{"id":22312,"date":"2016-12-24T10:20:33","date_gmt":"2016-12-24T15:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22312"},"modified":"2016-12-24T10:20:33","modified_gmt":"2016-12-24T15:20:33","slug":"this-is-how-the-u-s-government-destroys-the-lives-of-patriotic-whistleblowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22312","title":{"rendered":"This is How the U.S. Government Destroys the Lives of Patriotic Whistleblowers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is How the U.S. Government Destroys the Lives of Patriotic Whistleblowers<\/a><\/h3>\n
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We live in a time and within a culture where the best amongst\u00a0us are thrown in jail, demonized or destroyed, while the worst are celebrated, promoted and enriched. Nothing more clearly crystalizes this sad state of affairs\u00a0than the U.S. government\u2019s ruthless war on whistleblowers who expose severe constitutional violations by those in power. This war knows no political affiliation, and has been waged with equal vigor by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama.<\/p>\n

Earlier this\u00a0morning, I read one of the most enlightening articles on the subject to-date. It was published back in May, and should be read by every single American citizen. We need to admit to ourselves what we have become before we can make changes.<\/p>\n

What follows are excerpts from the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0piece,\u00a0How the Pentagon Punished NSA Whistleblowers<\/a>,\u00a0but you should really take the time\u00a0to read the entire thing.<\/p>\n

If you want to know why\u00a0Snowden did it<\/a>, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking\u00a0NSA\u00a0official than Snowden, and\u00a0he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today.\u00a0Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA\u2019s surveillance program were largely ignored.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is How the U.S. Government Destroys the Lives of Patriotic Whistleblowers We live in a time and within a culture where the best amongst\u00a0us are thrown in jail, demonized or destroyed, while the worst are celebrated, promoted and enriched. Nothing more clearly crystalizes this sad state of affairs\u00a0than the U.S. government\u2019s ruthless war on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3306,249,301,3250,4285,6174,9190,551,3007,10742,827,843,876,14604],"class_list":["post-22312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-barack-obama","tag-edward-snowden","tag-fbi","tag-george-w-bush","tag-liberty-blitzkrieg","tag-michael-krieger","tag-nas","tag-national-security-agency","tag-snowden","tag-thomas-drake","tag-united-states","tag-us-government","tag-whistleblower","tag-william-bunny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22313,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22312\/revisions\/22313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}