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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-punished-nsa-whistleblowers
[There] is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well. His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane's failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.
During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake's identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge. The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday May 23 2016, @02:00PM
This story is so ripe for a Godwin moment, but one is already in the article. One of the whistleblowers had a grandfather who faced down Hitler at gunpoint on the Nazi's first attempt to take over.
Lot of these agencies and contractors have this mentality that rules interfere with their missions. Have to break some rules to accomplish anything. That's the sort of argument Oliver North so eloquently advanced during the Iran-Contra scandal. They're right in that there are plenty of stupid rules and restrictions that do hinder the bureaucracies. One example is the CYA penchant for classifying every scrap of information no matter how trivial and obvious as Secret. Further, if as a consequence of obeying all the rules you get next to nothing accomplished, soon you're being accused of laziness, waste, and incompetence. Government bureaucrats are very sensitive to accusations of waste. They know many among the public hate government, look for any excuse to bash them, and that waste is an especially ugly accusation that resonates with everyone, plays right into the longstanding perception and propaganda that government is all thumbs compared to private enterprise.
So, when any whistleblower makes trouble, the management at these bureaucracies feels betrayed and angry at the "stupidity" of the whistleblower for having failed to understand that there are too many rules and some have to be broken. They have already broken plenty of rules, and so in their zeal they will break a lot more to retaliate against, suppress, bury, and otherwise hush up the whistleblower. They feel under the gun as is, with so much public hostility directed their way.
But this is breaking rules they should not have broken. They're in so deep by then that they've lost their perspective, and a few more broken rules hardly matter, even when their rule breaking is now unfairly ruining careers and lives.
Others of course take advantage of this culture to break rules for personal gain. They know they'll have the benefit of the doubt about the rule breaking, know others will hope they're being patriots instead of slimy crooks. The troops may get wind of the situation and respond by slacking off themselves, by, for instance, watching porn all day long rather than doing any work at all. The person who blows the whistle on that kind of crap is a hero, but many in government are still going to try to squash the whistleblower, try to paint the guy as a moronic traitor who just leaked valuable information to enemies of the nation to announce the equivalent of "water flows downhilll!"
The one episode of JAG I saw had as the theme the rule breaking patriot. A military officer was trying to serve his country, but felt he had to break some rules to do so effectively. Someone who didn't have the whole picture of why the rule breaking was being done blew the whistle, and the officer was dragged into court where he protested that "you don't know what you're doing", in other words, that the wheels of justice were about to ruin an effort vital to national security. The end justifies the means.