Former whistleblowers,
Thomas Drake,
Daniel Ellsberg,
Katharine Gun,
Peter Kofod,
Ray McGovern,
Jesselyn Radack,
Coleen Rowley have published an
open letter to intelligence employees in today's Guardian. I hope they won't mind if I reproduce it here in full.
"At least since the aftermath of September 2001, western
governments and intelligence agencies have been hard at work expanding
the scope of their own power, while eroding privacy, civil liberties and
public control of policy. What used to be viewed as paranoid,
Orwellian, tin-foil hat fantasies turned out post-Snowden, to be not even the whole story.
What's
really remarkable is that we've been warned for years that these things
were going on: wholesale surveillance of entire populations,
militarization of the internet, the end of privacy. All is done in the
name of "national security", which has more or less become a chant to
fence off debate and make sure governments aren't held to account – that
they can't be held to account – because everything is being done in the
dark. Secret laws, secret interpretations of secret laws by secret
courts and no effective parliamentary oversight whatsoever.
By
and large the media have paid scant attention to this, even as more and
more courageous, principled whistleblowers stepped forward. The
unprecedented persecution of truth-tellers, initiated by the Bush
administration and severely accelerated by the Obama administration, has
been mostly ignored, while record numbers of well-meaning people are
charged with serious felonies simply for letting their fellow citizens
know what's going on.
It's one of the bitter ironies of our time that while
John Kiriakou (ex-CIA) is in prison for blowing the whistle on US torture, the torturers and their enablers walk free.
Likewise
WikiLeaks-source
Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning
was charged with – amongst other serious crimes – aiding the enemy
(read: the public). Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison while
the people who planned the illegal and disastrous war on Iraq in 2003
are still treated as dignitaries.
Numerous ex-
NSA
officials have come forward in the past decade, disclosing massive
fraud, vast illegalities and abuse of power in said agency, including
Thomas Drake,
William Binney and Kirk Wiebe.
The response was 100% persecution and 0% accountability by both the NSA
and the rest of government. Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is
not a fun thing to do, but despite the poor track record of western
media, whistleblowing remains the last avenue for truth, balanced debate
and upholding democracy – that fragile construct which Winston
Churchill is quoted as calling "the worst form of government, except all
the others".
Since the summer of 2013, the public has witnessed a
shift in debate over these matters. The reason is that one courageous
person: Edward Snowden. He not only blew the whistle on the litany of
government abuses but made sure to supply an avalanche of supporting
documents to a few trustworthy journalists. The echoes of his actions
are still heard around the world – and there are still many revelations
to come.
For every Daniel Ellsberg, Drake, Binney, Katharine Gun,
Manning or Snowden, there are thousands of civil servants who go by
their daily job of spying on everybody and feeding cooked or even
made-up information to the public and parliament, destroying everything
we as a society pretend to care about.
Some of them may feel
favourable towards what they're doing, but many of them are able to hear
their inner Jiminy Cricket over the voices of their leaders and crooked
politicians – and of the people whose intimate communication they're
tapping.
Hidden away in offices of various government departments,
intelligence agencies, police forces and armed forces are dozens and
dozens of people who are very much upset by what our societies are
turning into: at the very least, turnkey tyrannies.
One of them is you.
You're thinking:
● Undermining democracy and eroding civil liberties isn't put explicitly in your job contract.
● You grew up in a democratic society and want to keep it that way
● You were taught to respect ordinary people's right to live a life in privacy
●
You don't really want a system of institutionalized strategic
surveillance that would make the dreaded Stasi green with envy – do you?
Still,
why bother? What can one person do? Well, Edward Snowden just showed
you, what one person can do. He stands out as a whistleblower both
because of the severity of the crimes and misconduct that he is
divulging to the public – and the sheer amount of evidence he has
presented us with so far – more is coming. But Snowden shouldn't have to
stand alone, and his revelations shouldn't be the only ones.
You
can be part of the solution; provide trustworthy journalists – either
from old media (like this newspaper) or from new media (such as
WikiLeaks) with documents that prove what illegal, immoral, wasteful
activites are going on where you work.
There IS strength in
numbers. You won't be the first – nor the last – to follow your
conscience and let us know what's being done in our names. Truth is
coming – it can't be stopped. Crooked politicians will be held
accountable. It's in your hands to be on the right side of history and
accelerate the process.
Courage is contagious.
Signed by:
Peter Kofod, ex-Human Shield in Iraq (Denmark)
Thomas Drake, whistleblower, former senior executive of the NSA (US)
Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, former US military analyst (US)
Katharine Gun, whistleblower, former GCHQ (UK)
Jesselyn Radack, whistleblower, former Department of Justice (US)
Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst (US)
Coleen Rowley, whistleblower, former FBI agent (US)"