Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is not a fun thing to do, but it is the last avenue for truth, balanced debate and democracy.<\/i><\/p>\n
By Former Whistleblowers<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n
At least since the aftermath of September 2001, western governments and intelligence agencies have been hard at work expanding the scope of their own power, while eroding privacy, civil liberties and public control of policy. What used to be viewed as paranoid, Orwellian, tin-foil hat fantasies turned out post-Snowden<\/a>, to be not even the whole story.<\/p>\n What’s really remarkable is that we’ve been warned for years that these things were going on: wholesale surveillance of entire populations, militarization of the internet, the end of privacy. All is done in the name of “national security”, which has more or less become a chant to fence off debate and make sure governments aren’t held to account \u2013 that they can’t be held to account \u2013 because everything is being done in the dark. Secret laws, secret interpretations of secret laws by secret courts and no effective parliamentary oversight whatsoever.<\/p>\n By and large the media have paid scant attention to this, even as more and more courageous, principled whistleblowers stepped forward. The unprecedented persecution of truth-tellers, initiated by the Bush administration and severely accelerated by the Obama administration, has been mostly ignored, while record numbers of well-meaning people are charged with serious felonies simply for letting their fellow citizens know what’s going on.<\/p>\n It’s one of the bitter ironies of our time that while John Kiriakou<\/a> (ex-CIA) is in prison for blowing the whistle on US torture, the torturers and their enablers walk free.<\/p>\n Likewise WikiLeaks<\/a>-source Chelsea (n\u00e9e Bradley) Manning<\/a> was charged with \u2013 amongst other serious crimes \u2013 aiding the enemy (read: the public). Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison while the people who planned the illegal and disastrous war on Iraq in 2003 are still treated as dignitaries.<\/p>\n Numerous ex-NSA<\/a> officials have come forward in the past decade, disclosing massive fraud, vast illegalities and abuse of power in said agency, including Thomas Drake, William Binney and Kirk Wiebe<\/a>. The response was 100% persecution and 0% accountability by both the NSA and the rest of government. Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is not a fun thing to do, but despite the poor track record of western media, whistleblowing remains the last avenue for truth, balanced debate and upholding democracy \u2013 that fragile construct which Winston Churchill is quoted as calling “the worst form of government, except all the others”.<\/p>\n