6 Brave Govt. Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act by Obama's Administration

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3. John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for giving journalists the names of two former colleagues who interrogated detainees using harsh practices including waterboarding. Kiriakou became central to the debate surrounding interrogation tactics in 2007 with an interview on ABC News. By then, he had left the CIA and was working at the auditing firm Deloitte. "Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique, and I struggle with it," he said in his ABC interview. He suggested that our country should abandon the technique because "we're Americans and we're better than this."After the interview, Kiriakou was asked to leave Deloitte but became a source for other journalists investigating torture. Over the course of the next year he gave the name of one former colleague to a freelance reporter and gave the name of another former colleague to a reporter for The New York Times. He pleaded guilty in October 2012 to the leak made to the freelancer; the charge related to The New York Times was dropped.

4. Shami K. Leibowitz

Shamai K. Leibowitz, a former FBI Hebrew translator and the grandson of Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, pleaded guilty to leaking classified information before a judge who later said he  did not know exactly what Leibowitz had disclosed — just that it was  a “very, very serious offense.” Leibowitz was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

Leibowitz had leaked 200 pages of transcribed conversations recorded by FBI wiretaps of the Israeli embassy in Washington. They documented discussions embassy officials had with American supporters of Israel and at least one member of Congress — and a discussion among Israeli officials in which they worry that their exchanges might be monitored. The leak was to a blogger, Richard Silverstein, who writes the blog  Tikun Olam promoting peace between Israel and Palestine and monitoring U.S. government overreach. Silverstein burned the transcripts when Leibowitz came under investigation.

In an interview with  The New York Times, Silverstein said that Leibowitz released the transcripts because of Israel’s aggressive attempts to influence public opinion in the U.S., and because Leibowitz worried that Israel would take what he saw as the potentially disastrous step of bombing nuclear facilities Iran. “I should not have done what I did,” Leibowitz said at his sentencing, “and I regret it terribly.”

5. Pfc. Bradley Manning

Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted to leaking 700,000 government documents to  Wikileaks, including videos of air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq in which civilians were killed. Manning said one of the videos, from 2007, was particularly disturbing to him — it showed  American Apache helicopters killing a dozen people in Baghdad, including twoReuters journalists, and then opening fire on a van that arrived to help the victims. Manning noted the “seemingly delightful blood lust” of the airmen.

Manning said in February that  his goal in releasing the materials was to show the public “what happens and why it happens.” “I believed if the public — in particular the American public — had access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

In 2010, while on leave, Manning first tried to leak materials to The Washington Post, but felt the reporter he spoke with was not interested. He then left a message with the ombudsman’s office at The New York Times which was not returned. So he uploaded the files to WikiLeaks. He  was arrested on May 29, 2010; his trial is set for June 3, 2013.