Whistleblowers Aren’t Protected... Here’s Why with John Kiriakou

If you report on illegalities, your career's over. There's a good chance you're going to go to prison. You have to seriously weigh the consequences here. If there were people over there that were witnessing atrocities, do you open up your door to allow people to come and and reveal that to you first and get help with with breaking out into the public? Literally, how would that how would that work if you were special forces right now? Right. So, literally every single day, literally, I get emails from people, potential whistleblowers, who want to know where to go, who they should talk to. And the answer should be easy, and it's not. You should be able to go through your chain of command and be protected by the National Whistleblower Act, the Federal Whistleblower Act. But whistleblowers in national security are exempt from its protections. And so if you report, oh, you know, on on illegalities, your career's over. There's a good chance you're going to go to prison. You have to seriously weigh the consequences here. But what you should do, if you could, in a perfect world, is go to your supervisor, then the the um uh inspector general, then the uh congressional oversight committees. And most of the time, I'll give you an example. Tom Drake, heroic whistleblower from NSA, great friend of mine. Tom reported um illegality first to the first to his his boss. His boss told him, "You're new here. You need to mind your own business." Then he went to the inspector general. The inspector general wasn't read into the compartment. And so he he's like, "I I don't know what you're talking about." Then he went to the general counsel. The general counsel said, "Buddy, this is way over your pay grade. You need to stop." Then he went to the Pentagon inspector general because NSA is a DoD agency. The Pentagon Inspector General reported him to NSA and said, "You have a rogue employee you need to watch out for." Then he went to the Congressional Oversight Committee. No way. the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and reported it and they arrested him and charged him with nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage. The whole case fell apart the night before the trial began. But he lost his job. He lost his pension. He lost his clearance. He lost his wife. He ended up spending the next eight years at the Apple Store in Bethesda, Maryland, working in the Genius Bar. This this guy was one of the country's leading experts in internet privacy and that's what they do to you. And this is really concerning like how do we open up the doors? Does it have to be through grassroots like YouTube channels or does a person need to start a YouTube channel to get out in front of the message? I think it has to be that way. I think yes. I think yes. And another thing that has to be done like right away is that Congress needs to rewrite the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboturs during the First World War. It has never been meaningfully updated. Never. It doesn't even mention classified information because the classification system wasn't created until the 1950s. It just talks about national defense information without actually explaining what that means, national defense information. And so we need a new espionage act that allows for what's called an affirmative defense that would allow whistleblower to say, "Yes, I released the information, but here's why I did it. I did it in the public interest." And now you can't do that. Straight to prison.