[000:00:00;00] ah, [000:00:00;00] a to see out becomes the advocate an engagement, it was the trail. when so many find themselves worlds apart, we choose to look for common ground. at this hour, american and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to

disarm iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from great danger. with food and medicine, supplies, and freedom with almost one year into the conflict. no major western leader is called for talks to bring peace to ukraine and europe. instead, we are witnessing dangerous escalation. the great tank debate has settled. will it be fighter jets next?

where does this n 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 an essay whistleblower reality winner had their anonymity compromise, and they both ended up in prison. and john kerry aku you're watching the whistleblowers. 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 whistle blower 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, we're 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 outed, and her life has never been the same. welcome to the show jazlyn 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 that 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 lind, 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 office and 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. they had 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. but then i got a call back. that was on a friday, i got a call back on monday saying oops, 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 have 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 provide it 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 gig cleo obligations. i ended up sharing it with a member of the press. i tried to do so anonymously. i think this was so blurs blow the whistle anonymously because 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 shield to 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 and 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 had just hired a criminal. so i had not been charged with anything. i had not received the subject

or target letter. my so i, the law firm of course, knew that i would have a claimant can submit, 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, i 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 job 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 pars 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, it, in no public servant, no human period to serve criminal defendants often have more rights than whistleblowers. and they never charged you with a crime. they had him 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 random. 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, his that are in the public interest. and unfortunately, a trend that started during your era of using the espionage act, right. 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. ready countries most significant programs 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 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 hill are serving as difficult as possible. it is unclear why daniel hill is in communications management unit because there are only 2 in the country, and they were created to house terrace. and daniel had no prior criminal history. he was not convicted or charged with an active terrorism. it is unclear how or why he ended up there, but it was alarming, certainly to assess his attorneys because his judge had recommended a specific prison that would have been much lower security and where he could've gotten that therapy that he needed. right. it's not just that he drives over to prison and turns on the tv and makes himself comfortable. he was do

psychological counseling, drug and alcohol counseling, which would have shortened his sentence. thank you. just lin rate ac. but don't go away. we're going to continue our conversation with gentlemen react right after this short break. stay tuned. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ah, ah, nice to come to russian state to little. never tied us on the moslem scheme, devastation american house house, nuns and maybe we could fill in 50000 disabilities on any 2000 speedy. one else was going to about this evening. we will van in the european union the kremlin miguel machine, the state aunt, rush up to date and split or

t spoke next. even our video agency roughly all band on youtube with electricity with with . 2 what them back to the whistleblowers rejoined once again by esteemed whistleblower attorney jeslane rate act. 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 bery, 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 whistle 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 week these days, but there are

a lot more ways to get caught. and whistleblowers 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 journalist, especially the ones that hold themselves out as being all about source protection and basic mistakes were made in number. the cases he 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 theme q, 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 the 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 coded yourself or the journalist has audi due, right? that's correct. a lot of people have been caught basically by meta data. so not the actual document itself, but something like you said, a marking on the document, a watermark and something that imperceptible to most people. like in reality, winners 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 the,

they are for space where she this it 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 ask 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 signal is not perfect either tom drake, the n s a was a 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 the dangerous points. it may and again, if 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 what 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 agency is 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 sarbanes 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 car 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 to see a, 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. yes,

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 or n s a 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. but then if the government can get a warrant, they will turn over the data. other kind of 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. and 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 rift when suddenly you have f b i. agents working on your case. so there are a number of considerations i think it's always was to talk to an attorney. unfortunately, 90 percent of people come in my door, you know, or they come in after the fact after they blew the whistle and they are being retaliated. yep, that is exactly what my situation was. that's how you and i met. that's all we have for you today. thanks to our guests. jeff lynn rate act. i'm john curiosity and

this has been the whistleblowers. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ah, ah, do this for you? my little genius, hope trammel and nickelodeon no,

but miss lucy more that all. what clothes showed mister vondik, the dodger. nick was laquia and read it to actually so center course rush. yeah, them for you, daniel, is doing in your us in that many smart also somewhat like which it says image, ocr. nice to probably spend us last with on the kid to look so lock the doors. yeah. i'm with your head in your see a chair. yeah. no more, so been a glove and a seamless dolly boys do not see to glower because you'll be blacked. it's lucky. i still didn't want to watch them loud enough where you'll be put the at them that you're not on that on. if not said, i would just do that, you know, nice easy to learn a link wishing cargo slip will get to choose who top deals squatter is mark for. but as the way it is almost one year into the conflict. no major western leader is called for talks to

bring peace to ukraine and europe. instead, we're witnessing dangerous escalation. the great tank debate has settled. will it be fighter jets net? where does this n a oh, local authority say russian troops sub in circle the ukrainian health city of r kimmel. in that then yet script public. it comes just a day after brushes, military cut off a major supply route for a key, ebs forces or stories at this hour. the i m f predicts that russian, that called me, will grow in 2023. that's that spike western leaders declaring sanctions imposed on multiple will bring the nation to it needs a stunning claim from