‘Plight for whistleblowers in US a lot worse now’ – Snowden’s lawyer

January 23rd, 2015

David Schulberg

A journalist looks at a display with a picture of former CIA employee Edward Snowden. The photo is taken during his meeting with human rights organizations at Sheremetyevo airport. (RIA Novosti/Pavel Lisitsyn)

Despite public perception of whistleblowers changing for the better, the plight of those who choose to expose wrongdoings “has gotten a lot worse” in the US, former ethics adviser to Justice Department and Edward Snowden’s lawyer, Josselyn Radak, told RT.

To back up her
statement, Radack singled out US President Barack Obama for
prosecuting “more whistleblowers than any previous president
and then all previous presidents combined.”

RT: What good has come out of
whistleblowing?

Josselyn Raddak: Enormous public good has come
out of whistleblowing, of the major scandals going on in the
United Sates and the world ranging from torture to secret
surveillance, to war crimes. We wouldn’t know information about
any of this but for whistleblowers who have come forward to
reveal fraud, waste, abuse, illegality and gross crimes.

RT: Almost every week we are reporting on
it. It doesn’t mean that it got worse, it just means that you
brought it to the fore and now it is being reported on. Is it a
correct assumption?

JR: It has gotten worse. Up until the indictment
of Thomas Drake in 2010, no-one had been prosecuted under the
espionage act for 40 years for allegedly leaking information. And
in the past 5 years President Obama has persecuted more
whistleblowers than any previous president and then all previous
presidents combined. And he has done so under the Espionage Act.
So I think the plight for whistleblowers has gotten lot worse.
Not only do you risk losing your job, you risk losing your very
freedom.

RT: Could you just remind our viewers what
you did in a nutshell, your whistleblowing, just tell them what
you did and what happened as a result of it?

JR: When I was a justice department attorney I
blew the whistle on our first prisoner in the Afghanistan War,
because the United States was not allowing him, a US citizen, to
have his attorney and we were also engaged in torture. And
because I revealed that information, I was put under one of the
first Federal Criminal leak investigations and put on the no-fly
list, which really wrecked my life over a number of years. I
decided to dedicate myself professionally as an attorney to
representing whistleblowers. And I’ve been privileged over the
years to represent Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden and today’s
recipient of the Sam Adams award Bill Binney.

RT: You talked about the espionage act and
the way that’s used now against people like you. Is there any
future for whistleblowers, and is the government likely to treat
people like you any differently, as the public perception about
you and what you are doing has grown so much in the last couple
of years?

JR: Public perception of whistleblowers is
changing. You see both Edward Snowden and Bill Binney featured in
the documentary Citizenfour by Laura Poitras, which has now been
nominated for an Oscar award. People are beginning to realize the
public value of the information brought forward by whistleblowers
who were being persecuted and prosecuted for exposing illegality.

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‘Plight for whistleblowers in US a lot worse now’ – Snowden’s lawyer
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