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Former intelligence worker Edward Snowden, 29, revealed himself as the source of documents outlining a massive effort by the NSA to track cell phone calls and monitor the e-mail and Internet traffic of virtually all Americans. He says he just wanted the public to know what the government was doing. “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded,” he said. While he has not been charged, the FBI is conducting an investigation into the leaks.
Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers in 1971. The top-secret documents revealed that senior American leaders, including three presidents, knew the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire. Further, they showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. Ellsberg surrendered to authorities and was charged as a spy. During his trial, the court learned that President Richard Nixon’s administration had embarked on a campaign to discredit Ellsberg, illegally wiretapping him and breaking into his psychiatrist’s office. All charges against him were dropped. Since then he has lived a relatively quiet life as a respected author and lecturer.
Starting in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service studied untreated syphilis in black men who thought they were getting free health care. The patients weren’t told of their affliction or sufficiently treated. Peter Buxtun, who worked for the Public Health Service, relayed information about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to a reporter in 1972, which halted the 40-year study. His testimony at congressional hearings led to an overhaul of the Health, Education and Welfare rules concerning work with human subjects. A class-action lawsuit was settled out-of-court for $10 million, with the U.S. government promising free medical care to survivors and their families. Here, participants talk with a study coordinator.
In 2005, retired deputy FBI director Mark Felt revealed himself to be the whistle-blower “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal. He anonymously assisted Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward with many of their stories about the Nixon administration’s cover-up after the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The stories sparked a congressional investigation that eventually led to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Felt was convicted on unrelated conspiracy charges in 1980 and eventually pardoned by President Ronald Reagan before slipping into obscurity for the next quarter-century. He died in 2008 at age 95.
Mordechai Vanunu, who worked as a technician at Israel’s nuclear research facility, leaked information to a British newspaper and led nuclear arms analysts to conclude that Israel possessed a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its weapons program. An Israeli court convicted Vanunu in 1986 after Israeli intelligence agents captured him in Italy. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Since his release in 2004, he has been arrested on a number of occasions for violating terms of his parole.
President Ronald Reagan addresses the media in 1987, months after the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair. A secret operation carried out by an American military officer used proceeds from weapons sales to Iran to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua and attempted to secure the release of U.S. hostages held by Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. Mehdi Hashemi, an officer of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, leaked evidence of the deal to a Lebanese newspaper in 1986. Reagan’s closest aides maintain he did not fully know, and only reluctantly came to accept, the circumstances of the operation.
Tobacco industry executive Jeffrey Wigand issued a memo to his company in 1992 about his concerns regarding tobacco additives. He was fired in March 1993 and subsequently contacted by “60 Minutes” and persuaded to tell his story on CBS. He claimed that Brown Williamson knowingly used additives that were carcinogenic and addictive and spent millions covering it up. He also testified in a landmark case in Mississippi that resulted in a $246 billion settlement from the tobacco industry. Wigand has received public recognition for his actions and continues to crusade against Big Tobacco. He was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 1999 film “The Insider.”
For 10 years, Frederic Whitehurst complained mostly in vain about practices at the FBI’s world-renowned crime lab, where he worked. His efforts eventually led to a 1997 investigation that found lab agents produced inaccurate and scientifically flawed testimony in major cases, including the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings. The Justice Department recommended major reforms but also criticized Whitehurst for “overstated and incendiary” allegations. He also faced disciplinary action for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into how some of his allegations were leaked to a magazine. After a yearlong paid suspension he left the bureau in 1998 with a settlement worth more than $1.16 million.
FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley accused the bureau of hindering efforts to investigate a suspected terrorist that could have disrupted plans for the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. In 2002 she fired off a 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller and flew to Washington to hand-deliver copies to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and meet with committee staffers. The letter accused the bureau of deliberately undermining requests to look into Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the United States of playing a role in the attacks. She testified in front of Congress and the 9/11 Commission about the FBI’s mishandling of information. Rowley was selected as one of Time magazine’s People of the Year in 2002, along with whistle-blowers Sherron Watkins of Enron and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom.
Sherron Watkins, a former vice president at Enron, sent an anonymous letter to founder Kenneth Lay in 2001 warning him the company had accounting irregularities. The memo eventually reached the public and she later testified before Congress about her concerns and the company’s wrongdoings. More than 4,000 Enron employees lost their jobs, and many also lost their life savings, when the energy giant declared bankruptcy in 2001. Investors lost billions of dollars. An investigation in 2002 found that Enron executives reaped millions of dollars from off-the-books partnerships and violated basic rules of accounting and ethics. Many were sentenced to prison for their roles in the Enron scandal.
Cynthia Cooper and her team of auditors uncovered massive fraud at WorldCom in 2002. They found that the long-distance telephone provider had used $3.8 billion in questionable accounting entries to inflate earnings over the past five quarters. By the end of 2003, the total fraud was estimated to be $11 billion. The company filed for bankruptcy protection and five executives ended up in prison. Cooper started her own consulting firm and told her story in the book “Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.”
In 2003, federal air marshal Robert MacLean anonymously tipped off an MSNBC reporter that because of budget concerns, the TSA was temporarily suspending missions that would require marshals to stay in hotels just days after they were briefed about a new “potential plot” to hijack U.S. airliners. The news caused an immediate uproar on Capitol Hill and the TSA retreated, withdrawing the scheduling cuts before they went into effect. MacLean was later investigated and fired for the unauthorized disclosure of “sensitive security information.”
Joe Darby is the whistle-blower behind the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq. He says he asked Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr. for photos from their travels so he could share them with family. Instead, he was given photos of prisoner abuse. Darby eventually alerted the U.S. military command, triggering an investigation and global outrage when the scandal came to light in 2004. Graner was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in the abuse. He was released in 2011 after serving 6½ years of his sentence. The military and members of Darby’s own family ostracized him, calling him a traitor. Eventually he and his wife had to enter protective custody.
The New York Times reported in 2005 that in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush authorized the U.S. National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court warrant on people in the United States, including American citizens, suspected of communicating with al Qaeda members overseas. The Bush administration staunchly defended the controversial surveillance program. Russ Tice, an NSA insider, came forward as one of the anonymous sources used by the Times. He said he was concerned about alleged abuses and a lack of oversight. Here, President Bush participates in a conversation about the Patriot Act in Buffalo, New York, in April 2004.
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused in the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history. His court-martial began on June 3. He has pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 charges against him and could face up to two decades in jail. He has pleaded not guilty to the most serious charge – that of aiding U.S. enemies, which carries the potential for a life sentence. At a February proceeding, Manning read a statement detailing why and how he sent classified material in 2010 to WikiLeaks, a group that facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information.
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Hong Kong (CNN) — China remained tight-lipped Thursday about its stance on NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who is believed to be holed up in a safe house somewhere in the semiautonomous territory of Hong Kong.
Snowden provided fresh fuel Wednesday for the controversy he has sparked, telling a Hong Kong newspaper that U.S. intelligence agents have been hacking networks around the world for years, including hundreds of computers in China.
In the interview with the South China Morning Post, he also said he plans to stay in Hong Kong to fight any attempt to force him to return to the United States because he has “faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.” His comments come as the FBI is investigating his case.
His presence in the southern Chinese territory, which has a separate system of government from the mainland, has raised questions about how an effort by the U.S. government to extradite him would unfold and what role Beijing might play in the process.
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But China’s first official comment on the matter gave away no clues.
“We have no information to offer at the moment,” a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, said in response to a question about Snowden at a regular news briefing in Beijing on Thursday. She repeated the same answer to several follow-up questions.
Snowden, 29, has rocked the Obama administration and U.S. intelligence community by providing documents to journalists revealing the existence of secret programs to collect records of domestic telephone calls in the United States and the Internet activity of overseas residents.
Differing reactions
U.S. security officials homed in on Snowden after Britain’s Guardian newspaper informed the Obama administration that it was planning to publish articles based on documents it had obtained, a U.S. official said. Authorities then quickly tried to determine who might have access to such information, as well as what documents were downloaded and by whom.
Snowden — who had taken leave from work at an NSA facility in Hawaii a few weeks before — quickly came to their attention, said the official. Authorities were “making progress” toward pinpointing the source of the leaks when Snowden went public, said a second U.S. official. Both officials spoke to CNN on the condition that they not be identified.
There are “no signs or indications” that Snowden had accomplices or tried to sell secrets, this official said. Investigators think the leaker is still in Hong Kong and have a general sense of where he is in that Asian metropolis.
Snowden’s case has become a hot issue in that coastal city, making local newspaper front pages, stirring legal debates and prompting plans for a rally in support of him over the weekend.
The reaction in mainland China, on the other hand, has been muted. State-run media outlets have covered the case cautiously, appearing to try to avoid focusing too much attention on some of the sensitive issues his disclosures have raised, such as government surveillance of citizens.
The Snowden story has also so far failed to make big waves among China’s tens of millions of highly active social media users.
Some Chinese state media took the opportunity Thursday to highlight Snowden’s comments to the South China Morning Post alleging that the U.S. government has hacked Chinese targets.
In recent years, the Global Times newspaper said in an editorial, “the United States has always claimed itself to be a victim of Chinese hacking activities. Many speculate that it’s a cover up for hacking activities conducted by the U.S. government. Now, Snowden’s revelation proves that such activities have already been going on for a long time.”
Hacking claims
Among some 61,000 reported targets of the National Security Agency, Snowden told the Hong Kong newspaper, are hundreds of computers in China.
U.S. officials have increasingly accused China of being the source of thousands of attacks on U.S. military and commercial networks. Beijing has denied such attacks.
The South China Morning Post said it had seen documents provided by Snowden but was unable to verify their authenticity. The newspaper also said it was unable to independently verify allegations of U.S. hacking of networks in Hong Kong and mainland China since 2009.
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Snowden told the paper that some of the targets included the Chinese University of Hong Kong, public officials and students. The documents also “point to hacking activity by the NSA against mainland targets,” it reported.
The claims came just days after U.S. President Barack Obama pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping to address cyberattacks emanating from China that Obama described as “direct theft of United States property.”
Snowden’s allegations appear to give weight to claims by some Chinese government officials that the country has been a victim of similar hacking efforts coming from the United States.
His claims came as Gen. Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency chief, testified at a U.S. Senate hearing that the country’s cyberinfrastructure, including telephones and computer networks, is somewhat vulnerable to attack.
On a scale of one to 10, “our critical infrastructure’s preparedness to withstand a destructive cyberattack is about a three, based on my experience,” he said.
In the South China Morning Post interview — published one week after the Guardian revealed the first leaks attributed to Snowden — he said the agency he once worked for as a contractor typically targets high-bandwidth data lines that connect Internet nodes around the world.
“We hack network backbones — like huge Internet routers, basically — that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
A “backbone” is part of the inner workings of a computer network that links different parts of that network. It is used to deliver data from one part of the network to another and, as such, could expose data from multiple computers if hacked.
‘Trying to bully’
While refusing to comment specifically on a person under investigation, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained clearly how and why U.S. authorities consider the leaks to be “very serious.”
“They go right to the heart of our efforts to combat terrorism, to combat efforts by extremists who desire to attack the United States and the American people,” Carney told reporters Thursday.
FBI Director Robert Mueller offered a similar assessment in testimony before Congress on Thursday.
“These disclosures have caused significant harm to our nation and to our safety,” Mueller said. “And we are taking all necessary steps to hold the person responsible for these disclosures.”
Snowden hasn’t been charged, but he has told The Guardian that he expects the United States to try to prosecute him. He worked for the computer consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton until Monday, when he was fired after outing himself as the leaker.
Snowden told the South China Morning Post that he felt U.S. officials were pressuring his family and also accused them of “trying to bully” Hong Kong into extraditing him to prevent the release of more damaging information.
He vowed to resist extradition efforts if it comes to that, saying he “would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.”
“My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate,” the South China Morning Post quoted Snowden as saying. “I have been given no reason to doubt your system.”
But Hong Kong lawmaker Regina Ip, a former secretary of security for the territory, said Tuesday that while any extradition process could take months, Snowden isn’t necessarily beyond the reach of the United States.
“If he thought there was a legal vacuum in Hong Kong which renders him safe from U.S. jurisdiction, that is unlikely to be the case,” she said.
Legal experts says that Beijing can get involved in the process to extradite a person from Hong Kong if the case significantly affects defense or foreign affairs.
But some observers say that Chinese authorities are unlikely to want to rock the boat in this instance.
“Given the somewhat fraught Hong Kong-Beijing relationship, the political impact of Beijing interference in this Hong Kong legal matter could be grave,” the Beijing-based analyst and blogger, Bill Bishop, wrote in an article for USA Today.
The newspaper said Snowden has been hiding in undisclosed locations in Hong Kong since checking out of his hotel room Monday, a day after he revealed his identity in an interview with The Guardian.
Snowden told the Morning Post he is not trying to evade U.S. authorities.
“People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.”
The NSA and the national intelligence director did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.
Asked during a media briefing Wednesday for comment on Snowden’s latest claims, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki declined. She said she had not seen the latest South China Morning Post report.
CNN’s Jethro Mullen reported and wrote from Hong Kong, and Chelsea J. Carter reported and wrote from Atlanta. CNN’s Greg Botelho, Carol Cratty, Barbara Starr, David McKenzie and Michael Pearson contributed to this report.
Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/13/politics/nsa-leak/index.html?eref=edition
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NewsRipplesWeb/~3/0Oj3a-M3f4o/no-comment-on-nsa-leaker
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