All Things Whistleblower: A GAP Blog

More on Pasdar

An article from today’s Washington Post details how the federal government can use telecoms to spy on Americans and gather remarkable amounts of private information.

The article is based largely on the disclosures of GAP client Babak Pasdar, a computer expert who discovered a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" at a major telecommunications company’s facility in 2003 which provided the federal government unfettered access to all customer mobile phone communications - all calls, emails, text messages, internet use, videos, billing, location - with no record of what was taken.

Pasdar’s disclosures are credited with persuading the House of Representatives to not grant immunity to telecoms involved with the warrantless wiretapping and illegal domestic spying scandal.

GAP Legal Director Tom Devine has written an op-ed centering on Pasdar’s disclosures, which has run in many newspapers throughout the country.

-- Dylan Blaylock

Ridenhour Awards

Yesterday at the National Press Club, the fifth annual Ridenhour Awards & Luncheon took place. The Ridenhour Awards seek to recognize and encourage those who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society. GAP is a strategic partner in producing the event, and a past winner of the Truth-Telling prize is Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz.

The awards are named in honor of Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour, who famously wrote a letter to Congress and the Pentagon describing the My Lai Massacre. Ridenhour later became a very respected investigative journalist before his death in 1998. Awards this year were handed out as follows (from the Ridenhour Awards Web site):

Bill Moyers is awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Courage Prize in recognition of his fierce embrace of the public interest and his advocacy of media pluralism, and for contributing an unyielding moral voice to our national discourse.

James D. Scurlock is awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Book Prize honoring an outstanding work of social significance from the prior publishing year. Scurlock’s book, Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit is a disturbing account of America’s unsustainable relationship with debt, revealing the vulnerability of the average person to the predatory and unethical lending methods of banks and credit card companies.

Matthew Diaz has been awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. Diaz is a former JAG officer who, while stationed at Guantánamo Bay, was the first person to release the names of the prisoners at the detention camp. In early January 2005, on the last night of his tour, he mailed a list—with the names and corresponding serial numbers of the 551 prisoners—in a Valentine’s Day card to a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Diaz hoped that his actions would help lawyers file habeas corpus petitions on the prisoners’ behalf.

-- Dylan Blaylock

Big Airline Safety Hearing Today

In the latest piece of an ongoing story, two FAA whistleblowers stated that supervisors ignored their reports that Southwest Airlines tried to hide its maintenance problems. Furthermore, the inspector-whistleblowers claim that Southwest tried to have them specifically removed from reviewing the company’s planes.

In what should be a highly charged and watched event, both Southwest’s Chairman and CEO will testify today at a hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee about this entire scandal. This story broke a few weeks ago, when it was revealed that Southwest had flown passengers on planes (for up to 30 months) that did not have mandatory, routine safety checks for some equipment performed.

You can watch the hearing starting at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on the committee’s Web site here.

-- Dylan Blaylock 

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals’ Authority

The Legal Times (free subscription on its Web site) published an excellent article detailing a rare victory for a whistleblower in February at the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, the only one which handles federal whistleblower claims, has only found for whistleblowers three (out of 186) times since late 1994.

The whistleblower in this case is former U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers, who was fired in 2004 for blowing the whistle on a lack of staffing and funding resources which threatened park security. 

-- Dylan Blaylock

CDC Officials Act Against Public Health Alert

In House testimony, a top government toxicologist exposed that, early on, he alerted CDC superiors that displaced Hurricane Katrina victims living in trailers faced severe health risks from formaldehyde exposure. Unfortunately, the scientist was first ignored, then told not to write email messages about his concerns. From the AP:

As a result, tens of thousands of families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita remained in the trailers without full knowledge of the risks, according to [the whistleblower].

Just this past February, the CDC finally admitted formaldehyde levels in trailers were five times “higher than in most model homes.” Long-term exposure to formaldehyde can cause serious breathing problems, and may cause cancer.

-- Dylan Blaylock

Voting Machine Fraud?

A former technician at an electronic voting machine company has alleged that the company, Hart InterCivic, lied to federal election officials “about the accuracy, testing, reliability and security of its voting machines.” From Wired News:

The whistleblower says the company did so because it was eager to obtain some of the approximately $4 billion in federal funds that Congress allocated to states in 2002 to purchase new voting equipment under the Help America Vote Act (aka HAVA).

The whistleblower filed a qui tam lawsuit last year, which remained sealed until last week, when the feds decided they wouldn’t join the litigation.

-- Dylan Blaylock

Gayl Update

In news related to the Franz Gayl case, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Ma.) wrote a heavily critical letter to Gen. James Conway, who told a Senate committee last month that Marine Corps commanders requested Humvees instead of MRAPs in February 2005. Kennedy wrote Conway that he “misrepresented” the requests, which did call for MRAPs. Kennedy wrote that Conway’s assertions are “contradicted by the request itself.”

Gayl, a civilian Marine Corps official, authored a study showing that the deaths or injuries of hundreds of Marines in Iraq could have been avoided if military officials had granted the 2005 MRAP request. MRAPs are vehicles designed to withstand attacks from improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

-- Dylan Blaylock

GAP Client’s Affidavit Affects Immunity Vote

An ABC News story details how the disclosures of a GAP client to key House officials last week helped lead to the stopping of an agreement to grant telecommunication companies retroactive immunity as part of the highly-debated warrantless wiretapping/national security bill. From the article:

Late last week, conventional wisdom said that the House wouldn't stand firm against an effort by big telecommunications companies and the Bush administration to forgive the telcos for any violations of law they committed while assisting with a top secret domestic surveillance program.

But that apparently changed after the whistle-blower group Government Accountability Project made public the assertion by security expert Babak Pasdar that he had once discovered a high-speed data line that may have been a part of a domestic spying program.

These allegations prompted the House officials to write a “Dear Colleagues” letter last week outlining the client’s allegations to other members of Congress. GAP and a coalition of groups sent a letter to all members of Congress yesterday urging them to review our client’s (Babak Pasdar) affidavit before voting on the bill (which debate is scheduled for today). The letter summarized concerns laid out in the affidavit:

“An unnamed major wireless telecommunications carrier may have given the government unmonitored access to data communications from that company’s mobile devices, including e-mail, text messages, and Internet use… [T]he line was configured so that the carrier could have no record of what information had been transmitted. Of equal concern was his allegation that there was no security to protect this line -- an unheard of vulnerability in a carrier environment.”

You can find GAP’s talking points about the affidavit here.

-- Dylan Blaylock

The Franz Gayl Case

A few weeks ago, the Associated Press broke news with the case of GAP client Franz Gayl, a civilian Marine Corps official who wrote a study indicating that the deaths or injuries of hundreds of Marines in Iraq could have been avoided if military officials had granted a 2005 request for MRAPs - vehicles designed to withstand attacks from improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Now, this AP article details how the Marine Corps has asked the Inspector General of the Pentagon to investigate allegations stemming from the report.

Additionally, as this USA Today piece shows, the Marine Corps have also ordered Gayl to stop working the report in question.

-- Dylan Blaylock

In Wake of Aguirre Case; S.E.C. Inspector General Promises Changes

Stemming from the case of GAP client Gary Aguirre, the new Inspector General at the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) has promised that future internal investigations of agency fraud or abuse will be handled credibly.

Aguirre was an S.E.C. staff attorney who was fired three years ago after protesting that his S.E.C. superiors were hindering his effort to subpoena John Mack, now the CEO of Morgan Stanley, in an insider trading investigation of hedge fund Pequot Capital Management.

S.E.C. Inspector General David Kotz pledged to restore the integrity of his office in a letter to Sen. Charles Grassley. An August report from the Senate Finance Committee, summarizing the findings of a year-long investigation into Aguirre’s case, details a laundry list of wrongdoing on the part of S.E.C. officials, stating not only that Aguirre was wrongfully retaliated against, but that the S.E.C. basically botched the investigation.   

-- Dylan Blaylock