He then informed the Senate intelligence committee he had knowledge of waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality related to Operation Merlin, a botched operation which involved passing on flawed nuclear blueprints to Iran officials. Instead of investigating his claims, he became the target of a leak prosecution.
Sterling was convicted in 2015 by a jury in the Eastern District of Virginia through largely circumstantial evidence. It was never proven that he leaked any details about Operation Merlin to New York Times reporter James Risen. Nevertheless, he was convicted of multiple offenses under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 42 months in prison, and his life was utterly destroyed.
In recent years, intelligence and military agencies have tested systems of total surveillance for monitoring employees. The systems can be used to create "staff profiles" or dossiers on employees with security clearances. Certain behaviors may trigger special monitoring, even if they have never taken any information with the intent to make a disclosure.
The Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) oversees the National Insider Threat Task Force. An official from the Task Force conducted a presentation, where National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake, who revealed fraud, waste, and abuse, was listed along with Nidal Hasan, Aaron Alexis, and Robert Hanssen. (Hasan and Alexis murdered people, and Hanssen was a Soviet spy.)
As Kenneth Lipp reported, Patricia Larsen of ODNI referred to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg as a criminal. She said Drake and Edward Snowden had been "self-radicalized" while the others in the "rogues gallery" were recruited by foreign governments. Each one of them had "strong egotistical streaks," which led them to do harm to the country.
Pompeo indicated his eagerness to work with the ODNI on further developing "insider threat" detection. In 2014, Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden took issue with the ODNI's approach [PDF].
"Any monitoring of employees' 'electronic behavior on the job as well as off the job' needs to include safeguards to prevent the chilling of legitimate whistleblower communications and protect the confidentiality of any legally privileged information," the senators maintained. "Procedural safeguards to prevent the targeting of whistleblowers for extra scrutiny as well as minimization requirements to avoid collecting protected communications are some examples of the sorts of safeguards that should be developed."
"If captured inadvertently, protected disclosures certainly should never be routed back to an official involved in any alleged wrongdoing reported by the whistleblower."
According to Kiriakou, there are two key issues. CIA leadership has "historically ignored the Office of General Counsel," and in the case of the torture program, the Inspector General was "cut out" and had no idea what was going on with the program.
"The Office of the General Counsel was implicated in the torture program. It was the Office of the General Counsel that sought the approval of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department to get the torture program approved," Kiriakou said.
That leaves Senate and House oversight committees, but they were "briefed on the torture program and they acquiesced to the torture program."
"In my case, the Justice Department said they did not want to pursue after investigating for a year, and the CIA went back and insisted, they demanded I be charged. That's going to be an ongoing problem.
"If the CIA wants to stifle internal criticism or whistleblowing, it can demand a criminal case of the Justice Department, and the Justice Department will likely acquiesce."
The Justice Department is highly likely to pursue leak prosecutions or prosecutions of whistleblowers if the Attorney General is Jeff Sessions. He believes, no matter what, an employee who makes an unauthorized disclosure, especially to a journalist, is committing a crime. "The information that the leaker has provided to a reporter is a crime that's supposed to be enforced by the Department of Justice."
Sessions also has supported the waterboarding of CIA detainees and does not believe it is a technique that should be off the table. "This would be unwise advice to the enemy we face," he once said.
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