Snowden adviser: Hillary "either out of touch, or lying" about US protections for whistleblowers

[truedelphi]

15. Maybe Candidate-for-President Clinton should ask Mr Thomas Drake how the

Whistleblower protection thing-ee plays out:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/11/us-usa-security-nsa-drake-idUSBRE95A12X20130611

From the Reuters article above:
Thomas Drake is one of the few people who understands from personal experience what the future may hold for Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former NSA contractor who exposed the U.S. government's top secret phone and Internet surveillance programs.

His advice for Snowden: "Be lawyered up to the max and find a place where it's going to be that much more difficult for the United States to make arrangements for his return," Drake said. "And always check six, as we said when I used to be a flyer in the Air Force. Always make sure you know what's behind you."

Drake, a 56-year-old former intelligence official at the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act in 2010 for allegedly revealing classified information about the agency's sweeping warrantless wire-tapping program. The government later dropped all but a misdemeanor charge. "For me this is a déjà vu," Drake said, adding that Snowden's previous comfortable life was over.

"When you offer up information about the dark side of the surveillance state, they don't take too kindly to it," he said. "They want to stay in the shadows."

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Mr Drake was one American who has been indicted for leaking secrets, and then investigated, re-investigated and re-re-investigated because the FBI thought that he was the source of a leak that resulted in a newspaper article.

Although it turned out that Drake was not the source of that leak, the way he finally was allowed to make the matter go away was to plead guilty to some lesser charge, and then and only then did he get his life back.

Of course, by the time that his life was "his" again, his career was pretty much destroyed.

You would think that Ms Clinton, who watched the Powers that Be go after her husband when he wouldn't give them their dirty little war in Iraq, you think she would be wiser as to what can be done, and what is actually done, to individuals in the name of taking down individuals who overstep their supposed boundaries.
(Her husband Bill Clinton brushed off the neo cons when they asked for a war against the people of Iraq, and less than six weeks later, his affair with Lewinsky was Number One Story on the airwaves 24/7.)