The Trump administration has declared a war on media leaks and called for the U.S. federal workforce and contractors to receive “anti-leak” training. The centerpiece of Trump’s anti-leak campaign, aside from early morning tweet-storms railing against leakers and media, is the National Insider Threat Taskforce.

The Insider Threat Program is not Trump-era creation. In then-secret testimony to Congress in 2012, Directorate of National Intelligence official Robert Litt touted the original Insider Threat Program as a highlight in administrative efforts to “sanction and deter” leaks. In the past, Insider Threat Program training has improperly included “WANTED”-style images of whistleblowers pictured alongside actual spies and mass murderers.

Leading progressive organizations hope to turn the reform of government surveillance programs into a litmus test for 2020 presidential candidates.

In a letter to congressional Democrats, 34 groups, led by the digital rights-focused Demand Progress Action, demand new protections for civil liberties in the reauthorization of a key surveillance law. The groups favor allowing the expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the federal government to search the electronic communications of Americans without a warrant.

Chelsea Manning never ended up lecturing at Harvard University after loud objections from the Central Intelligence Agency. But late Monday afternoon, the day she was supposed to begin her fellowship, Manning did talk about surveillance, tech, and social repression down the street—at the similarly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For someone who enlisted in the Army at a young age and spent most of her adult life in prison, seeing the prevalence of domestic surveillance and the militarization of policing is “like I’m walking out into the most boring dystopian novel I can imagine,” she told The Daily Beast shortly after her talk. “It feels like American cities, certain parts of them, are occupied by an American force, the police department.”

Because he just formed a new whistleblower group with John Napier Tye, there as been renewed interest in allegations an FBI Agent made during the Jeffrey Sterling case about attorney Mark Zaid. But there was actually a second detail regarding Zaid released just after the trial that has not been publicly reported: Zaid was interviewed by the FBI, twice, and was even interviewed before Sterling himself was.

I asked Zaid whether he was obligated to do the FBI interviews on Twitter but got no response. I think it’s possible FBI asked to interview him as much because the Senate Intelligence Committee was refusing to cooperate in the investigation as anything else; at the time, FBI considered SSCI staffer Bill Duhnke a more likely suspect than Sterling (and it’s not clear they ever ruled him out).

The FISC has twice found that certain Section 702 collection violated the Fourth Amendment. In 2011 the
government revealed that as part of its “upstream” Section 702 collection it collected non-targeted, entirely domestic
communications. When NSA violated the rules that were supposed to make this collection legal, FISC again deemed
the practice “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

For almost 12 years, both under Section 702 and other programs before it, NSA was always engaging in or retaining
some kind of electronic surveillance the FISC would go on to deem unauthorized, and NSA would only fix the
problem when threatened with criminal sanctions.

Harvard University on Friday revoked whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s invitation to be a “visiting fellow” following former CIA deputy director and torture proponent Mike Morell’s resignation in protest of the hiring and CIA director Mike Pompeo’s refusal to accept a speaking invitation at the school.

The smug pronouncements from the CIA crowd were stunning in their hypocrisy. Morell, in a letter he released to all major media outlets following his resignation, said, “I cannot be part of an organization — the Kennedy School — that honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information, Ms. Chelsea Manning, by inviting her to be a Visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Ms. Manning was found guilty of 17 serious crimes, including six counts of espionage, for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks, an entity that CIA Director Mike Pompeo says operates like an adversarial foreign intelligence service.”

The Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School revoked an invitation for United States military whistleblower Chelsea Manning to serve as a visiting fellow after intense pressure from the CIA.

According to the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper, “high-ranking current and former CIA officials” convinced the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government to reverse course.

A fired White House correspondent gave the FBI a thumb drive of internal communications and sat for a two-hour interview this month related to whether the Sputnik news outlet is illegally spreading propaganda without disclosure under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Some press freedom advocates say Americans should be concerned regardless of whether the meeting between journalist Andrew Feinberg, an FBI agent and a Justice Department attorney turns out to be related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s role in the 2016 election.

Bill Binney resigned from the NSA in October 2001, after 30 years with the agency where he was viewed as one of their best analysts: he quit because he believed that Bush-appointed leaders in the Agency had chosen to respond to the challenge of electronic communications by building out illegal, indiscriminate mass-surveillance programs that left the country vulnerable to terrorists while diverting billions to private contractors with political connections.

After his resignation, Binney and his fellow whistleblowers faced retaliation from the NSA, as the agency prevented him from getting work as a private intelligence contractor and eventually staged a guns-drawn dawn raid on his home.

The Nation

A letter from dissenting members of VIPS, a reply from VIPS, and the results of our independent review.

Editor’s note, 9/1/2017: For more than 150 years, The Nation has been committed to fearless, independent journalism. We have a long history of seeking alternative views and taking unpopular stances. We believe it is important to challenge questionable conventional wisdom and to foster debate—not police it. Focusing on unreported or inadequately reported issues of major importance and raising questions that are not being asked have always been a central part of our work.