Daniel Ellsberg introduces ExposeFacts.org
Whistleblowers from the National Security Agency, State Department, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice and British Government Communications Headquarters, gathered with noted journalists and freedom of information and human rights advocates on Wednesday to announce the launch of a new organization whose motto is “Whistleblowers Welcome.”
Known as ExposeFacts, the organization is part of the nonprofit Institute for Public Accuracy. It encourages “whistleblowers to disclose information that citizens need to make truly informed decisions in a democracy.”
The organization’s existence was announced just one day ahead of the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s release of information that changed how not just Americans, but the entire world, view the U.S. government. Snowden’s revelations spurred a push for reform in the U.S. intelligence system, a reason why ExposeFacts is hopeful that its existence will help “shed light on concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war.”
“At a time when key provisions of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments are under assault, we are standing up for a free press, privacy, transparency and due process as we seek to reveal official information — whether governmental or corporate — that the public has a right to know,” the group says on its website.
At a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Norman Solomon, editorial board member of ExposeFacts, as well as executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said that the launch of the organization comes at a time when it appears the public has to either defend or lose its civil liberties.
The author, journalist, and co-founder of RootsAction.org recognizes there are other individuals and groups that have worked for years to help expose government corruption, and he hopes to work in synergy with those individuals and organizations to protect and defend whistleblowers and the U.S. Constitution.
Saving democracy
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was the first person to become a member of the ExposeFacts advisory board. In a video statement, Ellsberg says he was happy to join other whistleblowers in supporting ExposeFacts, a group whose mission he describes as one to “encourage whistleblowing and independent journalism, and to preserve democracy.”
“All governments lie, and they all like to work in the dark as far as the public is concerned, in terms of their own decision-making, their planning — and to be able to allege, falsely, unanimity in addressing their problems, as if no one who had knowledge of the full facts inside could disagree with the policy the president or the leader of the state is announcing,” Ellsberg says in the video.
“A country that wants to be a democracy has to be able to penetrate that secrecy with the help of conscientious individuals who understand in this country that their duty to the Constitution and to the civil liberties and to the welfare of this country definitely surmount their obligation to their bosses, to a given administration, or in some cases, to their promise of secrecy.”
In addition to Ellsberg, the 46-person advisory board includes experts in a variety of fields such as intelligence, national security, foreign affairs, the environment, corporate malfeasance, investigative journalism, the First Amendment and press freedom.
Notable names on the advisory board include William Binney, a former high-level NSA intelligence official who retired in 2001 and blew the whistle in 2002 on surveillance programs the agency was conducting; Jeff Cohen, media critic, writer and journalism professor, as well as founder of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting; Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a former senior policy analyst for the EPA who blew the whistle when the agency ignored her complaints about a U.S. company harming the environment and human health in its vanadium mining in South Africa; Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst turned political activist and speaker who has protested the CIA’s use of torture; and Coleen Rowley, an attorney and former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to the director of the FBI exposed some of the agency’s pre-9/11 failures.
Editorial board members of ExposeFacts include author and journalism professor Barbara Ehrenreich; former Executive Director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism, and reporter for The Washington Post John Hanrahan; Communications and Media Director at the Institute for Public Accuracy Sam Husseini; independent journalist and radio host Sonali Kolhatkar; and Solomon.
How they help
Ellsberg and other ExposeFacts board members recognize the difficulty in trying to ascertain every threat to democracy. In the video, he explains that the organization will use technology to make it easier for sources to tell their truths “when government is off the rails here and to make it possible for us to get it back on track, to hold people accountable.”
Particularly because there is a lack of legal protection for those disclosing some controversial and startling information, the group wants to ensure that people can make such disclosures confidentially. But since the Internet is not as “anonymous” as some would hope, the organization has teamed up with the Freedom of the Press Foundation to use the group’s SecureDrop software to accept submissions.
SecureDrop, which was coded by freedom of information and Internet rights activist Aaron Swartz, allows an individual to submit information — including documents — without having to reveal his or her identity. The program only works when a user submits a document via Tor, free software and an open network that prevents others from using an Internet connection to decipher information such as what website a person visits or someone’s physical location.
Once information is submitted to the organization, the plan is for its seasoned editorial board to assess the materials and decide if the information is authentic, if it has a public interest value, and when the information should be shared with journalists. The editorial board is expected to call upon the team of experts on its advisory board to help decipher what information should be released.
In light of the push in recent years in Washington, D.C., to define who is a journalist and what is considered a news organization, the group appears to be cognizant of the government’s apparent intentions to not offer the legal protections that the press is awarded under the Constitution and to do its best to protect all involved in exposing the truth.
News outlets most affected by the changes in media “shield laws” are predominantly alternative media outlets that often publish classified information supplied by whistleblowers, but mainstream media outlets and the reporters that work for them are not immune from the government’s efforts to control the information that is reported, either.
Although reporters have historically been able to protect the identities of their sources, earlier this week New York Times reporter James Risen, who, with the help of sources he has declined to name, exposed a failed effort by the CIA under the Clinton administration to prevent Iran from creating nuclear facilities, was denied in his request for the Supreme Court to take up his case and clarify whether a journalist has the legal right to protect the identity of confidential sources.
Risen’s request came amid the reporter’s pushback against federal prosecutors’ insistence that he testify in the criminal trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, by disclosing who his sources were and what information he learned from them.
Cases like Risen’s are arguably why it is so crucial that ExposeFacts’ drop box accepts anonymous information but still allows journalists to ask follow-up questions of specific whistleblowers.
Role of the media
Part of the reason journalists are on the editorial and advisory boards of ExposeFacts is because, as J. Kirk Wiebe — a retired NSA whistleblower who worked at the agency for 36 years — pointed out, the lack of coverage on whistleblowers and corruption isn’t because there aren’t any reporters who want to share and report on these issues.
As journalist Barbara Ehrenreich explained during the press conference, a lot of the information that whistleblowers are trying to call the public’s attention to are not secret — in fact, she said, a lot of this information is in plain sight — but the public fails to see it either because we don’t want something to be true or because the information is suppressed by producers and editors of various news organizations.
Ehrenreich talked about her experiences trying to report on issues such as poverty, saying she was told by editors that they were going to pass on the some stories because they weren’t “upbeat” or “in tune with our advertisers.”
She continued, saying reporters who do decide to write these kinds of “bummer stories” often struggle financially because the number of news outlets that would pay for that kind of content can only afford to pay reporters pennies. She went on to talk about her work as founder and co-editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which pays journalists to report on issues such as poverty and inequality in the United States.
Before stepping away from the podium, the ExposeFacts editorial board member said she has never worked with a whistleblower on a story, but asked for some to come forward and help expose how groups like the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council are attempting to cut access to government services to people by pushing for legislation that requires a drug test for “everybody” and “everything.”
Ehrenreich also invited corporate whistleblowers to help expose on what level wage theft policies are devised and how they are technically worked out.
“I’ll be waiting on the other side of that drop box for people to come forward,” she said, adding that she and the rest of the ExposeFacts team will work to do everything they can to keep whistleblowers safe.
Exposing the truth
During Wednesday’s press conference, Wiebe, the retired NSA agent turned whistleblower, applauded the work of ExposeFacts and stressed the importance of organizations that help people tell the truth, saying the truth has become a foreign concept, especially in the media.
Wiebe said the media isn’t solely to blame for the rampant corruption that appears to have taken over Washington. Instead, he said, the entire U.S. population has become corrupt, pointing to a survey showing that upwards of 90 percent of youth admitted to cheating. Even more concerning for Wiebe is the finding that young people believe it’s OK to cheat or lie, so long as it benefits them as an individual.
If we are willing to cheat to the degree we seem to admit, Willing asked, “How do we get to the truth? How do we get people to say ‘I’m not going to look the other way?’”
“If we want whistleblowers, we have to infiltrate those values back into society,” he said. “We’re in trouble and we need to realize we are sick before we can get better.”
Wiebe’s fellow NSA whistleblower William Binney agreed, saying the government is continually creeping closer and closer to becoming a totalitarian state, as evidenced by the passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the military to arrest and indefinitely detain Americans without reason — a policing tactic the Nazis used during WWII.
Binney said groups like ExposeFacts are necessary because the channels the federal government has given to its employees to report waste, fraud and corruption, allow government officials to stonewall and counterattack whistleblowers. He said he experienced this firsthand in 2002, when he, Wiebe and NSA cryptologist Edward Loomis asked the Justice Department to investigate the NSA’s Trailblazer program.
“They attacked us with the FBI to silence us,” he said.
Of even greater concern to Binney is that the U.S. government uses whistleblowers like him to internally threaten other federal employees and potentially squash the likelihood that another person might speak out.
“This is why reporters are having a difficult time finding sources,” Binney said while talking about the intimidating environment created by the government.
“There’s an awful lot of money behind this,” Binney said, estimating the government has spent tens of billions of dollars to build its intelligence empire.
He said it may be easier and safer to just watch the government go “down a very ugly path,” but he’s not going to sit by and watch the undoing of our democracy. Instead, Binney said he’s going to “stand up and do the job of what Congress and the Department of Justice should be doing.”
During the press conference, EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo summarized her fight to expose corruption within the environmental agency and how she received rape and death threats for trying to report the truth. She asked journalists to follow and report on her case and that of other whistleblowers, whose “lives and careers are ripped apart” as a result of their decisions to speak out.
In a surprising move, Coleman-Adebayo announced that she was blowing the whistle again — this time, on the No-FEAR Act of 2002. The law was an attempt to end system-wide retaliation against whistleblowers by requiring every government agency to disclose statistics on its homepage related to discrimination and retaliation.
In the decade or so since the legislation was passed, according to Coleman-Adebayo, the government has spent more than $1 billion defending discriminating managers who retaliate against whistleblowers and civil rights advocates. The number is likely higher, she noted, since the Justice Department has refused to disclose how much money it pays its lawyers to fight federal whistleblowers.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “There’s no longer any place for the rascals to hide. We’ve got their numbers.”
She continued, asking Congress to hold hearings for these “criminals” and for President Obama to pass additional legislation protecting whistleblowers. She also reminded the public that they need to act if there will be any positive change.
Based on the amount of positive feedback editorial board member Solomon told MintPress News he received in the 24 hours or so after the launch, it seems the American public may be ready to take back control of their government.