HOPE X (2014): "When Whistleblowers Are Branded as Spies: Edward Snowden, Surveillance, and Espionage" (Download)

Friday, July 18, 2014: 1:00 pm (Manning): When The Guardian and Washington Post published the first stories exposing the National Security Agency's surveillance operations based on revelations from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the world learned that U.S. government officials told a series of misleading half-truths and outright lies to conceal what has become a U.S. surveillance industrial complex. The revelations revealed massive waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, and an equally massive loss of valuable intelligence. In response to the understandable public outrage about their mass surveillance, the NSA chose not to investigate the officials who needlessly and in secret sacrificed the privacy of hundreds of millions of innocent people. Rather, the intelligence community has spent untold resources investigating and attempting to discredit Snowden. It is a predicable response for an institution to focus on the messenger rather than the message. It can be an effective distraction to fo