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Comment by SlowRobotAhead | Hacker News Reader

>I think the administration badly, badly mishandled [whistleblowers]

Yes, but by design. Other than passing lip service towards transparency. The fact is Obama admin actively sought to silence them. I know this isn’t popular because HN won’t want to hear anything bad about Obama, but it’s a fact.

In the seven years of Obama's presidency, the administration launched a record number of cases against those who revealed what the government wanted kept secret. Under Obama, eight whistleblowers have been prosecuted under the World War I-era Espionage Act, more than under all other presidents combined.

Sources abound; pick your favorite.

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Agreed. one of the most illuminating aspects of the Obama administration was the divergence between great tolerance for corporate whistleblowers on the one hand, and animosity toward government whistleblowers on the other.

Also, people cite the "more than any other administration" argument frequently, especially in media, but rarely think to mention the small sample size. nice work!

Yea, there is a special handling of that whole line. More than any other administration - doesn’t seem like much. And the qualifier that we’re talking about 8 makes it seem less important.

However, those 8 people also the qualifier of “combined” where the sum of people charged with espionage until Obama was less than 8 people total, and then he comes in and exceeds that. No one should believe that from 2008-2016 we had some resurgence of traitors to the country. Just people charged as such in most cases for doing the right thing overall.

To put my views into this perspective. Am I glad that Snowden and others leaked information on government programs? Yes.

That said, I think it's amusing when people need to call out "Under president <whomever>'s administration..." as if it makes a point by itself and implies something directly about the president that was named. Let's not pretend here, that's exactly what you were doing. Using this same logic, I hope you blame George W. Bush's administration entirely for the 2008 recession. I want to be clear, I'm not pretending that the sitting president's policy decisions and other influences don't have an effect. But inherited legacy, context, and the surrounding details play a huge role in how these things play out.

First, the people you are talking about (Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden) all have different circumstances surrounding their cases.

Second, they all stepped forward roughly around 2009 and later. Most gathered the information they leaked between 2000 and 2008 working on programs for the CIA and NSA. They all leaked information that wasn't supposed to be leaked. The default in our government is to handle that with punitive measures. If they had stepped forward during any other presidency would the outcome have been the same? Yes.

Third, alluding to some sort of hypocrisy with regards to transparency when talking about intelligence programs initiated by the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc is ironic. Just because an administration wanted to embrace transparency doesn't mean it's fine to free-for-all leak information from those agencies.

> They all leaked information that wasn't supposed to be leaked.

What did Thomas Drake leak that wasn't supposed to be leaked?

> If they had stepped forward during any other presidency would the outcome have been the same? Yes.

Kiriakou in fact stepped forward in December 2007. The Justice Department under Bush did not pursue him, and it was explicitly the Justice Department under the Obama administration that did so.

Similarly, Jeffrey Alexander Sterling was in contact with a journalist during the period 2002--2004 (for a book published in January 2006), but his prosecution was also led by the Obama administration.

> What did Thomas Drake leak that wasn't supposed to be leaked?

He leaked information classified as "secret". Additionally he leaked unclassified information of which some of it was classified as "Unclassified—For Official Use Only" which means it is not supposed to be given to the public and is intended for internal or law enforcement use only.

> Kiriakou in fact stepped forward in December 2007. The Justice Department under Bush did not pursue him, and it was explicitly the Justice Department under the Obama administration that did so.

I'm not going to disagree here. For whatever reason, the CIA brought this case back in 2012 and asked for it to be pursued.

>Similarly, Jeffrey Alexander Sterling was in contact with a journalist during the period 2002--2004 (for a book published in January 2006), but his prosecution was also led by the Obama administration.

The Bush administration sent (the journalist) James Risen a subpoena on January 24, 2008. The leak investigation surrounding Sterling didn't come to a culmination until 2010. The investigation started in 2003, under Bush.

>[all had difference scenarios and different times]

Yet all were charged by the Obama Admin, for something people largely agree with and in most scenarios exposed government breaking the laws they themselves set.

As to your argument it doesn’t count because Obama didn’t put the cuffs on them himself - no, it was only Holder and Lynch who did the actual work, who directly reported to and were appointed by Obama himself.

I wonder if you would apply the same “AG autonomy” to decisions Sessions or Barr have made where those don’t reflect or implicate direction from Trump?

I'll quote myself, "I'm not pretending that the sitting president's policy decisions and other influences don't have an effect. But inherited legacy, context, and the surrounding details play a huge role in how these things play out."

The point being, there are often things initiated by past presidents that come to a head within the time the sitting president is in office. How the situations that arise are handled absolutely reflects on the sitting administration. But people who ignore the history and legacy surrounding those situations because it feels good to take a shot at an administration that has a letter after it (be it R or D) that a person doesn't identify with is overly simplistic.

There were a lot of things the Obama administration did that I do not agree with. Specifically, the use of drone strikes, how the ACA was handled (albeit a lot of players were involved), continuing revolving door policies, and more.

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