[applause] up next on cspan, former military Analyst Daniel ellsberg is part of a discussion on National Security whistleblowers. Then it is an update from the Supreme Court which today heard a case on whether a Technology Company violates copyright law by letting consumers remotely record and watch local rod castello vision on their computers. Also local broadcast television on their computers. Philip ewing, writing in sending, the u. S. Is Ground Troops to eastern to reassure allies that, as washington resumes its campaign of pressure on russia about the ukraine standoff, 150 soldiers based in italy are headed to each of four countries, poland, estonia. , latvia, and the pentagon says they will be sustained until further notice. Will take weapons and ammunition for infantry exercises and be in place by the end of the week. The press secretary told that to reporters at the pentagon. The companysized units will remain in place for about a month and humans follow until at least the end of the year. That again from politico today. Next, three whistleblowers talk about the challenges whistleblowers face when they ask those with a perceived are violations of law. Participating in the discussion is Daniel Ellsberg and thomas drake. Also hear from a former ethics advisor to the Justice Department who now advises snowden. From the university of southern california, this is two hours 10 minutes. [applause] flayed a leading role in defending snowden is a lawyer. I love having her here because i am all for models of people who dont sell out. And so much of what we teach is selling out. We test people so they will be able to make a lot of money, go on to Great Success and rarely asked the questions what are you going to use these skills for . Excelledis who clearly in the American University system and is and has devoted andlife and went to yale really doing her like work that puts her at risk. Without taking more time, one of you set the stage of why we are here. Thank you, bob. Thek you very much to Annenberg School for communication and journalism in partnership with my organization, the Government Accountability project. The Government Accountability project is the nations leading whistleblower organization. We been around for 35 years and have represented whistleblowers from all segments of the government, as well as private corporations and other entities. 2008, i began the National Security and Human Rights Program which ended up representing people in those communities and i quickly realized that those are the people who have virtually no protection. I think in our country right now, we are at this crossroads. Where the First Amendment is under attack and that implicates both you as journalists and us as whistleblowers. I was a whistleblower before i went to work for gap. A lot of people want to know what a whistleblower is and the government thinks it gets to decide who is a whistleblower. Case,vernment in this often the wrongdoer, does not get to decide who is the whistleblower and who is not. A person becomes a whistleblower by operation of law through , waste, abuse,d illegality, dangers to Public Health and safety. The term weaker is often used synonymously with whistleblower. But these are quite different activities because a leak, for example, when Richard Armitage leak cia undercover operative valerie planes, that served no public or whatsoever. Punishs done surely to ambassador joseph wilson. Handn blowing on the other is done to serve the Public Interest and the publics right to know so when i began this , i was used to representing whistleblowers who often experience retaliation, such as being demoted or transferred to a meaningless position or having their security credentials told. But that has escalated astronomically because, in 2010, thomas drake to the right of me was indicted under the espionage act, one of the most serious charges that you can level against an american. And he became the second person in u. S. History to be indicted for espionage for nonspy related activity since Daniel Ellsberg to my left. The pentagon papers whistleblower who did much of the same thing as another client is doingas snowden today with the help of journalists like yourselves. You play a critical function. Thats why journalists are considered the fourth branch, the Fourth Estate in our government. We, the whistleblowers, are considered to fit considered the fifth estate. We are considered pillars of our as they have been failing over the past decade since 9 11. The united asserts the state secret privilege to shut down these cases. When you have two important branches of government not functioning, you, the press, play a Critical Role even more. That is when we need whistleblowers even more. But since 9 11, the people who are out to expose government, incompetence, ineptitude, and things that embarrassed the government get hammered. But god forbid you should discover disclose government illegality because then the hammer will really following you and you will face being imprisoned for the rest of your life. This is not hyperbole. This is not exaggeration. I just wanted to set the stage and each of us in turn will talk about our own stories and our own role in this war that has been going on in which journalists have been the saving grace for a number of us. And they have also been all too willing to cooperate with the government in other cases. So with that, i will pass it back to bob. I thought you were going to go much longer. I can. What impressed me so much about your own work and you were a whistleblower is when john walker land from marin county, california was caught up with the taliban. I looked at this guys story and picture in the paper and he had been beaten and tortured. Without feeling any sympathy for what was involved in all of this, i taught, if there is a tradition of everyone deserves a Legal Defense and a tradition that due process applies universally, this was the guy that was going to challenge that tradition. About find so amazing your career is that, in the Justice Department, you decided that he deserved legal representation. Why dont you tell us a little bit about that case and how it entered your Justice Department career. I worked at the Justice Department as the ethics advisor. I happened to be on duty the day that i got a call that we had prisoner in first the afghanistan war, John Walker Lindh, quickly dubbed the american taliban. I was told unambiguously that he had a lawyer and the Criminal Division wanted to know about the ethical propriety of interrogating John Walker Lindh without his attorney. My office got that kind of question all the time. That was routine breadandbutter question. And i advise, no, you cannot question and interrogate someone if they are represented by counsel. Meanwhile, there was the famous trophy photo of him, naked, blindfolded, gagged, and with epithets written all over him. Foreshadowed what later happened at abu ghraib. Clearly, this was an individual who was being tortured so i am under a gag order and cannot go into that aspect of it too much. Suffice it to say the fbi ignored my advice, interrogated John Walker Lindh anyway and then wanted to know what to do. So at that point, i said, not to worry, you can see a lot the interrogation and use it for National Security and intelligence purposes but not for criminal prosecution. Which is exactly what the Justice Department turned around and did. Again, i didnt say anything. There is a press Conference Held by the attorney general announcing the charges against ,im and a reporter, one of you asked, hey, it looks like hes being mistreated here. This photo, he looks like hes been tortured. What happened . General saidney that his rights had been scrupulously guarded. I knew it was a lie but i didnt do anything. He had another press conference a few weeks later, john ashcroft. During that press conference, another astute reporter asked i thought he had legal counsel. ,nd the attorney general said if we were aware that he had a lawyer, he would have been provided that lawyer. Again, a complete lie. But i didnt act or do anything. It was the prerogative of the attorney general to say what he wanted to. However, the criminal prosecution continued and i inadvertently learned from the prosecutor that there has been a federal court order for all Justice Department correspondence related to John Walker Lindhs interrogation and he said that he had two of my emails. I was immediately concerned because no one had told me about discoveryorder, which orders go far and wide within the Justice Department. And i knew that i had written way more than two emails. Being a naive 29yearold, i went and checked the hardcopy files because back then we kept everything in analog form as opposed to digital because we barely had the internet in 2001. And when i checked the hardcopy file, my heart sank. There were only a couple of pieces of paper in what has been a inchthick file. I consulted with a colleague of mine who had been with the department for 25 years and he said very matteroffactly this file has been purged. To meas inconceivable because the department was simultaneously prosecuting Arthur Anderson and enron ford district for destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. I wasnt sure what to do but i knew i couldnt be a part of this. Waslled tech support and i able to resurrect more than a dozen of the emails, including the ones that documented the f an the fbi committing ethics violation in the interrogation of John Walker Lindh and i given to my boss and i said i dont know what is going on here but im not going to be a part of this and i resigned. Thought that was the end of this ordeal for me. But the criminal prosecution continued and there was a suppression hearing coming up. The key to John Walker Lindhs case was the validity of the confession he gave during the interrogation i had advised against. And i heard the Justice Department continued to say that they never thought he had a lawyer. Which said to me that the Justice Department didnt turn over the emails. I didnt think they would have the temerity to make a Statement Like that, that he never had a lawyer. I tried to get copies of my email. I had taken a i had taken home a copy in case they disappeared again. I taken them to the judge but i no longer had standing. And this weighed on me a lot because someone might die and face the Death Penalty because i hadnt turn over information or the information i tried to turn over didnt reach the court. I struggled with this. One morning, i saw Michael Isikoff who was with newsweek repeating the party line that he never had counsel and i picked up the phone and call him and said, yes, he did and i have the emails to prove it. I gave the emails to is to cough. He wrote to Michael Isikoff and he wrote an article which quickly settled with John Walker Lindh pleading guilty to two minor and mistreated infractions. I thought my part in this was over. But i didnt realize that by going to the press i was unleashing the full force of the entire executive branch. And when i say that, i mean that i was put under one of the First Federal criminal leak investigations. In reality, there is no such crime as leaking. I was referred to the state bars at which i am licensed as an attorney. And for good measure, i was put on the nofly list. Years in thed many wilderness fighting this, i decided to dedicate the rest of my life to representing whistleblowers. I knew when they would come in and say youll never believe what the government is doing to me. I could look them in the eye and say, yes, i can so i was representing whistleblowers. Usually, the retaliation was getting fired or transferred, demoted, having your security clearance pulled. That kind of thing. But then one day i read about a man named thomas drake, who from everything i could tell by the article had gone through every single internal channel to blow at nsa and was being indicted under the espionage act, which is the most serious charge that can be leveled against an american. Right now, while ive got while i thought toms gaze was a oneoff, it wasnt. It has turned into a brutal war against whistleblowers that , act,e espionage prosecutions more than any president before obama and more than all president s combined against people who are not spies but are accused of mishandling, allegedly, classified information and this implicates journalists because you are in every single indictment in these. Ases let me introduce an old friend, Daniel Ellsberg. He mentioned Daniel Ellsberg as setting the marker for whistleblowing and such cases. He is the most well read person i know and he never gets anything wrong i think when i met you, i thought of u. S. Sort of a conservative originally because you had been not only in favor of the vietnam war, you actually participated. Youve been in the press corps and the marines before that and in the Defense Department and so forth. We were having in our unit in this country over whether this war ahead any sense, whether it was justified and i wrote a pamphlet called how the u. S. Got involved in vietnam and it was based on what i could find in interviews and so forth. Lo and behold, we had the pentagon papers. The pentagon papers settled those debates. Basically, if we think of democracy being based on an informed citizenry, we had no way of knowing what was really going on in our name because it was all classified. But the pentagon had decided to do a study of what this war was all about. And this study, which Daniel Ellsberg revealed, and tony russo, first of people in government and they will tell you all about it, and then to newspapers. It really was a lesson to me and what this is all about, the peoples right to know. Because what this was was nothing more than an honest history. It was writing history. It was information used to make intelligence decisions that ended up being an event causing 3. 5 million indochinese to die as well as over 59,000 american soldiers. So here you have this karen bass. Evelopment there is a Defense Department study that says that what we are being told about this is bogus and this guy releases those documents and now hes considered something of a hero even in establishment circles because they use him to say snowden is the bad guy, ellsberg is the good guy. But i remember at the time when he was on trial at the federal doping in downtown l. A. And it looked like they were going to put him away for a real long time. Not gettingerg was support he was deserved at that time. Material inlot of it that wasnt into the pentagon papers. You had more than they had in many ways about the origins. Quite other hand, you had a bit that was in the pentagon papers. 1965, was it . And went to vietnam in 64 65. The study was published by Robert Hutchins center for the which year did he go out . 1965. But when i delivered my study, there was justice douglas, henry luce, the establishment organization. And this goes to how you. Prove something they told me you are full of it. This couldnt possibly be. And they all have their friends. Was always abate loser because we were not given information to validate. Left like bobhe at that time had been saying when it came out, this is not news to us. This is what we have been saying. To a large extent, that was true but they were not being heard and those who heard them like myself had to ask can this be true . Who are these guys . What do they know they are not insiders . The president saying what the motive wasnt what the aims were, what we were doing. It was so different it was hard to believe. Piece,time i read your which i would not have seen it in vietnam. I was in vietnam in 19th in 1965 to 1967. By that time, i was ready to believe having been there for two years. And i remember thinking, if i had read this before, in 1964 or 1965 when you were working on it, i never would have gone to vietnam. The had i read in 1965, i think my reaction would have been can this be true . What is this . What the pentagon papers showed was that people inside were not saying Something Different from what the radicals were saying. They were saying much the same. They were saying totally differently in the public. In other words, they were lying. They knew they were lying. To some degree, some of them showed particular realism about what was happening in vietnam contrary to the impression they were getting were giving. Were giving. I remember one of the joe pfeiffer cartoons. How could johnson not know this . The answer is he did know it. Us. As just lying to the government is able to keep secrets very well. And the secret they kept was what they were up to, what they thought the complex were, what they thought the costs were pretty much. They were simply lying