Most intelligence workers denied whistleblower protection

Little of the coverage about NSA contract employee Edward Snowden's leak has focused on the area of whistleblower protection. Snowden is, of course, the now-famous Booz Allen employee who told The Guardian newspaper about the vast, and possibly overreaching, American surveillance apparatus. A recent In These Times article revealed an important difference between protections available to federal employees and those available to contract employees, like Snowden, who wish to report perceived wrongdoings.

In 2012, the Whistleblower’s Protection Enhancement Act codified and expanded  protection for disclosures of government wrongdoing. For instance, the law closed loopholes in protection that court cases has eliminated, and it specified that “any disclosure of gross waste or mismanagement, fraud, abuse, or illegal activity may be protected.”

This even includes federal workers with access to high-security material. “While federal workers employed in intelligence gathering have less whistleblower protections than other federal workers,” Mike Elk wrote in In These Times, “they are still able to raise their complaints with the Inspector General of the agency employing them or with members of Congress sitting on the Intelligence Committees.”

But, Angela Canterbury, director of policy at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), told Elk that, “Intelligence community contractors have been shut out of all of the recent reforms.”

And, as In These Times noted:

“Not only do intelligence contract employees have fewer whistleblowing protections, but the private corporations that employ them also have fewer legal restrictions when it comes to electronically monitoring and surveilling employees.”

We’ve already known about underpaid and dispensable contract workers, but the Snowden case shines a light of the very precarious position of top secret workers. The Wall Street Journal said that about one-third of the 1.4 million people with top secret clearances are contractors – yet paid for by you and me.

In the case of Edward Snowden, his employer, Booz Allen, gets virtually all its $5.76 billion annual revenue from the U.S. treasury, and many of its employees do jobs that federal workers once did. But without security – even the right to report misconduct.

The federal government continues to contract out so many functions of high-security programs such as nuclear, aerospace, intelligence gathering and armed force. But oversight – particularly of the workforce – is weak or lacking entirely. At Speed Matters we believe at the very least, if we’re paying for these services then we want workers to have the same whistleblower protection as do their government counterparts. It’s our safety – and privacy – that’s at stake.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations (The Guardian, Jun. 9, 2013)

Snowden Leak Highlights Few Whistleblower Protections for Intelligence Contract Employees (In These Times, Jun. 11, 2013)

Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act Summary of Reforms (Project on Government Oversight, Sep. 17, 2012)

Contractor Says He Is Source of NSA Leak (Wall Street Journal, Jun. 10, 2013)