Deeper they go the more whistleblowers will come forward? Do you read before you hit post? That is ridiculous. The amount of deep cover things this country does would probably astound you. The only things that have come out are two morons just data dumping to thumb drives and CDs for notoriety. We aren't exactly overflowing with useful whistleblowers for decades now.
William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake blew the whistle on the NSA's Trailblazer project, another domestic spying program, in 2002. Obama's administration indicted Thomas Drake under the espionage act in 2010.
John Kiriakou blew the whistle on the use of waterboarding in 2007. Obama decided he should go to jail instead of the torturers.
Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and "Obama's favorite general" General James Cartwright is the prime suspect in the stuxnet virus leak.
Then there are more less notable leaks, like Stephen Jin-Woo Kim telling Fox News reporter James Rosen that North Korea was planning another (not the first) nuke test. (oh the horror) That was enough to get Kim indicted under the Espionage Act, Rosen's phones tapped, and Rosen being labeled a 'criminal co-conspirator' and a 'flight-risk'.
The drone program was heavily leaked about long before it was publicly acknowledged. Everybody knew about that 16 year old American kid being dead.
Then there are the beneficial leaks that administration(s) like to ignore if not outright contribute to. Leaks about the Osama raid to make that propaganda film for example. Or Bush ordering leaks that bolstered his case for war.
Obama implemented an 'Insider Threat Program' which criminalizes failure to report 'high-risk persons or behaviors' and labels leakers as 'enemies of the state'. Seems a bit overboard if there isn't a leak problem.
People rolled over before, now 10 years later it's outrage time,
Yes, but keep in mind that a key argument in the debate is that the laws are being reinterpreted to no longer mean what the authors intended. PATRIOT's author Jim Sensenbrenner included:
techdirt_sl said:
the Republican congressman from Wisconsin reiterated his concerns that the administration and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court have gone far beyond what the PATRIOT Act intended. Specifically, he said that Section 215 of the act "was originally drafted to prevent data mining" on the scale that's occurred.
And the DoJ is keeping their new interpretations of these laws secret.
