The July 10, 2014 New York Review of Books has a review by Sue Halpern of four books about the NSA and Edward Snowden [Page 16 ff.].
If you’re not now a fan of Mr. Snowden, you will be after your read the evaluations of him and the NSA in particular.
Reviewer Halpern writes that “the NSA employs as many civilian contractors – 60,000 – as it does agency employees – 30,000 – many of whom hold ‘confidential’ and ‘top secret” security clearances.¹ [Page 16]
¹More than 4.9 million people have some form of government security clearance, and about 1.4 million of those have ‘top secret’ clearance.” [See John Bacon and William M. Welch, Security Clearances Held by Millions of Americans, USA Today, June 10, 2013]
Ms. Halpern then tells readers of how the NSA treats or has treated employees who’ve tried to temper the NSA’s “illegal” activities by disclosing such illegalities to their superiors or government oversight committees:
“ … Thomas Drake, William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Edward Loomis, long-time NSA employees … attempted to raise concerns with their superiors – only to find themselves rebuffed … Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis resigned – and later found themselves the subject of FBI interrogations. Drake, however, stayed on and brought his suspicions to the office of general counsel for the NSA, where he was told: ‘Don’t ask any more questions, Mr. Drake.’ Frustrated, Drake eventually leaked what he knew to a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. The upshot: a home invasion by the FBI, a federal indictment, and the threat of thirty-five years in prison for being in possession of classified documents that, when he obtained them, had not been classified. After years of harassment by the government and Drake’s financial ruin, the case was dropped the night before trial.” [Page 16]
Along with the article in The New Yorker that I noted earlier here, about a researcher who was tormented by the EPA for his concerns about atrazine, Ms. Halpern’s review and the books she was reviewing show just how ruthless and malicious the government can be and is when it comes to keeping its activities – legal and illegal – under wraps.
This goes to the Roswell incident, perhaps, and is the grist of many of Nick Redfern’s books, including his most recent one, Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind, reviewed here a few weeks ago.
Anyone with a sense of hidden reality can see that if there is something important and sometimes not important will be defended extremely by the government and agencies, often outside the law or morality.
RR
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