NSA Whistle-Blower: Obama “Worse Than Bush”

March 13, 2012

Salon

By Matthew Harwood

Thomas Drake, the whistle-blower whom the Obama administration tried and failed to prosecute for leaking information about waste, fraud and abuse at the National Security Agency, now works at an Apple store in Maryland. In an interview with Salon, Drake laughed about the time he confronted Attorney General Eric Holder at his store while Holder perused the gadgetry on display with his security detail around him. When Drake started asking Holder questions about his case, America’s chief law enforcement officer turned and fled the store.

But the humor drained away quickly from Drake’s thin and tired face as he recounted his ordeal since 2010 when federal prosecutors charged him with violating the Espionage Act for retaining classified information they believed he would pass on to then Baltimore Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman. While Drake never disclosed classified information, he did pass on unclassified information to Gorman revealing that the NSA had wasted billions of taxpayers’ dollars on Trailblazer, a contractor-heavy intelligence software program that failed to find terrorist threats in the tsunami of digital data the agency was sucking up globally — and sometimes unconstitutionally. While Trailblazer burned through cash, in the process enriching many NSA employees turned contractors, Drake found that another software program named ThinThread had already met the core requirements of a federal acquisition regulation that governed the proposed system at a sliver of the cost, all while protecting American civil liberties at the code level. The NSA leadership, however, had already bet their careers on Trailblazer. So Drake blew the whistle, first to Congress, then to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office, and finally, and fatefully, to Gorman.

Last June, the government’s case collapsed. On the eve of trial, all 10 counts were dropped. In a Kafkaesque turn of events, Drake actually helped the government find a misdemeanor to charge him with — exceeding authorized use of an NSA computer — so federal prosecutors could save face. Once facing 35 years behind bars, Drake pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to one year of probation and 240 hours of community service, what he sardonically calls “his penance.”

Click here for the full report.

WikiLeaks Struggles to Stay Online as Hostility Grows

December 8th, 2010

AOL News

By: Hugh Collins

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is working to keep his whistle-blower website online and the project funded amid growing hostility from governments and business partners.

“The man is a high-tech terrorist,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The website’s release of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables caused “enormous damage to our country and to our relationships with our allies around the world,” he said.

“He needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” McConnell said.

Assange has drawn the ire of governments across the world after WikiLeaks published thousands of confidential diplomatic messages. The messages, known as cables, showed fraught relations between the U.S. and countries such as Pakistan and Mexico.

This widespread anger is now translating into financial pressure on WikiLeaks. The site lost a major source of revenue on Friday when online payment-service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account. PayPal said WikiLeaks had violated its policy about using the system to “encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

Assange is now seeking donations to an account that is under his name with the Swiss postal service and uses a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center, The Associated Press reported. A Swiss Post spokesman said Assange would have to prove that he lives in or near Switzerland, or does business in Switzerland, if he wants to continue using a Postfinance bank account.

The Swiss domain WikiLeaks.ch became the site’s main access point on Friday after a series of cyber-attacks forced it to leave WikiLeaks.org.

But the website has had trouble staying online even since the move. The French server for WikiLeaks.ch went offline today, forcing the domain to be redirected to another server, the AP said. It is not clear why the French server stopped working.

Assange is currently wanted in Sweden on allegations concerning sexual offenses. The United States has not filed any charges against him.

Switzerland “should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone who is on the run from the law,” Donald Beyer, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, said, according to the AP.

WikiLeaks first came to prominence earlier this year when it released a video that showed U.S. military personnel in Iraq shooting at civilians. A Reuters photographer and his driver died in the 2007 incident.

The site has published thousands of confidential documents this year. The latest batch of documents showed the tense relationship between the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East over the issue of terrorist financing, The New York Times reported.

The diplomatic memos highlighted difficulties with terrorist financing in the United Arab Emirates (“a strategic gap” for terrorists to exploit), Qatar (“the worst in the region” for counterterrorism,”) and Kuwait (“a key transit point”).

The frustrations were particularly acute when dealing with ally Saudi Arabia. Diplomatic messages portray the Saudi authorities as unwilling or unable to take serious action against the fundraising.

“It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” a classified memo sent by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.

“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” the message said, according to The New York Times.

Authorities in the United States suspect that huge sums of money are raised in Saudi Arabia for terrorists, including during the annual religious pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina.

Other diplomatic messages raise allegations about the dispute between Internet giant Google and the Chinese government. One memo quotes an unnamed source as saying that high-level Chinese officials directed cyber-attacks against the company, the AP reported.

Google has tense relations with Chinese authorities. In January, the company said it no longer wanted to cooperate with Chinese Web censorship after a series of cyber-attacks. In March, Google shut down its mainland-China-based search engine.

A separate source mentioned in the cable said Chinese politicians were “working actively with Chinese Internet search engine Baidu against Google’s interests in China,” the AP said.

Another cable suggested a top Chinese official ordered that action be taken against Google after doing an Internet search for his own name and finding critical comments among the results.

WikiLeaks has found some allies as it deals with its own Internet problems. The Swiss Pirate Party said that supporters of WikiLeaks were creating “mirrors” of the site on their own servers. This could mean that copies of the site will remain online, even if the main site is shut down. The Swiss Pirate Party controls the wikileaks.ch Web address.

“There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now,” Swiss Pirate Party Vice President Pascal Gloor said, according to the AP. “It’s a test for Internet censorship. Can governments take something off the Net? I think not.”

Click here for the full report from AOL News

WikiLeaks Moves to Swiss Domain After Cyber-Attacks

December 6th, 2010

AOL News

By: Lauren Frayer

The American company that provided WikiLeaks’ domain name pulled the plug overnight because of cyber-attacks that it said threatened the other half-million websites it hosts. But within hours, the whistle-blower website had popped back up with a new Swiss domain name.

The company, EveryDNS.net, issued a statement on its website saying that it provided WikiLeaks’ domain name until 10 p.m. EST Thursday, “when such services were terminated.”

“WikiLeaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure,” the company said in another statement cited by The Associated Press. It said it alerted WikiLeaks to the shutoff 24 hours ahead of time.

The whistle-blower website has been the target of unknown hacker attacks after publishing three huge troves of classified U.S. documents from the military and diplomatic services, which has outraged Washington. Some American lawmakers have called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, to be prosecuted under the U.S. Espionage Act.

Authorities in Sweden are seeking Assange’s detention for questioning in a sexual assault investigation, and Interpol has issued a “Red Notice” for his arrest, though he’s not been formally charged. The reclusive 39-year-old has said he believes the sexual assault allegations are part of the same hacker campaign to attack WikiLeaks and discredit him.

After EveryDNS severed WikiLeaks’ domain name, the website wikileaks.org ceased to exist. But within hours, the website was available with a new suffix: wikileaks.ch. The content has also popped up on several other websites, including one called Cablegate. In the past, Assange has said his group has contingency plans in place if its Web infrastructure is disabled somehow. It’s unclear whether the Swiss domain name and Cablegate are part of those plans.

On Twitter, WikiLeaks acknowledged that its domain name had been “killed” and asked for donations to “KEEP US STRONG,” it said in all-caps. Later, it posted its new Swiss domain name with a message saying, “WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland.”

EveryDNS is following in the footsteps of the online megastore Amazon.com, which initially allowed WikiLeaks to temporarily use its servers to distribute its latest leak of U.S. diplomatic cables, after cyber-attacks on the website last weekend. But after pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman and other U.S. lawmakers, Amazon decided to evict WikiLeaks from its servers Wednesday.

Anticipating potential cyber-attacks because of its controversial work, WikiLeaks has long hosted its content on several different servers around the world. The number is unknown, but one of them is the Swedish host Bahnhof, which continues to carry WikiLeaks content today, the AP reported. It’s unclear how many others exist.

Amazon denied succumbing to U.S. pressure to evict WikiLeaks and said it decided to do so because the whistle-blower group violated its policies by publishing material it didn’t own or control the rights to.

“When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere,” the company said.

Afterward, WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter that if the online bookseller was “so uncomfortable with the First Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution], they should get out of the business of selling books,” MSNBC reported.

Click here for the full report from AOL News

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 11-2-10

Today, Kevin explains the importance of voting for a third party candidate and why the media is suddenly reporting on the dangers of vitamin D! Plus, Glenn Walp, Ph.D, author of Implosion At Los Alamos, blows the whistle on the government’s failure to keep America’s nuclear weapons secrets safe.

Self Help:
Turn Back The Hands of Time
Natural Cures Health Institute
Your Dream Job

Health:
Hazardous Chemicals Found In Perfume

Government:
Anti-Vitamin Amendment Snuck Into Wall Street Reform Bill

NWO:
Doctors Sterilizing Women Without Consent
The Government Has Your Baby’s DNA!
Americans Are Warming Up To Socialism

Everything Kevin:
Become An Insider!
Support Kevin!
Kevin is on YouTube!
Sign Up For Kevin’s FREE Podcast
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Become Kevin’s Friend on Facebook
Kevin’s Film Club
Kevin’s Book Club

Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!

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Glenn A. Walp, Ph.D.

Click the picture or link below to hear Kevin’s interview with Glenn A. Walp, Ph.D and click here to purchase his new book, Implosion At Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption & Cover-Ups Jeopardized America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets.

More on Glenn…
The Secret Is Out 
Meet A Whistleblower 
CNN Jumps On Board 
Follow Glenn on Twitter

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 5-12-10

Today, Kevin explains the importance of voting for a third party candidate and why the media is suddenly reporting on the dangers of vitamin D! Plus, Glenn Walp, Ph.D, author of Implosion At Los Alamos, blows the whistle on the government’s failure to keep America’s nuclear weapons secrets safe.

Self Help:
Turn Back The Hands of Time
Natural Cures Health Institute
Your Dream Job

Health:
Hazardous Chemicals Found In Perfume

Government:
Anti-Vitamin Amendment Snuck Into Wall Street Reform Bill

NWO:
Doctors Sterilizing Women Without Consent
The Government Has Your Baby’s DNA!
Americans Are Warming Up To Socialism

Everything Kevin:
Become An Insider!
Support Kevin!
Kevin is on YouTube!
Sign Up For Kevin’s FREE Podcast
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Become Kevin’s Friend on Facebook
Kevin’s Film Club
Kevin’s Book Club

Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!

Click below to watch the Kevin Trudeau Show LIVE!

NHS Boss Fired After Putting Patient’s Safety First

April 19, 2010

Telegraph.co.uk

By Laura Donnelly

Gary Walker was dismissed as the head of one of Britain’s largest hospital trusts over accusations that he had used bad language during meetings.

But he told The Sunday Telegraph that senior NHS figures wanted him out because he had refused to put waiting time targets above all other considerations.

Now he is standing against health minister Gillian Merron in the key marginal seat of Lincoln with a manifesto which says that Government diktats are “killing patients and destroying the NHS”.

Mr Walker said he was dismissed from United Lincolnshire Hospitals trust, in February, on trumped-up charges after he tried to blow the whistle on pressures placed on him by health authority bosses, which he said threatened patient safety.

Seven months earlier, Mr Walker had written to NHS chief executive David Nicholson setting out his concerns.

In the letter he said pressures on managers to ensure waiting targets were hit – regardless of how many patients arrived at Accident and Emergency departments – were jeopardising safety.

He said the NHS East Midlands strategic health authority (SHA) was subjecting him to the same kind of behaviour as caused the scandal at Stafford Hospital, where an investigation found hundreds of patients died amid a rush to hit waiting targets.

Mr Walker said he had been bullied by the authority’s bosses over the trust’s failure to meet Government demands as its eight hospitals struggled to cope with a sudden 30 per cent increase in arrivals to A&E in early 2009. He had been brought in to run the trust in 2006, following a scandal in which more than 1,000 of its patients fell victim to waiting list manipulation, when they were placed on a “suspended waiting list”.

The manager, who had worked in the NHS for more than 20 years, oversaw improvements in Lincoln, including a 40 per cent fall in infections.

But in early 2009, as Britain experienced the coldest winter for a decade, the trust experienced a massive rise in the number of patients arriving at A&E departments.

By April, emergency attendances had risen by 30 per cent in just 10 weeks. As the hospitals prioritised emergency patients, waiting times for operations on non-urgent patients grew. When Mr Walker discussed the situation with SHA bosses, he was told to leave quietly, and fabricate a story about why he was going, or his “career would be in tatters,” he alleged.

He protested that the priority should be to deal with the problem, and asked for funding for more wards, which took months to be agreed, he said.

In July, the trust’s chairman David Bowles quit, claiming he had been threatened with suspension, when he refused to commit hospitals to meeting the targets at any cost.

Soon after, Mr Walker went on sick leave. While he was off he was told he was under investigation by the trust, and in February, a new chairman sacked him after an employment panel concluded “on the balance of probabilities” that he had used foul and abusive language at formal meetings.

Mr Walker admitting swearing from time to time, but said he had never sworn directly at an employee or colleague. The panel said it was not possible to make such a distinction.

“I was sacked because I was a whistle-blower and they just wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “The claims about swearing were laughable. I swear from time to time, like many people working in a stressful environment, but I have never sworn in a way that threatened anyone.”

To continue reading this report, click here.

God bless you Kevin…

I think you are a HERO by blowing the whistle and helping so much people know the truth and I would certainly like to meet you one day. Wishing you the best, God bless you Kevin!

Fernando Marroquin
Guatemala City, Guatemala

Whistle-blower: Health Care Industry Engaging in PR Tactics

August 12, 2009

CNN

By Ed Hornick and Elaine Quijano

Wendell Potter knows a little something about the health care industry’s practices and is not afraid of to speak out as the health care reform debate heats up around the country.

The former vice president of corporate communications at insurance giant Cigna, who left his post, says the industry is playing “dirty tricks” in an effort to manipulate public opinion.

“Words matter, and the insurance industry is a master at linguistics and using the hot words, buzzwords, buzz expressions that they know will get people upset,” he told CNN Wednesday.

Now a senior fellow on health care for the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, Potter writes a blog on health care reform. He is focusing on efforts to defeat legislation supporting a government health care plan — something he supports.

In early July, Potter testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, telling senators that “I know from personal experience that members of Congress and the public have good reason to question the honesty and trustworthiness of the insurance industry.”

Potter described how underwriters at his former company would drive small businesses with expensive insurance claims to dump their Cigna policies. Industry executives refer to the practice as “purging,” Potter said.

“When that business comes up for renewal, the underwriters jack the rates up so much, the employer has no choice but to drop insurance,” Potter had said.

In an e-mail to CNN, Cigna spokesman Chris Curran denied the company engages in purging.

“We do not practice that. We will offer rates that are reflective of the competitive group health insurance market. We always encourage our clients to compare our proposed rates to those available from other carriers,” Curran wrote.

But now, Potter is back in Washington at the invitation from Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York. He is questioning insurance companies’ public relations tactics — and says some of the questions from town hall meetings are familiar.

“People talk about the government takeover of the system … that’s a buzz term that comes straight out of the insurance industry,” he said.

A Cigna spokesman would not comment directly on Potter’s accusations. Instead, the company released a written statement saying officials agree that health care reform is needed. But the statement went on to say that officials don’t see how a government-sponsored plan can accomplish that.

But Potter’s concerns fall right in line with the Democrats’ strategy of hitting insurance companies hard this summer. Republicans argue that insurance companies aren’t solely to blame for the health care crisis, noting that many of their constituents are perfectly happy with the current system.

The Democratic Party is also dealing with a group of fiscally conservative members known as “Blue Dogs” who are worried over the high costs of the health care plans being bandied about.

Slaughter says that the concerns over a government option may be set up to “try and protect one industry” — referring to the health insurance industry.

Potter insists he has no agenda — just a deep passion for the issue.

“This is hard to do. It’s scary to do something like this. I don’t think I’m any more courageous than anybody but I feel I had to do this.”

Potter also has said he decided to resign in 2007 after Cigna’s controversial handling of an insurance claim made by the family of a California teenager, Nataline Sarkysian.

The Sarkysian family made repeated appeals at news conferences for Cigna to approve a liver transplant for the 17-year-old, who had leukemia. Cigna initially declined to cover the operation, then reversed its decision.

Sarkysian died hours after the company’s reversal.

Click here for the full report from CNN