Edward Snowden: Leaker Extraordinaire

in the Service of Vladimir Putins Gulag

(Speech before the America's Survival, Inc. news conference
at the National Press Club, November 17, 2014)
"Let every public servant know, whether his post is high or low, that a man's rank
and reputation in this Administration will be determined by the size of the job he
does, and not by the size of his staff, his office or his budget. Let it be clear that
this Administration recognizes the value of dissent and daring--that we greet
healthy controversy as the hallmark of healthy change. Let the public service be a
proud and lively career." John F. Kennedy

By Martin Edwin Andersen

One of the damning comments that can be made in discussions among unfortunately
ahistorical Americans is that someone is a conspiracy theoristthe challenge referring
to someone who presses hard on the paranoia pedal without regard for facts. The case of
national security leaker Edward Snowden puts that putdown on its head: it is the
coincidence theorists who need to come clean about why they have chosen to promote
someone now enveloped in the protective embraces of olympic Russian police-state
champion Vladimir Putin.1
For many of those used to fighting the good fight from the trenches of good government
and public accountability, the strange case of former National Security Agency contractor
Snowden causes particular dread. As the cases of Ukraine, Chechnya and Georgia show,
former KGB officer Putin is a master at deception and propaganda; witness his very
public embrace of Snowden, who stole classified documents far in excess of those he
supposedly took to make his argument against NSA, and then fled U.S. legal reach. Even
a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy like Sean Penn was obliged to note that Snowden
was not legitimate, his acts based on the narcissism of the so-called whistleblower.
Thus, like a bad dream with no end, a leaker arguably more akin to Edward Everett
Hales The Man Without a Country is being promoted around the globe as a brave and
selfless whistleblower. At stake: the very concept of whistleblowing and whatever
1

The analysis of Russia in the U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human
Rights Practices for 2013 is clear: There is no legal procedure in place to protect
whistleblowers who report corruption committed by other public officials. When
whistleblowers complained about official corruption, the official who was the subject of
the complaint was sometimes asked to investigate, which often led to retaliation against
the whistleblower, generally in the form of criminal prosecution.

chance there is to achieve bipartisan Congressional support for protecting real

government truth tellers (modern Paul Reveres), today and in the future.
*****
I know a little about what is at stake. You see, in 2001, I was the first national security
whistleblower to be given the Public Servant Award by the U.S. Office of Special
Counsel (OSC).
I became a whistleblower was when I was working as a senior advisor for policy
planning for the international education programs of the Department of Justices Criminal
Division. My whistleblower disclosures sparked a three-year criminal investigation by
the Department's Inspector General (IG), as well as a probe of personnel practices
involving whistleblowers by the OSC.
When I was recruited by the Criminal Division to come onboard as senior staff working
on its international programs, for a moment I was truly happy. My bosses consistently
rated my work as outstanding and our crime-fighting effortfocused on educating
police and prosecutors in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europelooked like
they were paying dividends.
Unfortunately, my core belief that promoting the rule of law abroad should be
accompanied by respecting it inside the Criminal Division proved to be contradicted by
facts on the groundby what senior officials were doing behind closed doors both at
home and overseas.
The misconduct ranged from consultants in Haiti living and sleeping with 14-year-old
girls, to using classified CIA documents as treats for academic pals they knew did not
have security clearances, as well as other gross failures to observe fundamental security
practices.
It included the Attorney Generals top aide on U.S. immigration matters attesting in
documents that a Russian woman with whom he was sleeping with at the time actually
worked for DoJ, in order that she and another female friend could get the visas to this
country for which they already had been turned down by the U.S. embassy in Moscow. In
fact the services she provided were not for the Department. (The IG latter found that the
man, Robert K. Bratt, at the time the Justice Departments supposed top troubleshooter,
had put his "own interests ahead of the interests of the government," and it described him
as "recklessly indifferent to the security of the government.")
In short, as the Inspector Generals office reported to a hearing of the full House Judiciary
Committee towards the end of the process:
We found that managers in [the DoJ offices] violated government
regulations relating to travel, security, the use of contractors, and
the hiring and promotion of federal employees, among others.

Although I could see the misconduct around me, I knew enough before acting to know
that I needed to wait until the misconduct affected another important government agency,
so that powerful people at Justice could not quash any investigation of their friends. That
happened when I found out about the CIAs classified informationthe wrongdoing
could no longer be kept in house.
After a serious of phone calls from offices and pay phones that were not my own, the
head of DoJ security agreed to meet with me, bringing in two FBI agents for the
interview in his office and promising me that my confidentiality would be respected.
Approximately two weeks later, even as security officials put the entire international
program staff in lock down as they sought evidence of wrongdoing, I was also outed as
a whistleblower to Criminal Division security staff figuratively in bed with the
wrongdoers.
It was then that I was told that my security clearance had "disappeared"even though I
had worked with classified information on a daily basis for the 19 months before it was
mysteriously taken away. (Revocation requires a formal process, yet in the absence of
any real protections for national security whistleblowers, the ability to circumvent that
requirement is both easy and common for bureaucratic miscreants and their allies.)
Stripped of my work duties as well as the ability to perform them, I was sent to a room in
the Division's administrative offices, under the supervision a Bratt protg, where I was
given virtually nothing to do. (It was during this same period of timethe month of
May--that I was supposed to be receiving an annual performance evaluation.) In the
absence of any formal duties, and while I was being shunned for even polite
conversation, I spent the time reading books about the history of the U.S. Civil War and
biographies of George Washington.
It made for an odd moment. My security clearance had "disappeared"--but the cluttered,
unsecured room where I was being warehoused was at the same time being used to store
what were called "burn boxes" full of classified and other sensitive information that was
supposed to be destroyed.
This farce was part of a libretto that was not meant to be believed, but rather to humiliate
meas the outed whistleblowerand, much more importantly, to warn others I worked
with about the likely consequences for them if they came forward with what they knew
about wrongdoing in the Criminal Division.
As I mentioned, I had received outstanding performance evaluations as well as glowing
letters of recommendation from my supervisors. After my disclosures, however, I was
told my services were no longer required at the Department.
The more than four-year-long ordeal my family and I were forced to go through left us
several times teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and, worried about what that meant for
my young daughters, put me into a state of severe depression.

The Justice Department IG did nothing to protect me and the other whistleblowers who
came forward in the Criminal Division. However, that did not keep Eric Holder from
claiming credit before Congress for the positive contributions the whistleblowing did for
tightening up the egregiously lax security at a division of Justice that considered itself the
crown jewel of federal law enforcement.
*****
As opinions clash and alleged conspiracies of the most hideous kind are bandied about
with Snowden centrally cast as a 21st Century hero or a contemporary Benedict Arnold
traitorthe foot soldiers of left, right and center find themselves facing choices that
will likely mean more pain and hardship for myriad already-overburdened true believers
in a government of the people and for the people.
Ironically, aligned in favor of a soft landing for Snowdensomeone who clearly decided
to commit felonies before he got his last government contractor assignmentare some of
the media giants with a record of being most in favor of government openness and
accountability; in other words, the very values we hold in common.
Arm in arm and in lock step with The New York Times, the Guardian and a host of other
media are important defenders of often-praised but rarely practiced protection for those in
government committed to speak truth to powerwhistleblowers.
Yet the arguments used in defense of Snowden dangerously parallel those that too many
government bureaucratsprotective of their personal interests and policy preferences
rather than those of the voting publiclike to trot out in order to stave off real
accountability.
The New York Times editorial judgment itself revealed a key dilemma when it said that,
Considering the value of his leaks and the N.S.A. abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden
should be offered clemency or a plea bargain. And what happens if the next Snowden
acts to promote ideas or values the Times somehow finds unpalatable or repugnant?
Measured by what the Times editorial board opines is the worth of the cost of admitted
criminal conduct needed to bring it about is for the Grey Lady the value of Snowdens
leaks. Applied more generally, the message seems to be that individuals in a bureaucracy
should, from here on, be permitted to engage in criminality if they themselves disagreed
with state policy, especially those that are highly unpopular or controversial measures.
The slippery slope emerges whenfollowing a pardon of Snowdenhundreds of
thousands of government workers of many different opinions, values and experiences
begin to believe that any government policy about which they have significant
disagreement can justifiably be thwarted by felony conduct.

Snowden appears to have no problem portraying himself as judge, jury and bureaucratic
executionerall in a single person. "I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am
working to improve the NSA," he claimed, as supposed good government groups
promoted his receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. "I am still working for the NSA right now.
They are the only ones who don't realize it."
In fact, embracing Snowden is the good-government-activist equivalent of tainted Kool
Aid, or making Stalin an allyfor those who to do so, watch your backs very carefully
once the leaker claims to have "won." Create a system of the promotion of individual
lawlessness based on personal ideology while working in the large and complicated
bureaucracy and you may very well see both our government and the way of life it is
supposed to defend suffer accelerated dry rot.
Some in the good government sphere defending Snowden have rushed to red-hot
judgment on how, for example (in the words of a real but kool-aid entranced
whistleblower): "Everyone with a security clearance who has access to sensitive
information is part of the conspiracy, even if they haven't personally observed
wrongdoing, because they have been captured by the secrecy regime.
Basic fact checking on Snowden's activities shows that they have gone far beyond
whatever exposure he gave to alleged official illegality (remember, accused bureaucrats
also have the right to trial, and an assumption of innocence until proven guilty as well).
Taking advantage of a security clearance whose rules Snowden he took an oath to respect
and using a set of talents which permitted him to rob some 1.7 million classified
documents, this virtual viet cong knowingly grabbed bushels of top secret information
thatrather than proving violations of citizen rights and federal lawincluded vital
knowledge of legitimate, legal NSA operations meant to protect this country and its
people.

Well-regarded national security whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid has offered

insightful analysis about what all of this means, zeroing in on those
who unequivocally and without hesitation, fully support, without making any
factual or legal distinction whatsoever, the illegal conduct of individuals such as
Snowden. Some, but not all of course, of those involved on this side argue
nothing more than policy rhetoric rather than the actual state of the law. And rather
than use the opportunity to highlight inadequacies in the system AND propose and
pursue reform, some merely jump on the bandwagon to make a hero out of
unlawful conduct that lawyers, especially whistleblowing lawyers, should be quite
wary of promoting.

Zaid pointed to a confrontation he had with Snowdens lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, at a

conference, "Leakers, Whistleblowers & Traitors: An Evolving Paradigm," sponsored by
The Journal of National Security Law & Policy and the Georgetown Center on National
Security concerning classified leaks and espionage prosecutions.

With her usual mannerism of preaching, rather than professionally wait until I finished
my comment and asked her a question, she rudely interrupted me, Zaid said, going on to
note:
Ms. Radack traveled to Russia to present Snowden with a whistleblowing award
for his unquestionably illegal activity. She declines to make any distinction
between Snowden's disclosure of the NSA's metadata 215 collection program
with the other 1.7 million documents he stole many of which reveal lawful,
overseas intelligence operations. While many could argue with the soundness of
a policy that might involve surveillance of foreign leaders, there is no waste,
fraud, abuse or illegality (under US law) involved. While Snowden is legally not
a whistleblower in any statutory or regulatory context because he didn't follow
the law, I can understand how some would generically view him as one, and I
don't really have an issue with it so long as the clarification is made, with respect
to the domestic disclosure programs. But he is completely undeserving of the title
with respect to just about everything else that has been revealed thus far "espionage porn", as some have called it.

Clearly our federal system, like many state and local governments, is in vital need of
reform to protect truth tellers, particularly national security whistleblowers. Perhaps it is
the British whistleblower group, Public Concern at Work, that bests articulates the
importance of truth tellers in a free and open society.
Whistleblowing, the PCaW says, is a valuable activity which can positively influence all
of our lives. It then goes on to offer another critical observation: The whistleblower
rarely has a personal interest in the outcome of any investigation into their concernthey
are simply trying to alert others.
Snowdens personal interest is all but self-evident. He did not want to face the music for
his actionseven while posing as a champion of civil disobedience in the tradition of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez and Daniel Ellsberg.
Instead Snowden sought refuge in the olympically-authoritarian Russia, offered other
nations even more NSA secrets if they too would help him, and then went on to claim the
United States owed him a huge debt of gratitude for wantonly violating its laws.
Only the willingly blind can see this as anything other than theft, not civil disobedience.
Even someone like Fareed Zakaria, a self-declared sympathizer of Snowdens, admitted
in a Washington Post column that none, repeat none, of the leakers substantive
revelations resulted in uncovering anything done by the NSA that was morally
scandalous.
And anyway, as far as the rule of law is concerned, you dont end cannibalism by eating
alleged cannibals.
*****

The July 30, 1778 Resolution of the Continental Congress states unequivocably
That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well
as all the other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to
Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or
misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these
states, which may come to their knowledge.
National security whistleblowersthose working outside the Beltway and without the
same access to Congress, the media, expert legal counsel, and the opportunity for face-toface meetings with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel that I hadneed to have
appropriate legal protections in place in order to survive.
While I am personally no more important than I was at the beginning of the process, I
think my experience does offer a case study of what real whistleblowingas opposed to
Snowdens leakingdoes
to protect those who speak truth to power and to sustain the fight against
government misconduct at a critical time in our history.