) are denied relevant information, they can't be prosecuted.
This asssumes you are living in a country with proper free government under the law. Apparently the USA doesn't qualify.
Not sure, if serious, but I'll give it a go
Snowden took American national secrets and gave them to the Russians, our enemies.
Snowden took American secrets and gave them to the American people, the Russians got them incidentally, as there is no way to allow all Americans to know something without letting some foreign nationals know as well.
Since when is that not an act worthy of being classified as a traitorous spy?
He's this generation's Kim Philby, but he found a better way to "justify" his actions.
Still doesn't make them right.
A whistleblower goes up the chain of command to the person above the obstruction; a traitor goes to the enemy.
I agree, he went to the American people, for which he was labeled a traitor.
...not a whistleblower....
A person that seeks power is, by definition, one who should not hold power.
When the whistle was blown, his polls plummeted, and his party abandoned him, he resigned.
Not quite the population limit you impose though.
I did not know we were at war with Russia, Last I checked they were a trade partner.
Also do you have proof that Snowden "gave" the "secret" documents to the Russians? again last I checked he had given them to international Journalists.
Lastly, Where do you go when the person authorizing the illegal activity is the Highest person in the land, you know Mr President? where do you go at that point?
We have seen time and time again that when a whistleblower goes "through the proper channels" they are told to shut up and not get involved.
Snowden took American national secrets and gave them to the Russians, our enemies.
The Russians are enemies of Americans? In this decade???
The main reason I don't trust any government in any country to provide a just outcome in whistle blowers cases is that the governments typically show no regard for the law themselves. Over and over we have seen governments break their own laws in spying and data acquisition and use....and when they are caught they just make it legal anyway and no one is ever prosecuted. The whistle blowers are talking to the people. The governments are deaf to news of their own crimes. It's up to each of us to see to it that criminal governments are at least held to account through the ballot box. if you don't......well.....Germany found out how that turns out back in the late 1930s. Sooner or later you get a leader who doesn't even make excuses for his crimes.
Only boring people are ever bored.
They were following "cues" not "queues".
People have moved on from just getting "you're" and "there/their/they're" wrong to getting more obscure things wrong.
Next they'll be using reign instead of rein and discrete instead of discreet.
We are ruined.