Just over three decades later, Justice Department attorney Thomas Tamm became a key source for The New York Times by revealing then-President George W. Bush’s Stellar Wind electronic mass surveillance program, which violated the Fourth Amendment’s individualized, particularized warrant requirement for such surveillance.
During the Iraq War, then-Army soldier Chelsea Manning, upon discovering evidence of US Army war crimes, provided the relevant data to Wikileaks, which released it globally.
Edward Snowden, who likewise released data revealing illegal US government mass surveillance on its own citizens in 2013, remains under indictment and living in exile after he exposed the breadth of National Security Agency electronic spying on Americans, to the chagrin of intelligence officials, who have attacked the revelations for causing damage to American counter-terrorism efforts even as they have provided relatively few details.
Pyle, Tamm and Snowden revealed unconstitutional US government surveillance targeting its own citizens. Ellsberg and Manning revealed evidence of U.S. government war crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, respectively.
Taken together, those episodes highlighted how the US government, as a pattern and practice spanning decades, routinely misuses the classification system to hide waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement and even criminal conduct. At the same time, federal whistleblower protection laws in the national security arena are a bad joke.
We don’t yet know the full motivation behind Teixeira’s alleged actions, but as The New York Times noted, the charging documents so far don’t suggest motivations like ideological conviction or providing information to the public that typically propel whistleblowers.
Carlson got one thing right, though. The real truth tellers of Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden were prosecuted by their own government for revealing actual U.S. government misconduct. (Tamm managed to escape actual prosecution but was censured and almost lost his law license as a result of his whistleblowing.)
In contrast, Teixeira is rightly being prosecuted for leaks of battlefield intelligence gleaned from critical and perishable sources, leaks that his young friends and fellow videogame aficionados said were designed to impress their shared Discord group as much as inform them. The consequences of his childish alleged act may well cost many Ukrainians their lives.
As The New York Times noted, “The [Russian] military apparatus is so deeply compromised, the documents suggest, that American intelligence has been able to obtain daily real-time warnings on the timing of Moscow’s strikes and even its specific targets.”
Teixiera’s alleged actions all but ensure those sources will dry up, degrading the ability of the U.S. to offer such warnings to protect Ukraine in advance of attacks and increasing the likelihood that Ukrainian soldiers and civilians will die as a result. In contrast and to this very day, U.S. officials can point to no actual deaths of any individual from Manning’s disclosures despite their warnings to the contrary.
The claims by the likes of Greene and Carlson that Teixeira is an actual whistleblower or a speaker of truth to power loathed by the Washington establishment are as silly as they are pernicious. Such falsehoods and bogus claims diminish the real good done by true federal whistleblowers.