Edward Snowden: hero or traitor? Lawmakers sound off
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Opponents of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data successfully blocked multiple attempts in the Senate early Saturday morning to extend the expiring law that authorizes the program.
The developments, coming in a rare overnight session, leave in doubt the ability of Congress to keep alive the Patriot Act program that many feel is critical to national security but has also alarmed privacy advocates for its sweeping nature.
First, the Senate blocked two separate measures. The first, a House-passed bill that would shift responsibility for holding data from the government to telecommunications companies, while also imposing stricter limitations on how authorities could access the information, failed in a 57-42 vote. The second measure was a two-month extension beyond the current law’s June 1 expiration date, which was voted down 54-45.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who’s also seeking his party’s nomination for President, led the charge against the program, repeatedly objecting to requests from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to extend it by just a few days.
“We have entered into a momentous debate,” said Paul, who said he objected because his request for a guarantee of two amendments on a future bill dealing with the NSA program was denied. “This is a debate about whether a warrant with a single name of a single company can be used to collect all of the phone records of all of the people in our country with a single warrant. Our forefathers would be aghast.”
Later, standing on the floor in the hushed chamber, McConnell made repeated attempts to keep the law alive. The first was to extend the NSA’s authority to June 8, which was objected to by Paul. McConnell’s next attempt was to extend to June 5, which was objected to by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, an ally of Paul on the issue. An attempt by McConnell at a June 3 deadline was denied by Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico. Finally, McConnell requested the program be extended until June 2, just one day after the law is set to expire, and Paul objected again.
Senators, who throughout the week generally thought a short-term extension would eventually be approved, appeared stunned by the swift exchanges between McConnell and the three opponents of the program. Gasps were audible.
An exasperated McConnell then took off his microphone and huddled with his leadership colleagues, searching for what to do next. After a few minutes, he returned to the podium and announced the Senate would adjourn and return to work a week from Sunday and try to find a way to keep the law in existence.
“We’ll be back on Sunday, May 31, one more opportunity to act responsibly to not allow this program to expire,” he said around 1:30 a.m. “This is a high-threat period. We know what’s going on overseas. We know what’s been tried here at home. My colleagues, do we really want this law to expire?”
By the time McConnell spoke, the visitors’ gallery was largely empty. But a small group of people, wearing brightly-colored “Stand with Rand” T-shirts, remained.
McConnell wasn’t the only senator who was frustrated with Paul’s tactics. Some senators privately grumbled about having to stay late as the Memorial Day weekend got underway, and Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill tweeted that the Kentucky senator was using the moment to “grandstand.”
Later Saturday morning, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a likely presidential candidate and a former U.S. attorney, blasted the Senate’s votes, and indirectly referenced Paul in his criticism.
“The Senate’s failure to extend the Patriot Act is a failure of the U.S. government to perform its most important function: protecting its citizens from harm,” Christie said. “This is the unfortunate result of misguided ideologues who have no real world experience in fighting terrorism putting their uninformed beliefs above the safety and security of our citizens. This dysfunction is what we have come to expect from Washington, D.C., but usually it does not have such dangerous and severe consequences.”
But in a fundraising email sent out Saturday morning – entitled “Last night I put NSA spying on life support” – the Kentucky senator trumpeted his actions.
“Fellow conservative,” Paul said in the email, “I stood up to the surveillance state every step of way.”
President Barack Obama has advocated for a renewal of the program, and an administration official told CNN Saturday that the White House’s outreach to the Senate extended “well into the night.” But with no agreement reached, the NSA is beginning to “wind down” the bulk collection program to comply in time with the June 1 sunset date, the official said.
“We have long made known that we would not seek to continue the program if the authorities expire,” the official added.
Photos: Notable leakers and whistle-blowers
THE GUARDIAN, GLENN GREENWALD AND LAURA POITRAS
Former intelligence worker Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source of documents outlining a massive effort by the NSA to track cell phone calls and monitor the e-mail and Internet traffic of virtually all Americans. He says he just wanted the public to know what the government was doing. "Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded," he said. Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia after initially fleeing to Hong Kong. He has been charged with three felony counts, including violations of the U.S. Espionage Act, over the leaks.
Photos: Notable leakers and whistle-blowers
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers in 1971. The top-secret documents revealed that senior American leaders, including three presidents, knew the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire. Further, they showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. Ellsberg surrendered to authorities and was charged as a spy. During his trial, the court learned that President Richard Nixon's administration had embarked on a campaign to discredit Ellsberg, illegally wiretapping him and breaking into his psychiatrist's office. All charges against him were dropped. Since then he has lived a relatively quiet life as a respected author and lecturer.
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CDC/National Archives
Starting in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service studied untreated syphilis in black men who thought they were getting free health care. The patients weren't told of their affliction or sufficiently treated. Peter Buxtun, who worked for the Public Health Service, relayed information about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to a reporter in 1972, which halted the 40-year study. His testimony at congressional hearings led to an overhaul of the Health, Education and Welfare rules concerning work with human subjects. A class-action lawsuit was settled out-of-court for $10 million, with the U.S. government promising free medical care to survivors and their families. Here, participants talk with a study coordinator.
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CBS/Landov
In 2005, retired deputy FBI director Mark Felt revealed himself to be the whistle-blower "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal. He anonymously assisted Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward with many of their stories about the Nixon administration's cover-up after the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The stories sparked a congressional investigation that eventually led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Felt was convicted on unrelated conspiracy charges in 1980 and eventually pardoned by President Ronald Reagan before slipping into obscurity for the next quarter-century. He died in 2008 at age 95.
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GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images/File
Mordechai Vanunu, who worked as a technician at Israel's nuclear research facility, leaked information to a British newspaper and led nuclear arms analysts to conclude that Israel possessed a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its weapons program. An Israeli court convicted Vanunu in 1986 after Israeli intelligence agents captured him in Italy. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Since his release in 2004, he has been arrested on a number of occasions for violating terms of his parole.
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President Ronald Reagan addresses the media in 1987, months after the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair. A secret operation carried out by an American military officer used proceeds from weapons sales to Iran to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua and attempted to secure the release of U.S. hostages held by Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. Mehdi Hashemi, an officer of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, leaked evidence of the deal to a Lebanese newspaper in 1986. Reagan's closest aides maintain he did not fully know, and only reluctantly came to accept, the circumstances of the operation.
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Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Tobacco industry executive Jeffrey Wigand issued a memo to his company in 1992 about his concerns regarding tobacco additives. He was fired in March 1993 and subsequently contacted by "60 Minutes" and persuaded to tell his story on CBS. He claimed that Brown & Williamson knowingly used additives that were carcinogenic and addictive and spent millions covering it up. He also testified in a landmark case in Mississippi that resulted in a $246 billion settlement from the tobacco industry. Wigand has received public recognition for his actions and continues to crusade against Big Tobacco. He was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 1999 film "The Insider."
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
For 10 years, Frederic Whitehurst complained mostly in vain about practices at the FBI's world-renowned crime lab, where he worked. His efforts eventually led to a 1997 investigation that found lab agents produced inaccurate and scientifically flawed testimony in major cases, including the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings. The Justice Department recommended major reforms but also criticized Whitehurst for "overstated and incendiary" allegations. He also faced disciplinary action for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into how some of his allegations were leaked to a magazine. After a yearlong paid suspension he left the bureau in 1998 with a settlement worth more than $1.16 million.
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MIKE THEILER/AFP/Getty Images/File
FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley accused the bureau of hindering efforts to investigate a suspected terrorist that could have disrupted plans for the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. In 2002 she fired off a 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller and flew to Washington to hand-deliver copies to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and meet with committee staffers. The letter accused the bureau of deliberately undermining requests to look into Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the United States of playing a role in the attacks. She testified in front of Congress and the 9/11 Commission about the FBI's mishandling of information. Rowley was selected as one of Time magazine's People of the Year in 2002, along with whistle-blowers Sherron Watkins of Enron and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom.
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Bill Pugliano/Getty Images/File
Sherron Watkins, a former vice president at Enron, sent an anonymous letter to founder Kenneth Lay in 2001 warning him the company had accounting irregularities. The memo eventually reached the public and she later testified before Congress about her concerns and the company's wrongdoings. More than 4,000 Enron employees lost their jobs, and many also lost their life savings, when the energy giant declared bankruptcy in 2001. Investors lost billions of dollars. An investigation in 2002 found that Enron executives reaped millions of dollars from off-the-books partnerships and violated basic rules of accounting and ethics. Many were sentenced to prison for their roles in the Enron scandal.
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Wiley
Cynthia Cooper and her team of auditors uncovered massive fraud at WorldCom in 2002. They found that the long-distance telephone provider had used $3.8 billion in questionable accounting entries to inflate earnings over the past five quarters. By the end of 2003, the total fraud was estimated to be $11 billion. The company filed for bankruptcy protection and five executives ended up in prison. Cooper started her own consulting firm and told her story in the book "Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower."
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John Moore/Getty Images
In 2003, federal air marshal Robert MacLean anonymously tipped off an MSNBC reporter that because of budget concerns, the TSA was temporarily suspending missions that would require marshals to stay in hotels just days after they were briefed about a new "potential plot" to hijack U.S. airliners. The news caused an immediate uproar on Capitol Hill and the TSA retreated, withdrawing the scheduling cuts before they went into effect. MacLean was later investigated and fired for the unauthorized disclosure of "sensitive security information."
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Joe Darby is the whistle-blower behind the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq. He says he asked Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr. for photos from their travels so he could share them with family. Instead, he was given photos of prisoner abuse. Darby eventually alerted the U.S. military command, triggering an investigation and global outrage when the scandal came to light in 2004. Graner was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in the abuse. He was released in 2011 after serving 6½ years of his sentence. The military and members of Darby's own family ostracized him, calling him a traitor. Eventually he and his wife had to enter protective custody.
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LUKE FRAZZA/AFP/Getty Images/File
The New York Times reported in 2005 that in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush authorized the U.S. National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court warrant on people in the United States, including American citizens, suspected of communicating with al Qaeda members overseas. The Bush administration staunchly defended the controversial surveillance program. Russ Tice, an NSA insider, came forward as one of the anonymous sources used by the Times. He said he was concerned about alleged abuses and a lack of oversight. Here, President Bush participates in a conversation about the Patriot Act in Buffalo, New York, in April 2004.
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Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted July 30 of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks, and the counts against him included violations of the Espionage Act. He was found guilty of 20 of the 22 charges but acquitted of the most serious charge -- aiding the enemy. Manning is set to speak in his defense when he takes the stand during the sentencing phase of his court-martial on Wednesday, August 14. He could face up to 90 years in prison if the judge imposes the maximum sentence.