warrant and the PRISM slides, few of the other documents that Snowden had given Poitras and

20 warrant and the PRISM slides, few of the other documents that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald for publication had little to do with either domestic surveillance or the infringements on the privacy of Americans. By the Lawfare Institute’s count, 32 of Snowden’s leaks to these journalists concerned the NSA’s overseas sources and method, nine identified overseas locations of the NSA’s intelligence bases, 25 of them revealed the identities of foreign officials of interest to US intelligence agencies, 14 of them disclosed information about Internet companies legally cooperating with the NSA, and 19 of them concerned technology products that the NSA had been using or researching. In addition, a considerable number of the published documents did not even belong to the NSA but were copies of reports sent to the NSA by its allies, including the British, Australian, Canadian, French, Norwegian and Israeli intelligence services. For example, he provided journalists with secret documents from the British cyber service GCHQ describing its own plans to obtain a legal warrant to penetrate the Russian computer security firm Kaspersky to expand its “computer network exploitation capability." All the GCHQ was revealing in this document was its own capabilities to monitor a Russian target of interest to it. While the release of these foreign documents may have embarrassed foreign allies of the United States, they exposed no violations of US law by the NSA. It was a legitimate part of the NSA’s job to share information with its allies. This raises the question: what constitutes whistle-blowing? To the general public no doubt, a whistle-blower is simply a person who exposes government misdeeds from inside that government. But in the eyes of the law someone who discloses classified information to an unauthorized person, even as an act of personal conscience, is not exempt from punitive consequences of his act. Indeed, if a person deliberately reveals secret US operations, especially ones that compromise the sources and methods of US intelligence services, he or she may run afoul of American espionage laws. In the past when government employees have disclosed classified information to journalist to redress perceived government misconduct, they almost always received prison sentences, Just during Obama’s presidency, there were six government employees who, as a matter of personal conscience, shared classified information they obtained from the FBI, CIA, State Department and US Army with journalists. They were Shamai Leibowitz in 2010, Chelsea Manning in 2013, John Kiriakou in 2013, Donald Sachtleben in 2013, Stephen Kim in 2014 and Jeffrey Sterling in 2014. Like Snowden, they claimed to be whistle-blowers informing the public of abuses of the government. But since they disclosed classified documents, they were dealt with as law-breakers. All six men were indicted, tried, convicted and received prison sentences. Sterling, a CIA officer who allegedly turned over a document to James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times, was sentenced to 42 months, for example. The most severe sentence was meted out to Private Bradley/Chelsea Manning, who an Army court sentenced to 35 years in a military stockade. The prison time that others received did not go unnoticed by Snowden. He had been following the Manning case since 2012. In fact, he posted about it shortly before he began stealing far more HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020172