We've discussed the Whistleblower Protection Act in the past. The bill provides somewhat greater protections for government employees who blow the whistle on government wrongdoing -- though it's not as strong as it could be. After a couple years of various Senators blocking the bill, it finally was approved and signed into law by Obama on Tuesday. Of course, it seems like there's a fair bit of irony that, as Obama signed the bill into law, one of the most famous whistleblowers out there, Bradley Manning, was in court to deal with the latest hearings for his actions. And, yes, I know that Manning's critics insist that he was no whistleblower, but it seems that the line here is very fine indeed. From Manning's statements, he clearly believed he was blowing the whistle on illegal activities by the US government. But he gets no protections at all. Instead, there's a decent chance he'll spend his life in jail.

Sometimes it seems that the federal government's left hand has no idea what it's right hand is doing. Bradley Birkenfeld, a former banker for Swiss banking giant UBS, blew the whistle on UBS practices of helping Americans hide their money offshore. For his troubles, the Justice Department charged him, leading to a plea deal in which he plead guilty to fraud conspiracy and was put in jail for a few years. He just got out a month ago... and now the IRS has handed him $104 million for the whistleblowing, which resulted in UBS paying $780 million to the government to avoid prosecution itself. The IRS claims they're doing this to encourage others to blow the whistle on tax fraud... though they might want to warn the DOJ not to put their whistleblowers in prison. That said... $104 million seems somewhat insane. I realize that it may have resulted in the US government getting a lot more money, but $104 million still seems like a giant sum of money to give a guy who, as the government's own efforts show, participated in fraud. If the idea is to "get the word out" to whistleblowers, you would think that smaller sums, still in the millions of dollars, would do the trick...

A few weeks back, we noted how ridiculous it was that Senator Dianne Feinstein seemed a lot more upset that information about questionable US activities abroad was being leaked than she was about the fact that the US was involved in questionable activities abroad. And, now the Senate Intelligence Committee (of which Feinstein is the chair) has pushed out new rules targeting those who leak information to the press (what most of us call whistleblowing). The Secrecy News blog does a good job highlighting how this seems to be much more about sweeping bad activities under the rug and blaming whistleblowers, rather than actually stopping bad behavior by government:

In an earlier generation of intelligence oversight, leaks led to leak investigations in executive agencies, but they also prompted substantive oversight in Congress.  When Seymour Hersh and the New York Times famously reported on unlawful domestic surveillance in December 1974, the urgent question in Congress was not how did Hersh find out, or how similar disclosures could be prevented, but what to do about the alarming facts that had been disclosed.

In contrast, while pursuing leaks and leakers, today’s Senate Intelligence Committee has not held an open public hearing for six months. The Committee’s investigative report concerning CIA interrogation practices from ten years (and two presidential terms) ago has still not been issued.  Upon publication — perhaps this fall — it will essentially be a historical document.

Most fundamentally, the Committee’s new draft legislation errs by treating “classification” as a self-validating category — i.e., if it’s classified, it warrants protection by definition — rather than as the flawed administrative instrument that it is.

Effectively, the new rules would make it that much harder for anyone in the intelligence community to blow the whistle if they come across illegal activities by the government. It effectively treats all activity by the government as good and any "leak" as bad, even if it would serve to highlight massive government abuse. That's pretty scary. Not only will it create massive chilling effects for anyone seeking to stop illegal government behavior, but it will actually provide even more cover for the government to ignore the laws.

We've discussed how, despite all his talk of "transparency" and the importance of whistleblowers, President Obama has been the most aggressive president ever in terms of attacking any whistleblowers. The administration has brought more indictments for leaking than all other presidents combined. Think about that for a second.

In one such case, against former NSA employee Thomas Drake (accused of leaking NSA info to the press), the feds are now trying to falsely claim that unclassified documents are classified -- which is actually a key point in the legal fight. Slashdot points us to the latest news in which Drake's lawyers submitted some evidence to the court concerning how the NSA classifies documents. Drake's team is arguing that nothing he had in his home or which was sent to the press was "classified," and that the NSA is falsely claiming unclassified works were classified. So here's the issue: the feds asked to court to seal the exhibits, claiming they were classified:

"As grounds [for sealing the records], the information contained within the exhibits derives from NSA. As the holder of the privilege for this information, NSA has classified the documents as 'FOUO', which means 'For Official Use Only.' This means that the information is not for public dissemination. Until such time as NSA downgrades the information to 'Unclassified,' the exhibits should not be publicly filed,"

And, as seems to happen all too often, the judge immediately agreed, sealing the "official use only" filings. Except, here's the thing, contrary to the statement above, "FOUO" documents are, by definition, not classified. As the report linked above points out, under DoD regulation 5200.1-R (pdf) "By definition, information must be unclassified in order to be designated FOUO."

In fact, one "sealed" document, which is still available (pdf) on the Federation of American Scientists web site, quite clearly shows that the document itself is marked unclassified: And, in a way, this actually proves the whole point of Drake's defense team. The government wants to pretend that unclassified documents that he had were classified. And, apparently without any sense of irony at all, it demonstrated its own problem of falsely claiming unclassified documents were classified, by claiming an unclassified document about how the government classifies documents... was classified! (Say that three times fast). What's troubling, of course, is that the court seemed to just accept the claim that this clearly unclassified document was classified and ordered the seal.

As large segments of the US government go ballistic over the Wikileaks issue -- potentially caused by a military whistleblower -- is it any surprise to find out that the government is admitting it sucks at protecting whistleblowers? The Justice Department has put out a report saying that the Defense Department has pretty much failed in its effort to protect whistleblowers in the military. The report also found that the military has also seen nearly double the amount of "retaliations" for whisleblowing as it had in the past.

Of course, what's most interesting about this is that this is the sort of thing that leads to situations like Wikileaks. If the Defense Department can't protect whistleblowers who go through the official process to report problems, those whistleblowers are going to go to third parties... like Wikileaks.