Edward Snowden’s Testimony to the European Parliament on NSA Spying and its Consequences
March 11, 2014
Independent Science News has decided to reprint in full the March 7th testimony of Edward Snowden to the European Parliament. Snowden’s
testimony is vitally important for every citizen in every country to understand, yet it has barely been covered by the
commercial or (non-commercial) global media. At stake is the possibility of individuals and organizations (not just the
media) to function as checks on executive power. It also demonstrates the ability of a secret agency to becomean executive power, able even to control the spy services of foreign countries. Publication here will enable ISN readers to hear from Snowden himself about what he considers the scope and significance of ‘suspicionless surveillance’
and its implications for democratic rights and free-speech. What Snowden shows is that surveillance is both a breach of
our personal rights but it also imperils our ability to collectively enforce all of our rights.
Snowden’s Testimony to the European Parliament (March 7th):
I would like to thank the European Parliament for the invitation to provide testimony for your inquiry into the
Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens. The suspicionless surveillance programs of the NSA, GCHQ (UK), and so many
others that we learned about over the last year endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the
foundation of liberal societies.
The first principle any inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political pressure to do so, no
western government has been able to present evidence showing that such programs are necessary. In the United States, the
heads of our spying services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass surveillance, but two
independent White House reviews with access to the classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was
untrue, as did a Federal Court.
Looking at the US government’s reports here is valuable. The most recent of these investigations, performed by the White
House’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined that the mass surveillance program investigated was not
only ineffective — they found it had never stopped even a single imminent terrorist attack — but that it had no basis in
law. In less diplomatic language, they discovered the United States was operating an unlawful mass surveillance program,
and the greatest success the program had ever produced was discovering a taxi driver in the United States transferring
$8,500 dollars to Somalia in 2007.
After noting that even this unimpressive success – uncovering evidence of a single unlawful bank transfer — would have
been achieved without bulk collection, the Board recommended that the unlawful mass surveillance program be ended.
Unfortunately, we know from press reports that this program is still operating today.
I believe that suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe. By
squandering precious, limited resources on “collecting it all,” we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of
harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at
the expense of traditional, proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified.
Despite the extraordinary intrusions of the NSA and EU national governments into private communications world-wide, Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “Underwear Bomber,” was allowed to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United
States in 2009. The 290 persons on board were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he
failed to detonate the device. While even Mutallab’s own father warned the US government he was dangerous in November
2009, our resources were tied up monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary tip-off didn’t
get Mutallab a dedicated US investigator. All we gave him was a US visa.
Nor did the US government’s comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite the Russians
specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn’t do more than a cursory investigation — although they
did plenty of worthless computer-based searching – and failed to discover the plot. 264 people were injured, and 3 died.
The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on monitoring the call records of everyone in
America.
This should not have happened. I worked for the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security
Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency. I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must
continue. And I have risked my life, my family, and my freedom to tell you the truth.
The NSA granted me the authority to monitor communications world-wide using its mass surveillance systems, including
within the United States. I have personally targeted individuals using these systems under both the President of the
United States’ Executive Order 12333 and the US Congress’ FAA 702. I know the good and the bad of these systems, and
what they can and cannot do, and I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private
communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under penalty of perjury that
this is true.
These are not the capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety,
and threatens our way of life.
If even the US government, after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and unnecessary, continues to operate to
engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem. I consider the United States Government to be generally responsible, and
I hope you will agree with me. Accordingly, this begs the question many legislative bodies implicated in mass
surveillance have sought to avoid: if even the US is willing to knowingly violate the rights of billions of innocents —
and I say billions without exaggeration — for nothing more substantial than a “potential” intelligence advantage that
has never materialized, what are other governments going to do?
Whether we like it or not, the international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by the work of
bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience of spies is more valuable than the rights of
their citizens, the inevitable result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe. Thank you.
I will now respond to the submitted questions. Please bear in mind that I will not be disclosing new information about
surveillance programs: I will be limiting my testimony to information regarding what responsible media organizations
have entered into the public domain. For the record, I also repeat my willingness to provide testimony to the United
States Congress, should they decide to consider the issue of unconstitutional mass surveillance.
Rapporteur Claude Moraes MEP, S Group:
Given the focus of this Inquiry is on the impact of mass surveillance on EU citizens, could you elaborate on the extent
of cooperation that exists between the NSA and EU Member States in terms of the transfer and collection of bulk data of
EU citizens?
- A number of memos from the NSA’s Foreign Affairs Directorate have been published in the press.
One of the foremost activities of the NSA’s FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member
states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK’s GCHQ, work very hard
to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet
surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers. These efforts to interpret new powers out
of vague laws is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers’ insistence that legal limits be
respected, effects the GCHQ internally described in its own documents as “damaging public debate.”
In recent public memory, we have seen these FAD “legal guidance” operations occur in both Sweden and the Netherlands,
and also faraway New Zealand. Germany was pressured to modify its G-10 law to appease the NSA, and it eroded the rights
of German citizens under their constitution. Each of these countries received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under
the guise of the US Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries’
communications. The ultimate result of the NSA’s guidance is that the right of ordinary citizens to be free from
unwarranted interference is degraded, and systems of intrusive mass surveillance are being constructed in secret within
otherwise liberal states, often without the full awareness of the public.
Once the NSA has successfully subverted or helped repeal legal restrictions against unconstitutional mass surveillance
in partner states, it encourages partners to perform “access operations.” Access operations are efforts to gain access
to the bulk communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions, normally beginning with
those that handle the greatest volume of communications. Sometimes the NSA provides consultation, technology, or even
the physical hardware itself for partners to “ingest” these massive amounts of data in a manner that allows processing,
and it does not take long to access everything. Even in a country the size of the United States, gaining access to the
circuits of as few as three companies can provide access to the majority of citizens’ communications. In the UK,
Verizon, British Telecommunications, Vodafone, Global Crossing, Level 3, Viatel, and Interoute all cooperate with the
GCHQ, to include cooperation beyond what is legally required.
By the time this general process has occurred, it is very difficult for the citizens of a country to protect the privacy
of their communications, and it is very easy for the intelligence services of that country to make those communications
available to the NSA — even without having explicitly shared them. The nature of the NSA’s “NOFORN,” or NO FOREIGN
NATIONALS classification, when combined with the fact that the memorandum agreements between NSA and its foreign
partners have a standard disclaimer stating they provide no enforceable rights, provides both the NSA with a means of
monitoring its partner’s citizens without informing the partner, and the partner with a means of plausible deniability.
The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on
the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn’t search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on
the condition that it doesn’t search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the
NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they
transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national
government’s spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having
any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against
ordinary citizens as a whole.
The Parliament should ask the NSA and GCHQ to deny that they monitor the communications of EU citizens, and in the
absence of an informative response, I would suggest that the current state of affairs is the inevitable result of
subordinating the rights of the voting public to the prerogatives of State Security Bureaus. The surest way for any
nation to become subject to unnecessary surveillance is to allow its spies to dictate its policy.
The right to be free unwarranted intrusion into our private effects — our lives and possessions, our thoughts and
communications — is a human right. It is not granted by national governments and it cannot be revoked by them out of
convenience. Just as we do not allow police officers to enter every home to fish around for evidence of undiscovered
crimes, we must not allow spies to rummage through our every communication for indications of disfavored activities.
Could you comment on the activities of EU Member States intelligence agencies in these operations and how advanced their
capabilities have become in comparison with the NSA?
- The best testimony I can provide on this matter without pre-empting the work of journalists is to point to the
indications that the NSA not only enables and guides, but shares some mass surveillance systems and technologies with
the agencies of EU member states. As it pertains to the issue of mass surveillance, the difference between, for example,
the NSA and FRA is not one of technology, but rather funding and manpower. Technology is agnostic of nationality, and
the flag on the pole outside of the building makes systems of mass surveillance no more or less effective.
In terms of the mass surveillance programmes already revealed through the press, what proportion of the mass
surveillance activities do these programmes account for? Are there many other programmes, undisclosed as of yet, that
would impact on EU citizens rights?
- There are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave the public interest
determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government
stakeholders.
Shadow Rapporteur Sophie Int’Veld MEP, ALDE Group:
Are there adequate procedures in the NSA for staff to signal wrongdoing?
- Unfortunately not. The culture within the US Intelligence Community is such that reporting serious concerns about the
legality or propriety of programs is much more likely to result in your being flagged as a troublemaker than to result
in substantive reform. We should remember that many of these programs were well known to be problematic to the legal
offices of agencies such as the GCHQ and other oversight officials. According to their own documents, the priority of
the overseers is not to assure strict compliance with the law and accountability for violations of law, but rather to
avoid, and I quote, “damaging public debate,” to conceal the fact that for-profit companies have gone “well beyond” what
is legally required of them, and to avoid legal review of questionable programs by open courts. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2013/oct/25/leaked-memos-gchq-mass-surveillance-secret-snowden) In my personal experience, repeatedly raising concerns about legal and policy matters with my co-workers and superiors
resulted in two kinds of responses.
The first were well-meaning but hushed warnings not to “rock the boat,” for fear of the sort of retaliation that befell
former NSA whistleblowers like Wiebe, Binney, and Drake. All three men reported their concerns through the official,
approved process, and all three men were subject to armed raids by the FBI and threats of criminal sanction. Everyone in
the Intelligence Community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized
operations.
The second were similarly well-meaning but more pointed suggestions, typically from senior officials, that we should let
the issue be someone else’s problem. Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns, no one at
NSA could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there
was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.
Do you feel you had exhausted all avenues before taking the decision to go public?
- Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any
action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was
not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for
revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process.
It is important to remember that this legal dilemma did not occur by mistake. US whistleblower reform laws were passed
as recently as 2012, with the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but they specifically chose to exclude
Intelligence Agencies from being covered by the statute. President Obama also reformed a key executive Whistleblower
regulation with his 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 19, but it exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as
myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.
Do you think procedures for whistleblowing have been improved now?
- No. There has not yet been any substantive whistleblower reform in the US, and unfortunately my government has taken a
number of disproportionate and persecutory actions against me. US government officials have declared me guilty of crimes
in advance of any trial, they’ve called for me to be executed or assassinated in private and openly in the press, they
revoked my passport and left me stranded in a foreign transit zone for six weeks, and even used NATO to ground the
presidential plane of Evo Morales – the leader of Bolivia – on hearing that I might attempt to seek and enjoy asylum in
Latin America.
What is your relationship with the Russian and Chinese authorities, and what are the terms on which you were allowed to
stay originally in Hong Kong and now in Russia?
- I have no relationship with either government.
Shadow Rapporteur Jan Philipp Albrecht MEP, Greens Group:
Could we help you in any way, and do you seek asylum in the EU?
- If you want to help me, help me by helping everyone: declare that the indiscriminate, bulk collection of private data
by governments is a violation of our rights and must end. What happens to me as a person is less important than what
happens to our common rights.
As for asylum, I do seek EU asylum, but I have yet to receive a positive response to the requests I sent to various EU
member states. Parliamentarians in the national governments have told me that the US, and I quote, “will not allow” EU
partners to offer political asylum to me, which is why the previous resolution on asylum ran into such mysterious
opposition. I would welcome any offer of safe passage or permanent asylum, but I recognize that would require an act of
extraordinary political courage.
Can you confirm cyber-attacks by the NSA or other intelligence agencies on EU institutions, telecommunications providers
such as Belgacom and SWIFT, or any other EU-based companies?
- Yes. I don’t want to outpace the efforts of journalists, here, but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far
are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations against Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the
United Nations, UNICEF, and others based on documents I provided have actually occurred. And I expect similar operations
will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.
Shadow Rapporteur Cornelia Ernst MEP, GUE Group:
In your view, how far can the surveillance measures you revealed be justified by national security and from your
experience is the information being used for economic espionage? What could be done to resolve this?
- Surveillance against specific targets, for unquestionable reasons of national security while respecting human rights,
is above reproach. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a growth in untargeted, extremely questionable surveillance for reasons
entirely unrelated to national security. Most recently, the Prime Minister of Australia, caught red-handed engaging in
the most blatant kind of economic espionage, sought to argue that the price of Indonesian shrimp and clove cigarettes
was a “security matter.” These are indications of a growing disinterest among governments for ensuring intelligence
activities are justified, proportionate, and above all accountable. We should be concerned about the precedent our
actions set.
The UK’s GCHQ is the prime example of this, due to what they refer to as a “light oversight regime,” which is a
bureaucratic way of saying their spying activities are less restricted than is proper (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/legal-loopholes-gchq-spy-world). Since that light oversight regime was revealed, we have learned that the GCHQ is intercepting and storing
unprecedented quantities of ordinary citizens’ communications on a constant basis, both within the EU and withouthttp://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret- world-communications-nsa). There is no argument that could convince an open court that such activities were necessary and proportionate, and it
is for this reason that such activities are shielded from the review of open courts.
In the United States, we use a secret, rubber-stamp Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that only hears arguments
from the government. Out of approximately 34,000 government requests over 33 years, the secret court rejected only 11.
It should raise serious concerns for this committee, and for society, that the GCHQ’s lawyers consider themselves
fortunate to avoid the kind of burdensome oversight regime that rejects 11 out of 34,000 requests. If that’s what heavy
oversight looks like, what, pray tell, does the GCHQ’s “light oversight” look like?
Let’s explore it. We learned only days ago that the GCHQ compromised a popular Yahoo service to collect images from web
cameras inside citizens’ homes, and around 10% of these images they take from within people’s homes involve nudity or
intimate activities (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo). In the same report, journalists revealed that this sort of webcam data was searchable via the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system,
which means the GCHQ’s “light oversight regime” was used not only to capture bulk data that is clearly of limited
intelligence value and most probably violates EU laws, but to then trade that data with foreign services without the
knowledge or consent of any country’s voting public.
We also learned last year that some of the partners with which the GCHQ was sharing this information, in this example
the NSA, had made efforts to use evidence of religious conservatives’ association with sexually explicit material of the
sort GCHQ was collecting as a grounds for destroying their reputations and discrediting them (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html). The “Release to Five Eyes” classification of this particular report, dated 2012, reveals that the UK government was
aware of the NSA’s intent to use sexually explicit material in this manner, indicating a deepening and increasingly
aggressive partnership. None of these religious conservatives were suspected of involvement in terrorist plots: they
were targeted on the basis of their political beliefs and activism, as part of a class the NSA refers to as
“radicalizers.”
I wonder if any members of this committee have ever advocated a position that the NSA, GCHQ, or even the intelligence
services of an EU member state might attempt to construe as “radical”? If you were targeted on the basis of your
political beliefs, would you know? If they sought to discredit you on the basis of your private communications, could
you discover the culprit and prove it was them? What would be your recourse?
And you are parliamentarians. Try to imagine the impact of such activities against ordinary citizens without power,
privilege, or resources. Are these activities necessary, proportionate, and an unquestionable matter of national
security? A few weeks ago we learned the GCHQ has hired scientists to study how to create divisions amongst activists
and disfavored political groups, how they attempt to discredit and destroy private businesses, and how they knowingly
plant false information to misdirect civil discourse (https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/).
To directly answer your question, yes, global surveillance capabilities are being used on a daily basis for the purpose
of economic espionage. That a major goal of the US Intelligence Community is to produce economic intelligence is the
worst kept secret in Washington.
In September, we learned the NSA had successfully targeted and compromised the world’s major financial transaction
facilitators, such as Visa and SWIFT, which released documents describe as providing “rich personal information,” even
data that “is not about our targets” (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-exclusive-nsa-spies-on… transactions-a-922276.html). Again, these documents are authentic and unmodified – a fact the NSA itself has never once disputed.
In August, we learned the NSA had targeted Petrobras, an energy company (http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united… brazilian-oil-giant.html). It would be the first of a long list of US energy targets. But we should be clear these activities are not unique to
the NSA or GCHQ. Australia’s DSD targeted Sri Mulyani Indrawati, a finance minister and Managing Director of the World
Bank (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/18/australia-tried-to-monitor-… presidents-phone). Report after report
has revealed targeting of G-8 and G-20 summits. Mass surveillance capabilities have even been used against a climate
change summit.
Recently, governments have shifted their talking points from claiming they only use mass surveillance for “national
security” purposes to the more nebulous “valid foreign intelligence purposes.” I suggest this committee consider that
this rhetorical shift is a tacit acknowledgment by governments that they recognize they have crossed beyond the
boundaries of justifiable activities. Every country believes its “foreign intelligence purposes” are “valid,” but that
does not make it so. If we are prepared to condemn the economic spying of our competitors, we must be prepared to do the
same of our allies. Lasting peace is founded upon fundamental fairness.
The international community must agree to common standards of behavior, and jointly invest in the development of new
technical standards to defend against mass surveillance. We rely on common systems, and the French will not be safe from
mass surveillance until Americans, Argentines, and Chinese are as well.
The good news is that there are solutions. The weakness of mass surveillance is that it can very easily be made much
more expensive through changes in technical standards: pervasive, end-to-end encryption can quickly make indiscriminate
surveillance impossible on a cost- effective basis. The result is that governments are likely to fall back to
traditional, targeted surveillance founded upon an individualized suspicion. Governments cannot risk the discovery of
their exploits by simply throwing attacks at every “endpoint,” or computer processor on the end of a network connection,
in the world. Mass surveillance, passive surveillance, relies upon unencrypted or weakly encrypted communications at the
global network level.
If there had been better independent and public oversight over the intelligence agencies, do you think this could have
prevented this kind of mass surveillance? What conditions would need to be fulfilled, both nationally and
internationally?
- Yes, better oversight could have prevented the mistakes that brought us to this point, as could an understanding that
defense is always more important than offense when it comes to matters of national intelligence. The intentional
weakening of the common security standards upon which we all rely is an action taken against the public good.
The oversight of intelligence agencies should always be performed by opposition parties, as under the democratic model,
they always have the most to lose under a surveillance state. Additionally, we need better whistleblower protections,
and a new commitment to the importance of international asylum. These are important safeguards that protect our
collective human rights when the laws of national governments have failed.
European governments, which have traditionally been champions of human rights, should not be intimidated out of standing
for the right of asylum against political charges, of which espionage has always been the traditional example.
Journalism is not a crime, it is the foundation of free and informed societies, and no nation should look to others to
bear the burden of defending its rights.
Shadow Rapporteur Axel Voss MEP, EPP Group:
Why did you choose to go public with your information?
- Secret laws and secret courts cannot authorize unconstitutional activities by fiat, nor can classification be used to
shield an unjustified and embarrassing violation of human rights from democratic accountability. If the mass
surveillance of an innocent public is to occur, it should be authorized as the result of an informed debate with the
consent of the public, under a framework of laws that the government invites civil society to challenge in open courts.
That our governments are even today unwilling to allow independent review of the secret policies enabling mass
surveillance of innocents underlines governments’ lack of faith that these programs are lawful, and this provides
stronger testimony in favor of the rightfulness of my actions than any words I might write.
Did you exhaust all possibilities before taking the decision to go public?
- Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any
action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was
not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for
revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process.
It is important to remember that this is legal dilemma did not occur by mistake. US whistleblower reform laws were
passed as recently as 2012, with the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but they specifically chose to exclude
Intelligence Agencies from being covered by the statute. President Obama also reformed a key executive Whistleblower
regulation with his 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 19, but it exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as
myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.
Are you aware that your revelations have the potential to put at risk lives of innocents and hamper efforts in the
global fight against terrorism?
- Actually, no specific evidence has ever been offered, by any government, that even a single life has been put at risk
by the award-winning journalism this question attempts to implicate.
The ongoing revelations about unlawful and improper surveillance are the product of a partnership between the world’s
leading journalistic outfits and national governments, and if you can show one of the governments consulted on these
stories chose not to impede demonstrably fatal information from being published, I invite you to do so. The front page
of every newspaper in the world stands open to you.
Did the Russian secret service approach you?
- Of course. Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: that’s their job.
But I didn’t take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I’m sure they were disappointed, it doesn’t take long
for an intelligence service to realize when they’re out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly
fearless journalist with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As
a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for
the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high.
I would also add, for the record, that the United States government has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no
evidence at all of any relationship between myself and the Russian intelligence service.
Who is currently financing your life?
- I am.
Shadow Rapporteur, Timothy Kirkhope MEP, ECR Group:
You have stated previously that you want the intelligence agencies to be more accountable to citizens, however, why do
you feel this accountability does not apply to you? Do you therefore, plan to return to the United States or Europe to
face criminal charges and answer questions in an official capacity, and pursue the route as an official whistle-blower?
- Respectfully, I remind you that accountability cannot exist without the due process of law, and even Deutsche Welle
has written about the well-known gap in US law that deprived me of vital legal protections due to nothing more
meaningful than my status as an employee of a private company rather than of the government directly (http://www.dw.de/us-whistleblower-laws-offer-no-protection/a-17391500). Surely no one on the committee believes that the measure of one’s political rights should be determined by their
employer.
Fortunately, we live in a global, interconnected world where, when national laws fail like this, our international laws
provide for another level of accountability, and the asylum process provides a means of due process for individuals who
might otherwise be wrongly deprived of it. In the face of the extraordinary campaign of persecution brought against me
by my the United States government on account of my political beliefs, which I remind you included the grounding of the
President of Bolivia’s plane by EU Member States, an increasing number of national governments have agreed that a grant
of political asylum is lawful and appropriate.
Polling of public opinion in Europe indicates I am not alone in hoping to see EU governments agree that blowing the
whistle on serious wrongdoing should be a protected act.
Do you still plan to release more files, and have you disclosed or been asked to disclose any information regarding the
content of these files to Chinese and Russian authorities or any names contained within them?
As stated previously, there are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave
the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in
coordination with government stakeholders. I have not disclosed any information to anyone other than those responsible
journalists. Thank you.
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