Salon reports: John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who blew the whistle on Bush’s torture program and is now in prison, sent an open letter to Edward Snowden last week warning him not to trust the FBI.

“DO NOT,” Kiriakou wrote, “under any circumstances, cooperate with the FBI. FBI agents will lie, trick, and deceive you. They will twist your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They will pretend to be people they are not – supporters, well-wishers, and friends – all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-context statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy; it’s part of the problem, not the solution.”

These are the words of a registered Republican who voted for Gary Johnson, whom the Rosenberg Fund for Children denied a grant, informing him that he wasn’t “liberal enough,” Kiriakou says, for the award — and who last year received a birthday card from Jerry Falwell Jr.

Kiriakou is the first CIA veteran to be imprisoned. It was after he blew the whistle on Bush’s torture program that the CIA, FBI and Justice Department came down on him, at first charging him with aiding the enemy and later convicting him of disclosing the identities of undercover colleagues at the CIA. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The American whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the US of waging a campaign of “historically disproportionate aggression” against him during an extraordinary meeting with human rights activists and Russian officials at the Moscow airport where he has been trapped since 23 June.

In his first appearance since disclosing his identity in the Guardian last month, Snowden insisted he had no regrets and had made a “moral decision” to leak dozens of secret documents outlining US surveillance programmes. He also announced that he would apply for political asylum from the Kremlin and appealed to those present for help in leaving the airport.

The US has lobbied governments around the world to refuse entry to Snowden and has invalidated his US passport.

Last week, a plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, was grounded in Vienna after several European countries blocked their airspace amid suspicions that Snowden was on board.

“The government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have,” Snowden said. “I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression.” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: As the director of national intelligence, James Clapper has told Congress that the regime of Moammar Gadhafi would likely prevail in Libya, that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party was “largely secular” and that the National Security Agency doesn’t collect data on millions of Americans.

Not quite.

Gadhafi ended up killed by Libyan rebel forces, and the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi quickly moved to install conservative Islamists into top positions when he became Egypt’s president. And Clapper’s latest misstep may have dented trust in the chief intelligence officer despite public assurances of support from the White House and key members of Congress.

Clapper acknowledged he misspoke when he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March that U.S. spies do not gather data on Americans – something NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealed as false by releasing documents showing the NSA collects millions of Americans’ phone records showing who they called and for how long, as well as some Internet traffic.

“Clapper is probably job secure for now because (Capitol) Hill is not calling for his removal,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser to the Obama White House who heads the Brookings Intelligence Project research group. “But he now has an unfortunate record. Another misstatement, and he will be a liability.” [Continue reading…]

At Wikileaks, Edward Snowden writes: A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.

It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice. [Continue reading…]

Ben O’Neill writes: Provisions of the Espionage Act are now being brought to bear against [Edward] Snowden to try to put him in prison. But what is more interesting than consideration of the provisions of an Act of the US Congress is to appeal to the science of jurisprudence to determine the normative question of when whistleblowing should and should not be regarded as a criminal action. This is an important jurisprudential question, since it is common for people to assent to the view that whistleblowing should be a protected activity, even when it “breaks the law” in the sense of violating contractual obligations or secrecy legislation.

Whistleblowing involves the revelation of misconduct or illegality occurring in an organization. This necessarily involves disclosing secret information beyond the bounds intended by those trying to keep it secret, and often this involves publication and disclosure to the general public. By virtue of the fact that whistleblowers exist within the organizations they are exposing, they are almost always under some contractual or statutory requirement not to disclose the information they are disclosing. If one takes these obligations at face value then it would appear that whistleblowing must always be regarded as a breach of law, and possibly also a breach of ethics, at least insofar as it involves a breach of contract with the organization where the whistleblower is employed. Under such a view, whistleblowing can never be legally justified, and it is only through an ethical imperative to break the law that it could be justified ethically.

Confidentiality contracts are a legitimate part of the management of many kinds of organizations, and in many cases they are indispensible to the successful operation of the organization. This is true in most legitimate professions, and of course, all illegitimate ones. It is certainly true that people and organizations can enter into confidentiality contracts of this kind, and in the ordinary course of business these contracts create justifiable legal and ethical obligations for the parties involved. If a person agrees to confidentiality in dealings with an employer or client, and agrees to keep sensitive material a secret, then ordinarily this would be a legitimate and binding contract that would bind the person to make good on their promise. Failure to do so would be a breach of contract, and might also involve breaches of other legal duties (e.g., fiduciary duties).

However, one exception to this ordinary contractual case is crucial: confidentiality contracts are not legitimate and should not be regarded to be ethically or legally operative when the confidentiality is designed to protect secret unlawful actions that are being taken by one of the parties. This is part of a wider objection in law to what are sometimes called “unlawful agreements”. Broadly speaking, contracts cannot be regarded as legitimate if they involve agreement to perform an unlawful action, or an action designed to further an unlawful purpose. This is the basis on which one can regard whistleblowing as a lawful activity, notwithstanding that it often proceeds in breach of an agreement of confidentiality. In cases of unlawful action occurring in an organization, the action of keeping information confidential will not usually be illegal in its own right, since people are rarely under a positive legal obligation to report breaches of law (with some exceptions). Regardless, this is no bar to the invalidity of a contract obliging a party to do this. A contract can be considered unlawful even if the acts agreed to be taken are perfectly legal, “… by reason of the wrongful purpose of one or both parties in making it.” Hence, a confidentiality contract which protects an underlying unlawful activity is not generally legitimate. [Continue reading…]

This extract comes from part one of a two-part article. Part two can be read here.

Mashable reports: At last year’s DefCon, the world’s largest hacker conference, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander showed up in blue jeans and a tucked-in T-shirt to give the keynote speech, asking hackers to join forces with the NSA.

“We can protect the networks and have civil liberties and privacy, and you can help us get there,” he said.

The hacker conference and the NSA were on such good terms last year that the spy agency even had a recruitment booth — next to that of the digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Wired‘s security reporter Kim Zetter went as far as describing the conference as “a lackey for the NSA.”

This year, however, after revelations of top secret, far reaching NSA surveillance programs, DefCon’s founder Jeff Moss asked the feds to stay away.

“When it comes to sharing and socializing with feds, recent revelations have made many in the community uncomfortable about this relationship. Therefore, I think it would be best for everyone involved if the feds call a ‘time-out’ and not attend DEF CON this year,” he wrote in a short blog post on the conference’s website titled “Feds, We Need Some Time Apart.”

Moss, also known as The Dark Tangent, told Reuters that “a little bit of time and distance can be a healthy thing, especially when emotions are running high.”

Moss’s request came as a surprise to many, and reactions have been mixed. Hacker and security researcher Shane MacDougall, who has been attending DefCon for years, explained that while in the past the conference felt more like “us against the Feds,” now things are different.

“Over the years, and especially after 9/11, that anti-Fed mindset changed,” he wrote in an email to Mashable. “A lot of new kids to the field are completely ignorant of the history of hackers vs. the FBI and others, and there seems to be a massive crush of them who want to become ‘feds.'”