over the top, i was a mom, i had 2 young kids. i was pregnant during part of this ordeal. i mean it, it, in no public servant, no human period to serve set criminal defendants often have more rights than the suppliers. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 yeah, just a sampling thereabout is program the whistleblowers ultimately shutting light on what so often the deep states clandestine operations. you can see that on our on air at r t. c, i should say, but also what are the thoughts called the mean time your world news returns to the top with

ah, what do you do if you want to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality? but you know that if you do, your life will change forever. what do you do if blowing the whistle might put you in physical danger? or what if blowing the whistle might land you in prison? you try to do it anonymously. sometimes that works. the whistleblowers who brought us the panama papers, for example, are still unknown, but others who tried to remain anonymous like drone whistleblower daniel hale and se whistleblower reality winner had their anonymity compromise, and they both ended up in prison. and john korea, you're watching the whistleblowers. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 blowing the whistle on waste fraud abuse, illegality,

or threats to the public health or public safety is something that every country should celebrate. many countries have some sort of whistleblower protection law even in national security. but those laws are rarely enforced fairly or equally. sometimes they're ignored altogether, and sometimes national security trumps whistle blowing. even when the whistleblower is exposing a crime, were joined by an attorney who is not only a hero to national security whistleblowers here in the united states. but she's a whistleblower herself. she tried to remain anonymous and she was out it, and her life has never been the same. welcome to show just one re deck. thank you john. jesse, you were a senior attorney at the u. s. department of justice working in legal ethics. your job was to make sure that the justice department's attorneys acted within the law and within the guidelines of professional responsibility. but then the september 11th attacks occurred and many people in government decided that day that the rules would go out the window. you were not one of those people. soon after those attacks,

you found yourself involved in the case of john walker lynde, who became known as the american taliban. and it was soon after that that you became a whistleblower. tell us how that happened. it happened because i was in the ethics offer some part of my job was to give advice to attorneys prospectively. and that included not just attorneys, but f b i. agents on the ground and we got the news that they captured a terrorist. and that he happened to be american. so, commensurate with any advice that would give anyone in that situation, i said that they should mirandize him. and that apparently at that point their picture circulating around the world of him being tortured of him naked, blindfolded, bound, gagged. and, and held in basically a coffin, and i advised that we don't torture people and that those images are unacceptable.

and certainly any information they obtain as a result of him being kept in, that kind of captivity would not be in miscible in court. so that was the advice i gave. i gave that in writing. put 10. i got a call back. that was on a friday. i got a call back on monday saying hoops. well, you know, we went ahead and, oh, boy interrogated him. anyway. what do we do now? and i explained, you know, not to worry. you can still use that information for national security and intelligence gathering purposes, but not for criminal prosecution. then they shortly thereafter used it for exactly that to criminally. prosecute him that you i

found out about inadvertently when i learned that there was a discovery order for all internal justice department correspondence related. ready to john walker lind. so i went to check the file because back then we had paper files. and the advice i had given was missing from the file, right? i happen to be apparently more computer savvy than some of my superior. so i went and called tech support and was able to go through the computer archives the internet at this point. we're talking 2000. 1 is a new thing that's right. especially for the government, which is behind the 8 ball lawn technology. so i was able to resurrect the missing email and provided to my boss. and i said, i don't know why this was not turned over in discovery,

but here it is. and then what happened? because you ended up, you ended up being in touch with quite a prominent journalist, and that's really where your problems began. that's correct. basically, when i learned that the document had still not been turned over to the court, i ended up resigning and i took home a copy of the document in case it disappeared from the file again. and when the government was continuing to pursue this case, and it was evident that this information had not been turned over consistent with brady and cleo obligations. i ended up sharing it with a member of the press. i tried to do so anonymously. i think most are so blurry, blew the whistle anonymously. it's not about them. they want people to focus on what they're blowing the whistle on, not on them. unfortunately,

because it was the beginning of the internet edge. while newsweek sheltered my name from the print edition, my name appeared in the digital version. and that was the beginning of the unleashing of one of the 1st criminal leak investigations of modern time. when you were outed as the source, in this case, your life changed. you were forced to leave a job that you loved many of your colleagues and friends turned against you and you had trouble finding work here you were a renowned attorney. you had graduated from brown in yale universities to the top schools in the world. and you were having trouble finding a job. you finally found one at a large law firm in washington, dc. but it didn't last long. what happened there? at that point, the government contacted my private 3rd party employer and told them that they just hired a criminal. so i have not been charged with anything i have not received the subject

or target letter. my so i, the law firm of course, knew that i would have a claim against them if they just fired me, especially for being a whistleblower. so they put me on unpaid administrative leave, which left me kind of hanging in limbo for a number of months. and in the meantime, i had to lawyer up and get a criminal defense attorney, an employment attorney, and a constitutional law attorney. my gosh. and then follow continued, actually you had trouble when you traveled internationally. complaints against you were lodged with the local bar association, but you ended up taking the bull by the horns and you went to work with the government accountability project as their director of national security, representing whistleblowers and national security. in fact, i'm proud to say that you were one of my attorneys, and you represented also an essay whistleblower tom drake and even ed snowdon,

what made you decide to take on the national security establishment? my experience of how i was treated as a whistleblower. i thought if they can come down with the full force of the entire executive branch on a public servant who had been a public servant for a long time because they were just doing their child up and trying to do it. honestly, it made me, i didn't know what it was. so blower was i had the same reaction. most whistleblowers do when my attorney said, you're a whistleblower. so no, i'm not. i was just trying to do my job, right. but after what i went through the fact that the government ended up putting me under a criminal investigation and referring me to the state bars and literally started a whisper campaign in my law firm, which ended up somehow following me even to my own synagogue. i realized how draconian the government can be, how, how brutal and underhanded,

but also completely over the top. i was a mom. i had 2 young kids. i was pregnant during part of this ordeal. i mean, it's no public servant, no human period to serve criminal defendants often have more rights than whistleblowers and they never charged with a crime if they entered for charged me with the crime. and in fact, the bar complaints, it took 12 years before those charges were finally dismissed by the bar. but it was a cloud. it's just right of damocles hanging over your head to have to tell any potential employer. yeah, i've been referred to the bar, but based on a secret report that i've never seen and don't have access to, you know, had something called the whistleblower and source protection group. it's a part of expose facts. tell us about the kind of work that you do there. we represent national security and intelligence whistleblower hers mainly

blowing the whistle on human rights violations. so that can include the gamut of torture, secret surveillance drone killings. and that's been an entire kind of boutique that we have focused on. we want to protect disclosure that are in the public interests. and unfortunately, a trend that started during your era of using the espionage actually just an incredibly draconian law to go after whistleblowers has unfortunately become normalized and been used primarily on whistleblowers from f b i the c i c i a and say that the power house agencies that run this country's most significant program and in fact sentences have been getting noticeably longer. have they not?

they have they have reality winners. sentence of about 5 years was twice, twice the, the normal 2 and a half years that people had been, had been given. and daniel hale, even, his sentence of 45 months. i mean that was for one count, one count under the espionage act. so the sentences, i mean that's part of the reason they use the espionage act because it is so punitive and one count can carry, you know, 10 years. so we're going to talk about daniel hale again in a minute. but before we get a break, i wanted to ask you one other question. one of the things that i've noticed that they've been doing with whistleblowers is putting them in higher and higher security prisons. stephen kim, the state department whistleblower was in a minimum security work camp. i was in a low security prison, but daniel hale is in a maximum security penitentiary. is that just just because they can,

is that just to make the time that people like daniel hale are serving as difficult as possible. it is unclear why daniel hell is and a communications management unit because there are only 2 in the country and they were created to house terrorists. and daniel had no prior criminal history. he was not convicted or charged with an act of terrorism. it is unclear. ah, how or why he ended up there? ah, but it was alarming certainly to assess his attorney's because his judge had recommended a specific prison on that would have been much lower security and where he could have gotten that therapy that he needed. right. it's not just that he drives over to prison and turns on the t v and makes himself comfortable. he was do

a psychological counseling, drug and alcohol counseling, which would have shortened his sentence. thank you. jacelyn rate act, but don't go away. we're going to continue our conversation with jazlyn reed at right after the short rates stay to. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ah, i in the year of 1954, the united states of america engaged in warfare against the people of vietnam. the white house supported the corrupt puppet government of southern vietnam. in 1965

americans began their invasion following the aim to defeat the forces of vietnamese patriots. the pentagon was confident that the victory would be on the american side due to its military superiority. however, the vietnamese turned this war into a total hell for the occupants. unable to cope with guerrillas, the american army started blanket bombing alongside using chemical weapons and napalm which burnt all alive. the village of my lay wearing 1969 american soldiers killed 504 civilians, including 210 children, became a tragic symbol of this war. all in all, during the whole period of this conflict, the usa dropped on vietnam more than $6000000.00 tons of bombs, which is 2 and a half times as much as on germany during the 2nd world war. in 973,

the american army under the pressure of the rebels, withdrew from vietnam. and only 2 years later did the puppet regime in saigon fall . however, the vietnamese paid a high price for their freedom. more than 1000000 vietnamese people became the victims of american aggressors. ah, almost one here into the conflict. no major western leader is called for talks to bring peace to ukraine and europe instead were witness the dangerous escalation. the great tank debate has settled. will it be fighter jets next? where does this have? no one else. so think ra went, oh please. just don't hold me yet to see how does the become the advocate an engagement equals the trail. when so

many find themselves worlds apart, we choose to look so common ground. ah, got them back to the whistleblowers rejoined once again by esteemed whistleblower attorney jeslane read at jesse. it seems like we've seen so many whistleblowers who have wanted to remain anonymous who have tried to remain anonymous, but their identities invariably are revealed and the consequences have been drastic for many of them. the f b i whistle blower, terry all. barry, for example, received 4 years in prison. drone whistleblower daniel hale. we mentioned a moment ago received 3 years and 9 months. an essay whistleblower reality winner received more than 5 years in prison. ca whistleblower joshua shulty faces as much as 80 years in prison. is there a safe way to blow the whistle?

can somebody in national security do it without being caught? and then being sent to prison? it's incredibly difficult even when you go through proper channels. a lot of the people you mentioned did try to go through channels at one level or another. but even with successful whistleblowers, even like the white house was so blower on trump, they still went through the proper channels and still got tangled up in internal channels. i mean, is there a safe way in theory? there is in practice. there are a lot more ways to leak these days. but there are a lot more ways to get caught. and whistle blowers are not. you're not assume to be expert at spy craft and keeping your contact with the reporter secret that's really incumbent upon journalists, especially the ones that hold themselves out as being all about source protection

and basic mistakes were made in number. the cases you mentioned, whether the journalists was just being careless or whether there was a snafu in the way a document got transmitted. it's very easy to get caught these days. it's almost like we're back to the days of meeting in the underground parking garage where you meet in person paying cash, you know, and try to do it very out of the sight of cameras, but their cameras everywhere, including and parking lot. it's true and an ongoing seem to, especially with national security whistleblowers is that identifying information is almost always embedded in documents. so if you work for one of the national security agencies and you print a document, your name and your personnel number are embedded somewhere on that document in a period in the door of an eye. and so if the document finds its way to the media, and then the media sends it back to the agency to ask about whether or not it's

a legitimate document. you've just, how did yourself or the journalist has out to you, right? that's correct. a lot of people have been caught basically by metal of data. so not the actual document itself, but something like you said, a marking on the document, a watermark, something that imperceptible to most people like in reality, winters case. instead of showing a xerox copy of a document to the government, they showed the actual document. so they could immediately identify where she, they are for space where she said occurred and immediately it, it was a bright red arrow pointing to her jeff sterling. that was another case based on meta data. i think it's easy now, it's very hard not to leave digital footprints even when you're using encryption. i

would advise any whistleblower to use signal or to get well versed in encryption. but what you can expect a whistleblower to, to have to be well versed in security protocol to be able to get the truth out. and you've reason important point to people asked me all the time. should i be using signal? should i be using what's up or viber? i've always been told that signal is the best, but signals not perfect either tom drake. the say was the blower told me recently that even with signal they can intercept the message before you hit send. they can intercept it as you're typing it because it's not yet encrypted, it only becomes encrypted when you send, when you hit that send button, that's exactly right. the end points are dangerous points. it may and again, it's people think that it's the content of messages that ends up basically pointing a finger at the whistleblower. but it's not,

it's the who's sending it who's receiving it. and when that's, that is getting people convicted, not the content of what they're actually saying, just we've seen whistleblowers in banking or in the legal profession who have been able to maintain their anonymity. i mentioned the panama papers whistleblower earlier in the show. they were very careful where they sent their information. the outlets involved protected their identities, but that hasn't been the case for national security whistleblowers. why do you think that is our counter intelligence agencies really? that good? i think in panama papers, other cases that have more been international dimension, it's probably easier because to not be living in a surveillance state, which if the united states has been trending again, people are being caught on metadata is some, it would be impossible for me to take the metro and come here without leaving a huge trail of metadata with buying a ticket. taking the exact train that i took care walking with the camera on every

corner. so it's easier to get caught if you're in surveillance state that has so much monitoring going on. i think also traditionally people who are in the banking arena, including in the u. s. they have protections under dodd frank and the sharp ins oxley act and the false claims act and a whole bunch of other protections that national security and intelligence whistleblowers do not have. in this country, there is a specific, carved out for national security and intelligence employees. so not only, i mean they, they have a statement in the i c, w, p, a saying that they're protected, but there's no enforcement mechanism, right? so you can blow the whistle, but then when the government retaliates against you and comes down on, you will like a ton of bricks. you have no recourse. there is nothing you can do. and in fact,

they will now prosecute you. whereas before, you may have gotten an administrative risk slap or fired, or even blackballed from the industry, now you will go to jail. when i was at the ca, i sat next to a woman who was having an affair with someone working for cnn, who had been a senior officer. and in the course of pillow talk, she revealed some classified information to him. he used that classified information in his commentary on the or on cnn, and sure enough, the office of security did an investigation. they immediately figured out that it was her, but they didn't arrest her. they didn't charge her with espionage. what they did is they suspended her without pay for 6 weeks. they put a letter in her personnel file and she was ineligible for promotion for, for a year. and that was it. now if that were to take place today, she would be charged with espionage and would be looking at at least 5 years in

prison. that's correct. and then there are whole, there's a whole range of other subtle but career killing retaliatory mechanisms like taking away people, security clearances. so even if they're still free walking around, they can't find a job in the profession. they've been trained in because they can't get a security clearance renewed. so there are the subtle ways and there is no way to contest that there is no way to say you're mistaken. this person is not a security risk. what they blew the whistle on was validated by congress and they still can't get your security clear if you're exactly right. you mentioned metadata a moment ago. one of the things that i fear and tell me if this is a legitimate fear is that when the government or individual companies private companies like the big information companies, apple in google, and yahoo and whatnot. when they collect this metadata,

they have the capacity to save it forever. is that correct? and then the f, b, i or the cia are and if they can, go back and draw this information whenever it suits them. that's my understanding. i mean that was an issue with the data retention facility in utah. bill benny had talked about apple. i know you has actually pushed back and said you need a warrant if you want to. but then when, if the government can get a warrant, they will turn over the data. other companies like facebook and twitter, i am not sure the current policy that they have in place in terms of when they will turn over data or not. but i think people do not give it a 2nd thought when they're entering all their personal information willy nilly into facebook. you're making the government's case for them. it doesn't matter if you don't think you're doing anything wrong or, you know, i'm not doing anything wrong. they wouldn't be interested in me,

but it's awfully easy as you know, to construct a circumstantial case around things that actually were meant to be us. i actually said those words, they wouldn't be interested in me and they were very interested in me. you know, one of the questions that i'm asked very frequently is if i would do anything differently, if i were to blow the whistle again and my answer is the same every time the answers, yes. what i would do differently is to hire an attorney before blowing the whistle . that was a mistake that i made because i was forced to be reactive rather than proactive. what advice would you give whistleblowers considering blowing the whistle? yeah, i would. that's exactly what i would tell them, talk to an attorney ahead of time so they can safely walk you through these land mines. also, you need to make a consider determination about whether or not to tell your family what you're doing and how much to tell them. i had not told my family at the time because i wanted them to have plausible deniability that they didn't know i was blowing the whistle

. but at the same time that can end up causing a rif twins from the way you have f, b, i. agents working on your case. so there are a number of considerations i think it's always wise to talk to an attorney. unfortunately, 90 percent of people come in my door. you know, are they come in after the fact after they blow the whistle and they are being retaliated? so yep, that is exactly what my situation was. that's how you and i met her. that's all we have for you today. thanks. we're a guest just with reed act. i'm john here. yahoo and this has been the whistleblowers. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 blue

ah, just do this for you, melissa and his vote. spare manipulators or not, but miss lucy little. what calling showed mister vondik for the dodger nook was laquia and read it to actually still single course rush them. yeah. them for you daniel. is doing, you know, it's in that many. each was marty. was to someone took which is 70 middle kenesaw police went us last. so that was done the kid to mozilla. you georgia, i'm was your head in your theater yet? no more. so been a glove and a seamless dolly grace of do not seem to glower because you'll be blacked dyslexia dice didn't want to watch and loud, screwed up while you'll be put it down that you're not on that on the nice that i would show you that you know, nice easy to learn a swing, wishing cargo, or slip,

or better to talk, the old squad or he's mark low, but us, we're used to work with headlines right now. here we're not the international local authority, say russian troops up in circle, the ukrainian health city of art trouble is going to donate square public. just a day off, the russian soldiers cut off a major supply route for the ukrainian military, a twitter account alleging us bio labs and ukraine goes viral after being reinstated by the platform. it does support numerous claims on the issue by the russian ministry of defense packer stollins, national currency plummets to a historic low against the us dollar. the i m f, the bonds, the removal of exchange rate control.