'It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution'

AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State'

By Ryan Singel June 27, 2008

Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.

[Wednesday]'s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and endorses an all-powerful president. It's a Congressional coup against the Constitution.

The Democratic leadership is touting the deal as a "compromise," but in fact they have endorsed the infamous Nuremberg defense: "Just following orders." The judge can only check their paperwork. This cynical deal is a Democratic exercise in deceit and cowardice.

Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T's internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to. He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government's warrantless wiretapping program broke.

Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) -- which were under court seal -- and published the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated.

The lawsuit that resulted from his documents is now waiting on the 9th U.S. Appeals Court to rule on whether it can proceed despite the government saying the whole matter is a state secret. A lower court judge ruled that it could, because the government admitted the program existed and that the courts could handle evidence safely and in secret.

But the appeals court ruling will likely never see the light of day, since the Senate is set to vote on July 8 on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which also largely legalizes Bush's warrantless wiretapping program by expanding how the government can wiretap from inside the United States without getting individualized court orders.

Klein continues:

Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter--such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon's line: "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.

The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.

Neither the House nor the Senate has had Klein testify, nor have telecom executives testified in open session about their participation.

The bill forces the district court judge handling the consolidated cases against telecoms to dismiss the suits if the Attorney General certifies that a government official sent a written request to a phone or internet provider, saying that the President approved the program and his lawyers deemed it legal. Judge Vaughn Walker of the California Northern District can ask to see the paperwork, but would not be given leeway to decide if the program was legal.

Photo: Mark Klein in the offices of his lawyers in San Francisco. Credit: Ryan Singel/Wired.com

~ Blog Network - Wired ~

UNDP to pay whistleblower 14 months back pay for lack of due process, oversight muct increase

Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 27 -- The UN Ethics Office has recommended that the UN Development Program pay as restitution 14 months back pay to the whistleblower who exposed irregularities in the agency's programs in North Korea. Ethics Officer Robert Benson, in an eight-page report, specifically finds a lack of due process. UNDP rushed out a statement that its senior management is in the process of studying the recommendations [but w]e also believe that there was full due process."

This is not the first time UNDP has disagreed with the UN's specialist Ethics Office. When that Office found a prima facie case of retaliation by UNDP, the agency's Administrator Kemal Dervis declined to follow the recommendation that he allow the Ethics Office to conduct an investigation. Instead, Dervis appointed his own "Independent Review Panel."

Friday, Inner City Press asked the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad about the report, and attempts by UNDP to re-open its program in North Korea. Ambassador Khalilzad responded, "We believe the recommendations of the Independent Review Panel, and there are quite a set of them, especially that audits should be made available" and about "not appropriate oversight... need to be implemented." Amb. Khalilzad continued, on camera, "We want to see a plan... a timeline."

UNDP's Dervis getting money from Spain - now to be paid to whistleblower for lack of due process?

The IRP said Shkurtaj had no right to continue in his job, and so couldn't be retaliated against. Benson notes that the IRP applied to weak a burden of proof on UNDP, but then takes at face value that when Shkurtaj was having a job taken away, those doing it did not know of complaints against Shkurtaj springing from his whistleblowing. As noted in the Ethics Office report, the "Independent Review Panel" strangely went out of its way to denigrate the whistleblower, Artjon Tony Shkurtaj, without providing him any opportunity to comment or rebut. To many, this demonstrated the IRP doing the (hit) job assigned to it by Dervis. Well before any findings were in, Dervis told reporters that they would soon see why UNDP could not rehire Shkurtaj. Now the Ethics Office has recommended that UNDP pay 14 months back pay as restitution. Some now question, could or should this come out of Mr. Dervis' ample compensation? Or perhaps more appropriately, from Associate Director Ad Melkert?

Perhaps, noted one wag, from the $280,000 wrongful taken by UNDP's Eveline Herfkens, money she refuses to return while UNDP defends her.

~ Inner City Press ~

Meet the one and only EPA global warming whistleblower

By Matthew Blake 07/09/2008

 

The Washington Post this morning looks at Jason Burnett, the former Environmental Protection Agency official who yesterday said that Dick Cheney's office manipulated Congressional testimony to play down the danger of greenhouse gas emissions. For die-hard fans of Henry A. Waxman's House oversight committee Burnett's name is familiar: he told the committee in May that the White House improperly interfered in denying California a waiver to regulate greenhouse gases.

Burnett is the lone EPA official to come forward about the California decision, sitting for an interview with  the committee which was transcribed. But yesterday he took on a more high-profile role, appearing at a news conference with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate environment committee.  Burnett reasserted what he said in a letter to Boxer's committee: that Cheney's staff altered the testimony of Centers for Disease Control Director Julie L. Gerberding. And in doing so, the White House was trying to prevent regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Two weeks ago, Burnett was also in the news for saying the White House simply ignored an email the EPA sent detailing the danger posed by greenhouse gas emissions.

With such serious allegations, it's no surprise that Burnett himself is starting to receive scrutiny. The Post article mentions that he's a heavy contributor to Democratic candidates, including Barack Obama, though his credibility was not called into question.

Will Burnett's revelation prompt his former colleagues to publicly back him up? Or will he continue to be the lone EPA whistleblower?

 

~ The Washington Independent ~

 

'It doesn't pay to be a whistleblower'

Life After Corporate Death

by JoAnn Greco   Jul 10 2008

 

If Sherron Watkins, the famed Enron whistleblower, could do it all over again, she says she probably wouldn't have written that fateful memo to Ken Lay in August 2001 raising "suspicions of accounting improprieties." Nor would she have subsequently pushed for an internal investigation at the energy trading company, or later testified before Congress about her experiences there.

"I should have just left the company when I noticed things were wrong," says the 48-year-old Watkins today. "I'd be happily employed elsewhere."     

Despite all the praise and publicity she received, including being named one of Time magazine's People of the Year in 2002 (along with fellow whistleblowers at Worldcom and the F.B.I.) and the recipient of countless awards, Watkins says her actions at Enron irreparably derailed her corporate career and even made it hard to get jobs in academia.

"I'd be in discussions with Rice or Wharton about becoming a visiting professor and there'd be an initial excitement; then down the road in the hiring process, someone would ask, 'Can't we get this skill set somewhere else?' " she recounts. "There was a fear factor, a sense that I couldn't be trusted."

Such stories are not uncommon among whistleblowers, even those who have become as celebrated as Watkins. Many have a hard time finding work, and most report suffering depression at some point, according to Dylan Blaylock, a spokesperson for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit advocacy group for government and corporate accountability that's contacted by about 400 whistleblowers each year.

Whistleblowing is a "life-changing event that exacts a heavy toll on most, even the famous," says Blaylock. "Their peers don't want to associate with them and they become outcasts." Forced in many cases to leave their chosen fields, whistleblowers often flounder before crafting new careers.

Jeffrey Wigand, the cigarette company researcher whose exposure of industry practices famously helped bring down Big Tobacco in the 1990s, and who was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie The Insider, says he felt completely isolated after coming forward. By "refusing to be a bystander," he says he hoped to set an example. Instead, the 65-year-old now says, "I was left hanging in the breeze. I was radioactive. No one wanted anything to do with me."

 

~ Conde Nast Portfolio ~

 

Army fires whistleblower who wanted press access to military funerals

The Army fired Arlington National Cemetery's public affairs director late last month after a struggle over Army restrictions on press access to the funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq war.

Gina Gray, who took over as the public affairs director just three months ago, made headlines in April in The Washington Post for trying to increase media access funerals in which the family approved it. But despite Gray's efforts — and those of families hoping to remind the public of the ultimate cost of war — the Army tightened its restrictions on reporters.

In particular, Gray took issue with cemetery officials demanding the media stay within a designated area, 50 yards away from the service, according to the Post account.

This new practice, which Gray said violated Army regulations, blocked the photographers' view and placed the reporters out of earshot. Traditionally, the media have been allowed to cover funerals from a location where they could listen to the prayers and eulogies, and photograph the folded flag being passed to the next-of-kin.  

Although nearly two-thirds of families have permitted media coverage at soldiers' funerals, Gray told the newspaper that the cemetery's deputy superintendent, Thurman Higginbotham, has been calling the families, pressuring them to deny access to the press altogether.

The Post confirmed the accusation with a high-ranking Arlington official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Arlington National Cemetery, which fired Gray just eight weeks after The Post ran its column on her push for press access, is now looking for its fourth public affairs director in the past few years.  

Gray's termination memo, which states that she "failed to act in an inappropriate manner," contained a typo. "Only at Arlington National Ceremony could it be considered a firing offense to act appropriately," reporter Dana Milbank wrote in The Post.

~ The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press ~