On The Front Lines
Rutherford Institute Calls on President Obama to Restore Whistleblower Protections for Intelligence Community Contractors Such as Edward Snowden
WASHINGTON, DC — The Rutherford Institute, as part of a coalition of 45 national and international organizations that includes the ACLU, Government Accountability Project, Human Rights Watch and the Sunlight Foundation, is calling on President Obama to restore whistleblower protections for intelligence community (IC) contractors such as Edward Snowden. The coalition’s letter urges Obama to lend his support to legislation, S. 794, that would give intelligence whistleblowers incentives to work within the system by making it possible for them file a whistleblower complaint and provide them access to District Court and a jury trial to challenge retaliation. As the letter points out, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did not have viable rights to work constructively within the system, nor is there a system in place for him to have a fair trial.
“In our current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience can well render you a criminal,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If we are to have any hope of restoring transparency and accountability to our government, it is more critical than ever that we stand up for the rights of those whistleblowers who dare to speak out against governmental wrongdoing.”
In 2007, Congress enacted whistleblower rights for some intelligence community contractors, including Department of Defense (DoD) contractors who work for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the NSA. These protections remained in place from 2008 through 2012, and the Senate, with bipartisan support, approved expansion of the safeguards to all government contractors in the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. However, a closed conference committee removed all preexisting and new IC whistleblower protections from the bill before passing it, despite a track record showing that the law was working as intended and did not produce any adverse impacts on national security during its five-year lifespan. IC contractors were subsequently stripped of whistleblower protections in 2012 such that they have no independent due process rights outside the intelligence community to defend themselves in the face of retaliation, even when they work though designated channels.
Six months after IC contractor rights were rolled back, Edward Snowden disclosed the U.S. government’s sweeping domestic surveillance programs. When Mr. Snowden talked about his experience blowing the whistle, he said, “The charges they brought against me … explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense. There were no whistleblower protections that would’ve protected me – and that’s known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.” Snowden went on to cite the nightmares of previous whistleblowers who were harassed when they worked through institutional channels without protections. For example, Edward Loomis, a career NSA employee and then contractor from 1964 to 2007, was allegedly retaliated against by the NSA after reporting through internal channels an ineffective surveillance program that wasted taxpayer dollars and violated constitutional rights to privacy.
