In a press conference Thursday, May 16, at the White House, President Obama stated he had no regrets over the AP scandal:

Obama said he made “no apologies” for being concerned about national security but that the free flow of information was important to him as well.

What exactly is this “free flow” of information? According to The Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald:

If you talk to any real investigative journalist, they will tell you that an unprecedented climate of fear has emerged in which their sources are petrified to talk to them. That the Obama administration has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined has already severely chilled the news gathering process. Imagine what message this latest behavior sends to journalists and their sources: that at any moment, the phone records of even the nation’s most establishment journalists can be secretly obtained by the DOJ, which has no compunction about doing so even in the most extreme and invasive manner.

This mind set is obviously not very conducive to a “free flow” of information. So apparently, President Obama’s “free flow” of information is only pertaining to that information which benefits his administration:

The Obama administration does not mind leaks of classified national security information; to the contrary, they love such leaks and are the most prolific exploiters of them. What they dislike are leaks that they don’t approve and/or which don’t glorify the president.

Interestingly,  the media is suddenly up in arms about this abuse by the Obama administration. This passage from the Washington Post had Greenwald laughing audibly:

President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.

The Justice Department’s collection of journalists’ phone records and the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama’s credibility as a champion of civil liberties – and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor.

Greenwald’s response?

You don’t say! The Washington Post’s breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama’s civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: “I’m disgusted with this
president.” In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a “better-late-than-never” outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

The news media should take a several steps back from its cozy relationship inside the Beltway and return to its adversarial position as a watchdog of government. We, the people, need the media on our side, not the side of the politically elite.

Important criticism of the Justice Department’s suppression of press freedom remains inadequate.

Finally finding its voice after five years of relative silence, the mainstream establishment press finally woke up this week to criticize the Obama administration’s assault on the First Amendment. But, while this criticism is important and necessary, it remains days (indeed, years) late, and much more than merely a dollar short.

Is this America or China?

The Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press telephone calls without prior notice, in violation of fundamental First Amendment principles, and extending the Obama administration’s already hypocritical and authoritarian crackdown on government whistleblowers, is indeed a travesty worthy of this week’s onslaught from the press, Congress, and the public. Reaching even beyond the office phone lines of reporters and editors to also invade the privacy of their home and cellular calls, the Justice Department’s tactics seem more fitting in China than the United States.

Noting that “[b]y obtaining these records, the DOJ has struck a terrible blow against…freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation also noted the broader need to “require more than a mere subpoena…whether the target is the news media or an ordinary citizen.” Few others, however, beyond Glenn Greenwald, have recognized that the assault on press freedom is merely an extension of a longstanding policy shared by presidents from both of the major political parties.

To its credit, the Washington Post expanded the context of its reporting, writing this week that:

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• 5/13, David Kravets, Wired, Feds Won’t Say if NSA Surveilled New York Terror Suspects
• 5/13, Sari Horwitz, Washington Post, Under sweeping subpoenas, Justice Department obtained AP phone records in leak investigation
• 5/13, Matt Williams, Raw Story, Guantánamo hunger strikers subjected to harsh new method of force feeding
• 5/13, The Associated Press, New York Times, U.S. Secretly Obtains Two Months of A.P. Phone Records
• 5/13, Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic, So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman
• 5/10, Kelley Vlahos, The American Conservative, VA Whistleblower Ignites Firestorm Over Vets’ Illnesses

5/9, Peter Van Buren, Salon, The government whistleblower who wouldn’t be silenced

5/9, Brian Bennett and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times, Intelligence report identified vulnerability before Boston bombing

5/9, Alicia A. Caldwell and Eileen Sullivan, Salon, Boston police commissioner: We need more cameras

5/9, Hazel Dukes, Amsterdam News (NY), NAACP condemns Quinn’s support of stop-and-frisk

5/9, Barbara Ross, Daily News (NY), Judge backs NYPD’s refusal to detail its surveillance of Muslim community under Freedom of Information Law

5/9, VIDEO, Huffington Post, FBI Planning To Revise Wiretapping Laws

The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition (MCCRC) held a public forum on April 18 to discuss what effect “The War on Terror” has had on free expression and grassroots political organizing in Maryland and across the United States since 9/11.  The forum featured four speakers whose presentations discussed a number of demonstrations of federal, state and local surveillance and their disruption of peaceful activism.  The forum was opened by Kit Bonson, who explained the MCCRC’s desperate formation, saying:

The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition (MCCRC) started because in the fall of 2010, 7 activists in Minneapolis and Chicago awoke one morning to find that their houses were being raided by the FBI. Boxes and boxes of their possessions were confiscated, including computers, papers, and family photos. Although they were never charged with any crime, they were called to testify in front of a Grand Jury.

In response, activists here in our area, as well as in cities around the country, came together to protest the use of the FBI and the Grand Jury process to harass and intimidate movement organizers. Basically, we wanted to stand in solidarity with activists who had not committed crimes or advocated anything other than nonviolence action. It was from these events that MCCRC was founded.

Forum Speakers

Saqib Ali, formerly a Maryland state legislator,  is now the Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Maryland chapter (CAIR-MD).  Ali spoke about the overwhelming surveillance of Muslim-American communities throughout the United States, describing the three major issues facing these communities as the “No Fly” list; the FBI’s infiltration of mosques and the growing presence of FBI informants in mosques; and the near-constant surveillance of Muslim communities.  Ali explained that the “No Fly” list prohibits many Muslim-Americans from travel back and forth between the United States and countries abroad where family members may still be located.  Ali specifically noted that the Transport Security Administration (TSA) compiles their “No Fly” list fairly arbitrarily, and lacks any legal recourse; not only  is the reason for being on a “No Fly” list murky at best, but it becomes nearly impossible to remove oneself from that list.

Ali also discussed the FBI infiltration of mosques, both as a means to surveil Muslim community worshiping therein, as well as to persuade mosque members towards terrorist action and subsequently stage their arrests.  He also discussed the more local development of an NYPD “Demographics” Unit, which singled out Muslim community centers of all kinds throughout New York and New Jersey for surveillance.  He described the “Demographics” Unit as a “wide, indiscriminate dragnet of Muslim everyday things: barber shops, bookstores…”

Sue Udry, the Executive Director of the Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF), broadened the discussion beyond the Muslim-American community to discuss the many different examples of legitimate activism being disproportionately targeted by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.  She specifically mentioned the “Ag Gag laws,” which aim at preventing whistleblowers from exposing any wrongdoing within agricultural operations.  Within these Ag Gag laws is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) which Udry and DDF describe as:

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• 4/17, David Ferguson, Raw Story, New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel nixes new medal for drone pilots
• 4/16, Editorial Board, New York Times Opinion Pages, Indisputable Torture
• 4/16, David Ignatius, Washington Post, The limits of intelligence collection
• 4/16, The Constitution Project, New York Times, Constitution Project’s Report on Detainee Treatment
• 4/16, Matt Sledge and Michael Calderone, Huffington Post, Obama Whistleblower Prosecutions Lead To Chilling Effect On Press
• 4/16, Chris Finan, The Hill, House should scrap cyber bill (CISPA) and start over
• 4/16, Kevin Gosztola, Fire Dog Lake, Robert Greenwald’s ‘War on Whistleblowers’ Shows Importance of Preserving Press Freedom
• 4/15, David Kravets, Wired, ACLU Appeals Ruling Allowing Feds to Stay Mum on Drone Targeted Killings

President Obama came to office promising government transparency and accountability, but throughout his presidency, has acted more aggressively than any other president to silence government whistleblowers who might expose corruption, fraud and general wrongdoing.  Since 2009, Obama has used the World War I-era Espionage Act six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information.  A Bloomberg report on this intimidation campaign summarized the objections this way: “the president’s crackdown chills dissent, curtails a free press and betrays Obama’s initial promise to ‘usher in a new era of open government.’”

The logic behind the prosecution of whistleblowers is that a government has the right to protect itself and its own best interests, and as a result, should be allowed to punish treasonous citizens.  Woodrow Wilson argued that the Espionage Act allowed the government to protect itself against “insidious methods of internal hostil activities” and  declared it unlawful in a time of war to publish information that the president may determine to be “of such character that it is or might be useful to the enemy.”  Following this logic, it seems reasonable that Obama would  crackdown on whistleblowers.  The problem, though, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian wrote, is that:

…This Obama whistleblower war has nothing to do with national security. It has nothing to do with punishing those who harm the country with espionage or treason.  It has everything to do with destroying those who expose high-level government wrongdoing. It is particularly devoted to preserving the government’s ability to abuse its power in secret by intimidating and deterring future acts of whistleblowing and impeding investigative journalism.

Greenwald makes an important point here; the common thread between the cases of  every whistleblower that has been prosecuted since 2009 is the growing strain of witnessing acts of fraud, corruption and flagrant unconstitutionality.

The four whistleblowers from the National Security Agency (“The NSA Four”) all echo the struggle of being asked to hold classified information that is clearly in violation of the law.  Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Weibe and Edward Loomis make up the NSA Four, who were falsely accused of leaking confidential information in 2007.  According to The Nation, the NSA Four have now endured years of harassment for “exposing the waste and fraud behind a multibillion-dollar contract for a system called Trailblazer, which was supposed to “revolutionize” the way the NSA produced signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the digital age.”

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• 3/26, Ryan Gallagher, Slate, FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013
• 3/26, Mitch Strohm, ABC15 (AZ), CISPA: Cybersecurity or internet privacy killer?
• 3/26, Tim Shorrock, The Nation, Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers
• 3/26, Matt Sledge, Huffington Post, TSA Airport Screening Lawsuit Nears Court Date To Challenge Intrusive Searches
• 3/26, Finian Cunningham, Press TV, Guantanamo exposes reality of US fascism
• 3/26, Greg Miller and Julie Tate, Washington Post, CIA director faces a quandary over clandestine service appointment

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou was recently sentenced to 30 months in prison for revealing to reporters the name of a CIA agent complicit in torture. On January 23rd, he was honored in Washington, DC at an portrait unveiling hosted by Americans Who Tell the Truth. Kiriakou recently appeared on HuffPost Live, where he noted that while torturers continue to hold public office, “I’m the only one going to prison.”

Kiriakou’s portrait is the latest in a series that prominent artist Robert Shetterly has been creating to showcase notable truth-tellers from American history. In Shetterly’s words, the portrait series is “dedicated to the belief that a profound sense of citizenship is the only safeguard of democracy and the best defense of our social, economic, and environmental rights.”

Shetterly, Kiriakou and GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack (the subject of a series portrait herself) spoke at the January 23 event, which was timed to occur two days before Kiriakou was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for disclosing the identity of a CIA analyst to .

Though President Obama has pledged to protect federal workers from retaliation for exposing waste, fraud and abuse of authority, Attorney General Eric Holder has prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the Espionage Act than “all his predecessors combined.”

As Jesselyn Radack has emphasized, “for someone who pledged to protect and defend whistle-blowers, [President Obama] certainly has not even remained neutral, he’s affirmatively set us back really, really far.” In an environment in which those who speak out against misuse of power are prosecuted instead of protected, and those who have misused power are not apprehended, will federal workers have the courage to risk their careers to reveal fraud and waste by government agencies?

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While last week’s mainstream hysteria shifted from fiscal cliff-jumping to debt ceiling collapse, BORDC engaged media outlets to discuss disturbing developments endangering our constitutional rights.

On Monday, January 7, Flashpoints  (on KPFA 94.1 PM in the San Francisco Bay Area) invited BORDC’s Shahid Buttar and Nadia Kayyali to break down domestic surveillance under the recently re-authorized FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Describing the counterintuitive construction of the FAA, Kayyali notes:

[The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] was amended in 2008…and this amendment changed even the minimal requirements of review of this surveillance by the FISA court, and now it allows for warrantless wiretapping that will sweep up Americans’ communications.

Kayyali’s observation suggests that the FAA, in amending a law created to establish judicial oversight, actually undermines its very purpose. Buttar, highlighting the secrecy with which the National Security Agency (NSA) violates our privacy rights, adds:

[I]n spite of knowing that the [NSA] has violated the law, no one knows the context in which that violation took place. No one knows how many people [were affected]. No one knows even whether or not it’s been stopped or whether that violation remains ongoing.

Also on Monday, BORDC’s Michael Figura appeared on Progressive Radio Network’s The Smart Show, as well as The Monitor (on KPFT 90.1 FM in Houston),  to extend the discussion of unconstitutional federal programs. Highlighting the treatment of former CIA agent John Kiriakou, Figura states the chilling consequences for individuals who defy our government’s  illegal conduct:

the only person to ever go to prison so far in the history of the whole [CIA] torture program is someone who blew the whistle on it.

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