Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983)is a former technical contractor and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), before leaking details of classified NSA mass surveillance programs to the press. Snowden shared classified material on a variety of top-secret NSA programs, including the interception of US telephone metadata and the PRISM surveillance program, primarily with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, which published a series of exposés based on Snowden's disclosures in June 2013. Snowden said the leaks were an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."
Snowden's alleged leaks are said to rank among the most significant breaches in the history of the NSA.Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said disclosures linked to Snowden have "confirmed longstanding suspicions that NSA's surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew." On June 14, 2013, US federal prosecutors filed a sealed complaint, made public on June 21, charging Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified intelligence with an unauthorized person; the latter two allegations are under the Espionage Act
The United States revoked his passport and demanded that he got deported back to the U.S. The United States even bargained with China about intelligence and Snowden.
Bradley Manning
Bradley Edward Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed classified material to the website WikiLeaks. He was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source and aiding the enemy.
Assigned to an army unit based near Baghdad, Manning had access to databases used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, told the FBI that Manning had confided during online chats that he had downloaded material from these databases and passed it to WikiLeaks. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 United States diplomatic cables; and 500,000 army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. It was the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public. Much of it was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010
Thomas Drake
Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010 the government alleged that Drake 'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.
On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pled to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer; Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped represent him, called it an act of "civil disobedience.
John Kiriakou
John Kiriakou (born August 9, 1964) is a former CIA analyst and case officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counter-terrorism consultant for ABC News, blogger for Huffington Post, and author.
He is notable as the first official within the U.S. government to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, which he described as torture.
On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou pled guilty to disclosing classified information about a fellow CIA officer that connected the covert operative to a specific operation. Kiriakou thus became the second C.I.A. officer convicted of violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and the first for passing along classified information to a reporter, although the reporter did not publish the name of the operative.He was sentenced to 30 months in prison on January 25, 2013 and reported to the low-security Federal correctional facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania to begin serving his term on February 28, 2013. Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence adviser to Barack Obama who turned down an offer to be considered for CIA director in 2009, has sent the President a letter signed by eighteen other CIA veterans urging that the sentence be commuted.
Kiriakou received a prison "send-off" party at an exclusive Washington, D.C. hotel hosted by political peace activists dressed in orange jumpsuits and mock prison costumes. In 2012, Kiriakou received the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage for standing up for constitutional rights
Stephen Jin-Woo Kim
Stephen Jin-Woo Kim is a Senior Analyst at the Office of National Security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He previously had a career in academia and government service.He lives in McLean, Virginia.
Kim was charged him the Espionage Act for allegedly disclosing to a reporter that North Korea might test a nuclear bomb. His defenders argue that such disclosure is both harmless and commonplace in Washington, and that the charge against him is excessive and unprecedented.
He was born on August 15, 1967 in Seoul, South Korea. His family moved to New York in 1976. He attended Fordham Preparatory School, a Jesuit school. For college he went to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (1989). He tried out Wall Street but found the work did not suit him. Following that, he attended Harvard for a master's degree in national security (1992), and then Yale for a Ph.D. in diplomatic and military history (1999). He authored a book based on his dissertation. He has also extensively studied philosophy and literature.
After graduation, he went to work at the Center for Naval Analyses, where he analyzed U.S. operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. After the September 11 attacks, he moved to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he focused on North Korea. He briefed the Defense Policy Board on his work, as well as Kissinger, Hadley, and Cheney. He also worked at the Office of Net Assessment under the Secretary of Defense, analyzing Chinese nuclear issues.
In 2008, he went to work as a contractor at the State Department at the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance. There he was Senior Advisor for Intelligence to the Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation. He studied North Korea's nuclear program, especially its claims of dismantling its equipment. He also participated in nuclear war games at the Naval War College
Shamai Leibowitz
Shamai Kedem Leibowitz is a lawyer and blogger who was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for leaking information to a blogger.
Leibowitz worked as a contract Hebrew linguist for the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) monitoring wiretaps of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C..Leibowitz said, “During the course of my work I came across wrongdoings that led me to conclude this is an abuse of power and a violation of the law. I reported these violations to my superiors at the FBI who did nothing about them. Thereafter, to my great regret, I disclosed the violations to a member of the media.”He became concerned about communications he heard indicating a potential attack on Iran by Israel and illegal influence-peddling by the Israeli embassy, and leaked information to Richard Silverstein who runs a blog, Tikun Olam: Make the World a Better Place. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, although the proceedings were so secret at the time that not even the judge knew specifically what he had leaked.
His grandfather was Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
Jeffrey Sterling
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is a former CIA employee, who was indicted and subsequently arrested under the Espionage Act for allegedly revealing details about Operation Merlin to journalist James Risen
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling joined the CIA on 14 May 1993, and in 1995 became Operations Officer in the Iran Task force of CIA's Near East and South Asia division. He held a Top Secret security clearance and had access to Sensitive Compartmented Information, including classified cables, CIA informants and operations. After training in Persian in 1997 he was sent first to Bonn, Germany, and two years later to New York City to recruit Iranian nationals as agents for the CIA, as part of a secret intelligence operation related to the weapons capabilities of Iran. In April 2000, Sterling filed a complaint about racial discrimination practices by CIA management with CIA's Equal Employment Office. The CIA subsequently revoked Sterling's authorization to receive or possess classified documents concerning the secret operation, and placed him on administrative leave in March 2001. After the failure of two settlement attempts, his contract with the CIA was terminated on 31 January 2002
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