Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake

Whether they spoke out against torture or mass surveillance, government officials who blew the whistle on the deplorable changes made to U.S. legislation after the 9/11 attacks have been left bankrupted, broke and broken.

The documentary Silenced, directed by James Spione and screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 9 March, follows the cases of three prominent whistleblowers who confronted and made public the unlawful practices of U.S. authorities.

Focusing closely on former CIA analyst and case officer John Kiriakou who spoke out against the CIA’s use of torture, Silenced shows the impact on Kiriakou and his family in the lead up to his nearly two year imprisonment, which ended in early February 2015.

In a Q&A following the screening, two of the film’s protagonists – activist and retired NSA executive Thomas Drake, and former DOJ Ethics Advisor Jesselyn Radack, director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project – discussed their struggles as whistleblowers and how journalists can help foster change.

.@SilencedFilm @frontlineclub Q&A: knowing what you know now would you do it again? @Thomas_Drake1: yes, but I’d go to the press earlier.

— Jen Robinson (@suigenerisjen) March 9, 2015

What Could Have Been Done Differently?
Thomas Drake said that both he and the government should have done things differently before and after he blew the whistle on the dubious legality of NSA dragnet surveillance. “I would have gone to the press a lot sooner,” said Drake.

“Despite the huge personal costs, what price do you put on freedom and liberty? We don’t have to forsake the future of freedom and liberty for all. Are there threats to civil society? Yes. It doesn’t mean that we turn everybody into suspects, even if it’s virtual. What it means to be free and what it means to have liberty means more to me now than ever.”

He responded to an audience question about how methods of surveillance could be changed to protect privacy. “You certainly don’t have to go outside of the constitution,” Drake said. “The U.S. unchained itself. Because they had failed to protect Americans, they decided they would unchain themselves from the rule of law. Five days after 9/11, Cheney said ‘we’re going to the dark side.’”

Both before and after bulk surveillance was introduced, Drake said he had continuously advocated for the use of a program called ThinThread, which would have protected the privacy of American citizens.

Foundation of Courage
Much has changed since Radack and Drake first spoke out, not least of which are the mass surveillance revelations by Edward Snowden, who brought international attention to the act of whistleblowing.

Radack praised the establishment of the Courage Foundation last year, set up to help financially support whistleblowers as they navigate the expensive court cases that stem from their revelations. “That foundation is now supporting legal defence for [Edward] Snowden, other clients of mine, other clients of other attorneys. None of that existed back when I blew the whistle and when Tom and John were going through their ordeals,” she said. Even if a whistleblower is found ‘not guilty,’ Radack added, “it’s very hard to recover,” and “there’s still such a price” financially.

Panel discussion with two of the “Original 7 #Whistleblowers” who were prosecuted under #Obama @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/RiIOrpgBeH

— Luigi Rappallo (@LuigiRappallo) March 9, 2015

Double-edged Media
The media is both a key aspect in “demonising and vilifying the whistleblower,” Radack said, and at the same time their “saving grace” since “robust investigative journalism has been a tremendous help to whistleblowers.”

Whistleblowers “are always painted as being out for fame, or profit, or revenge,” she said. “Some journalists in the U.S. act more like the government lapdog than the government watchdog. And they very much care about maintaining their contacts.”

But the war on whistleblowers is really a backdoor war on journalists, Radack maintained. “There’s been a war on whistleblowers, a war on journalists, a war on hacktavists, and an overall war on information… because information is the currency of power, especially in the digital age.”

When leaks come from official sources, such as in the recent Hillary Clinton email controversy that has seen the former Secretary of State release State Department emails to the public, and former CIA Director David Petraeus’ leak of classified material to his lover, “they’re very self serving,” said Drake. “Whistleblowing is done in the public interest. The whistleblowers, the truth tellers, are really the canaries in this democratic liberty and freedom coal mine.”

Visit the Silenced website for more information on the film and upcoming screenings.

What happened to the man who exposed the CIA’s use of waterboarding? And what are the consequences of making public illegal intelligence gathering techniques by the US government? In this revealing documentary, three prominent whistleblowers explain the radical changes that occurred following 9/11.

John Kiriakou (former CIA), Thomas Drake (former NSA) and Jesselyn Radack (lawyer and former ethics consultant to the American Department of Justice) talk candidly to filmmaker James Spione about their leaks: how they made public the illegal criminal practices of their own government and faced a choice between career and conscience that put their very lives at risk.

Directed by James Spione
Duration: 104′
Year: 2014

In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was several years into the making of a film about abuses of national security in post­-9/11 America when she started receiving encrypted e­mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four”, who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programmes run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and reporter Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely unique in the history of cinema: a 100% real-­life thriller unfolding minute-by-minute before our eyes.

Directed by Laura Poitras
Duration: 120′
Year: 2014

Citizenfour will be released in cinemas across the UK on Friday 31 October. More details here.

Following the latest revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Frontline Club’s First Wednesday panel on 6 November gathered to discuss Has NSA spying “reached too far”?

L-R: Owen Bennett-Jones, Julian Borger, James P. Rubin, Steven Erlanger. Photo: Sally Ashley-Cound

Chair Owen Bennett-Jones, a freelance journalist and a host of Newshour on the BBC World Service started off by asking if anyone really knows how much data has been collected?

Steven Erlanger, London bureau chief for The New York Times said:

“I’m not sure we know the answer to the question to be honest. Because these things have been kept secret and they remain secret.”

Julian Borger, The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, continued:

“There is an awful lot of material and it’s a very lengthy process figuring out what in it is of public interest…it’s the process of discussing with the government agencies involved about what it means and the balance between public interest and national security.”

James Rubin, a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute and former chief spokesperson for the US State Department, added:

“I don’t think Snowden knows. He’s got 50,000 documents from the NSA. I took one of these documents and I actually know something about this stuff …it’s hard to understand even for those who know the code words.”

Nigel Inkster, director of transnational threats and political risk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), who served in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1975 to 2006, had some praise for the NSA and GCHQ:

“We’ve got this huge explosion of communications. . . . They were confronted with this new reality which they had to make sense of and I have to say, in the circumstances I think they’ve done a rather remarkable job.”

An audience member asked if “the threats justify the methods”?

Inkster replied:

“We elect a government and this is one of the responsibilities that they are assigned. It is for the government of the day to judge on the basis of the best information it can, what the security environment it faces.”

The panel were asked if the release of these documents has changed anything – has damage been done?

https://twitter.com/caro_schmitt/statuses/398172032355270656

Rubin:

“We’ll never know what changed people’s behaviours. People’s behaviours are going to change.”

Inkster:

“We will never know how different would the course of WWII been if Bletchley park had not broken and read the material that was being transmitted over Enigma. How can we judge? You can never do a counter factual assessment.”

Erlanger:

“There’s another level of damage which is to trust, to international relationships; the United States has a big problem with its allies.”

US goodwill was exhausted by Bush and Obama needs to deposit more goodwill. Remark @frontlineclub debate Why #nsa hit US reputation so hard.

— Karen Melchior (ex-verif) (@karmel80) November 6, 2013

Christoph Scheuermann, London bureau chief for German weekly Der Spiegel, seemed surprised at the panel for thinking that anything had changed:

“I thought this was really naive, we don’t live in an age where terrorists…have to read The Guardian or Der Spiegel or the New York Times to know what intelligence agencies are capable of.”

Borger added:

“We share all of GCHQ material, names of everyone who works there, addresses, what they like to do at the weekend, with 850,000 Americans. Half of those people are private contractors. So the odds of that getting out are very high.”

After all this effort, disruption and political chaos, what were the benefits of the NSA gathering all the information?

Inkster:

“Knowing who’s in touch with who can be as – if not more important than – knowing what they’re saying to each other. This is a business that the bad guys are trying to hide the fact that they’re in communication.

“[Secondly] you can use analysis of big data to ascertain patterns of correlation, which are simply not discernable with lesser data sets. This has applications in all sorts of areas, in retail, public health…you can identify all sorts of things.”

One point the panel agreed on was that the world has completely changed from the days of phone bugging and code-breaking:

Watch the event:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/first-wednesday-has-nsa-spying

The world is coming to grips with the depth and scale of government surveillance following revelations, released by whistleblower Edward Snowden, about the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) Prism program. On 9 July a panel of experts convened at the Frontline Club to debate the balance between personal privacy and national security.

Mark Urban (left), Sir Malcolm Rifkind (centre), John Kampfner (right), Photo: Jim Treadway

“Balance does not exist,” argued author and commentator John Kampfner, who advises Google on free expression.  Kampfner said that because citizens demand total security, governments simply “cannot allow for balance.”

A deeper question than balance seemed to emerge in the debate, however –  that of trust. Can governments and corporations be trusted to wield the deeply penetrative surveillance technology that has so recently arrived in their hands?`

Sir Malcolm Rifkind believes they can.  The Chairman of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee and a former Foreign and Defence Secretary, opened his remarks by saying:

“Let’s start from the presumption that the people who run GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 are decent, responsible people, with high levels of integrity.  I think it’s a reasonable assumption.”

The Director of Oxford’s Internet Institute, Helen Margetts pointed out:

“PRISM is [said] to have cost $20 million, which is completely and utterly ludicrous.  As one tech blog put it, most security consultants ‘won’t get out of bed for less than $100 million’.  The actual cost is probably billions.”

Academic and journalist John Naughton disagreed with Rifkind:

“What comes out [from authorities] is, ‘Trust Us.’  And the trouble with that is that, in recent decades at least, our political masters haven’t deserved our trust…”

The big problem is that the technology operates outside of the laws. . . . Without a warrant – in this country – GCHQ can scoop up all of our email metadata [and] all of our mobile phone metadata, and . . . all of your click streams are collected.  In other words, every website we’ve ever visited. . . . You have an amazingly detailed picture of everybody. My question is:  in the long run, can you actually square this with liberal democracy?

John Naughton (left), Helen Margetts (right); Photo: Jim Treadway

Rifkind offered a powerful counterpoint:

“Ask yourself . . . why in America, since 9/11, there’s not been a single further example of that kind of a mass atrocity, or why in this country, apart from the 7/7 bombings, not a single person has been killed – since Lee Rigby, a few weeks ago.  In each and every year since 7/7 –  or since 9/11, whichever you prefer – there have been at least one and sometimes two terrorist plots – in this country – that have been uncovered. . . . I know for a fact that in each of these terrorist plots that were disrupted, it was metadata [that] was a substantial part of the evidence…”

In that light, the chair Mark Urban, an author and an diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Two’s Newsnight, asked:

“To what extent do we as citizens . . . with a phone and a computer, give our consent to the companies?  Is it possible to live a modern, networked life, without giving that consent?”

To which Naughton answered:

“Our futures are bounded by the nightmares of two old Etonian writers.  One of them is George Orwell, who thought we’d be destroyed by the things we fear.  And one of them is Aldous Huxley, who thought we’d be destroyed by the things we love – things that delight us [iPhones and Google etc]. We’re sleepwalking into a nightmare. . . . We are sleepwalking into this amazing, dystopian world, and we love it.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-trade-off-individual

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-trade-off-individual

Privacy of the individual, secrecy of the state and national security have been in sharp focus in past weeks due to the leak of material from the US’s National Security Agency (NSA).

It has been revealed that under the so-called Prism programme millions of phone calls have been gathered and Internet use has been monitored on a massive scale. In the UK there are suggestions that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has also accessed the material.

The chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Conservative MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme “in order to protect the public that does require, as President Obama said in Washington, some intrusion on privacy in certain circumstances”. The murder on 22 May of Drummer Lee Rigby reignited calls for the draft communications data bill to be re-examined.

As the debate about individual privacy, state secrecy and national security continues, we will be joined by a panel of experts to ask whether it is possible to strike a balance. Are we moving towards a surveillance state or is the idea of online privacy a myth?

Chaired by Mark Urban, diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Two’s Newsnight. He is the author of several books including Big Boys’ Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA, The Tank War and Task Force Black: The explosive true story of the SAS and the secret war in Iraq.

The panel:

Sir Malcolm Rifkind is MP for Kensington and chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. In 1990 he became Secretary of State for Transport and in 1992 Secretary of State for Defence. From 1995-97 he was Foreign Secretary. He was re-elected as a Member of Parliament in May 2005 for Kensington and Chelsea. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Kensington in May 2010. He served as the Shadow Secretary of State for Work & Pensions and Welfare Reform until December 2005.

John Kampfner is adviser to Google on freedom of expression and culture. He is an author, broadcaster and commentator specialising in UK politics, international affairs, media and human rights issues. Previously he served as chief executive of Index on Censorship from Sept 2008 until March 2012 and was editor of the New Statesman from 2005-2008. He is the author of a number of books including, most recently, Freedom For Sale.

John Naughton is a senior research fellow at CRASSH, emeritus professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, vice-president of Wolfson College, Cambridge and an adjunct professor at University College Cork. He is director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme and a well-known newspaper columnist, writing the Observer’s Networker column. He is author of a well-known history of the Internet A Brief History of the Future and most recently From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet.

Helen Margetts is the director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a department of the University of Oxford investigating individual, collective and organisational behaviour online. Her research focuses on digital governance and politics, investigating the dynamics of online relationships between governments and citizens, and collective action on the Internet. She is the co-author of Paradoxes of Modernization: Unintended Consequences of Public Policy Reform; The Tools of Government in the Digital Age; and Digital Era Governance: IT Corporations, the State and e-Government. She currently holds an ESRC professorial fellowship entitled The Internet, Political Science and Public Policy, is editor-in-chief of the journal Policy and Internet and sits on the Advisory Board of the Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office.