Edward Snowden has called for a complete overhaul of US whistleblower protections after a new source from deep inside the Pentagon came forward with a startling account of how the system became a trap for those seeking to expose wrongdoing.

The account of John Crane, a former senior Pentagon investigator, appears to undermine Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other major establishment figures who argue that there were established routes for Snowden other than leaking to the media.

Crane, a longtime assistant inspector general at the Pentagon, has accused his old office of retaliating against a major surveillance whistleblower, Thomas Drake, in an episode that helps explain Snowdens 2013 National Security Agency disclosures. Not only did Pentagon officials provide Drakes name to criminal investigators, Crane told the Guardian, they destroyed documents relevant to his defence.

Snowden, responding to Cranes revelations, said he had tried to raise his concerns with colleagues, supervisors and lawyers and been told by all of them: Youre playing with fire.

He told the Guardian: We need iron-clad, enforceable protections for whistleblowers, and we need a public record of success stories. Protect the people who go to members of Congress with oversight roles, and if their efforts lead to a positive change in policy recognize them for their efforts. There are no incentives for people to stand up against an agency on the wrong side of the law today, and thats got to change.

Snowden continued: The sad reality of todays policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least youve got a chance.

Thomas Drakes legal ordeal ruined him financially and ended in 2011 with all serious accusations against him dropped. His case served as a prologue to Snowdens. Now Cranes account has led to a new investigation at the US justice department into whistleblower retaliation at the Pentagon that may serve as an epilogue one Crane hopes will make the Pentagon a safe place for insiders to expose wrongdoing and illegality.

If we have situations where we have whistleblowers investigated because theyre whistleblowers to the inspector generals office, that will simply shut down the whole whistleblower system, Crane told the Guardian.

Crane, who has not previously given interviews, has told his explosive story in a new book, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing In The Age of Snowden by Mark Hertsgaard, from which the Guardian is running extracts. The Guardian has partnered with Der Spiegel and Newsweek Japan on Cranes story.

When someone becomes a whistleblower, theyre making a serious, conscious decision, Crane said.

Theyre making a decision that can change their lives, change their futures, impact family life, too. There needs to be this certain unbreakable trust. Confidentiality is that trust and that cant ever be violated.

Snowden cited Drakes case as a reason for his lack of faith in the governments official whistleblower channels.

When I was at NSA, everybody knew that for anything more serious than workplace harassment, going through the official process was a career-ender at best. Its part of the culture, Snowden told the Guardian.

If your boss in the mailroom lies on his timesheets, the IG might look into it. But if youre Thomas Drake, and you find out the president of the United States ordered the warrantless wiretapping of everyone in the country, whats the IG going to do? Theyre going to flush it, and you with it.

While Drakes case is well known in US national security circles, its internal history is not.

In 2002, Drake and NSA colleagues contacted the Pentagon inspector general to blow the whistle on an expensive and poorly performing tool, Trailblazer, for mass-data analysis. Crane, head of the offices whistleblower unit, assigned investigators. For over two years, with Drake as a major source, they acquired thousands of pages of documents, classified and unclassified, and prepared a lengthy secret report in December 2004 criticizing Trailblazer, eventually helping to kill the program. As far as Crane was concerned, the whistleblower system was working.

But after an aspect of the NSAs warrantless mass surveillance leaked to the New York Times, Drake himself came under investigation and eventually indictment. Drake was suspected of hoarding documentation exactly what inspector-general investigators tell their whistleblowers to do.

They made it clear to keep [documents] wherever possible, and obviously properly handle anything that was classified, Drake remembered.

Crane feared that his own colleagues had told the FBI about Drake. He suspected the Pentagon inspector generals lead attorney, Henry Shelley, whom Crane said had earlier suggested working with the justice department about the leak, had done so. A confrontation yielded what Crane considered to be evasions.

The top lawyer would not reveal to me whether or not Drakes confidentiality had been compromised or not. That was a concern Normally I expect direct answers, Crane said.

When Drakes attorneys sought potentially exculpatory information from the inspector generals office, they learned that much of it had been destroyed before the defendant was charged, pursuant to a standard document destruction policy, according to a 2011 letter from prosecutors.

Crane was livid. All relevant regulations mandated keeping the documents, not destroying them. But a high-ranking colleague, Lynne Halbrooks, prevented Crane from investigating the document destruction. He suspected Shelley and Halbrooks of sacrificing a whistleblower and misleading the justice department and a federal judge, all in a case centering around the cover-up of NSA bulk surveillance.

Cranes relationship with his superiors spiraled downward until they forced him out in 2013, months before Snowdens revelations. The next year, he filed a complaint with a federal agency that works with whistleblowers, the Office of Special Counsel. In March this year, it found a substantial likelihood that the Pentagon inspector generals office improperly destroyed the Drake documents and arranged, with Pentagon consent, for the justice department inspector general to investigate.

Shelley, still the Pentagon inspector generals senior counsel, declined to answer questions but said he was certain my name will be cleared by the new investigation.

Halbrooks, the Office of Special Counsel and the justice department inspector general declined to comment for this story.

Bridget Serchak, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon inspector general, noted that her office and the Office of Special Counsel jointly requested the justice department investigation.

It is important to point out that there has been no determination on the allegations, and it is unfair to characterize the allegations otherwise at this point. DoD OIG will cooperate fully with the DoJ OIGs investigation of this matter and looks forward to the results of that investigation, Serchak said.

Crane considers this latest inquiry a bellwether for whether the whistleblower system can reform itself in a post-Snowden era.

Snowden responded to the way Drake was handled. The Office of Special Council investigation regarding destruction of possibly exculpatory documents regarding Drake might be the end of this saga, Crane said.

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If you think that your phone may have been hacked so that your adversaries can watch you through the cameras and listen through the mics, one way to solve the problem is to remove the cameras and microphones, and only use the phone with a headset that you unplug when it's not in use.

In this video for Vice, Edward Snowden demonstrates how to remove the surface-mount mic and camera components from your phone's logic board to render it blind and deaf except when you connect external sensors to it.

On tomorrows episode of Vice, the man himself shows correspondent Shane Smith how to make a smartphone go black by removing the cameras and microphones so they cant be used against you. Find out how to do it yourself in the clip above from Vice, which airs tomorrow at 11 p.m. on HBO.

Watch Edward Snowden Teach Vice How to Make a Phone Go Black [Angela Watercutter/Wired]

Lured by the internets pervasive insistence that it represents a superior, more comfortable typing experience, I recently went back to an old-timey mechanical keyboard. This was a mistake. I am now a hamfisted ASCII jazz disaster.

SpareOne Emergency Phone is a basic cellphone powered by AA batteries. This gives it a relatively short time on a charge, but means that it will have a charge after being stuffed in a drawer or glove box for months. I came across this during my search for the perfect basic phone, but be warned: []

Low-cost carrier Easyjet has prototyped Sneakairs, a pair of shoes that have small vibrating motors and Bluetooth links; they work in concert with your mobile phones mapping app, buzzing left or right when its time to turn, and twice if youve gone the wrong way.

Jared Sinclair developed the RSS reader app Unread, whichmade $10,000 in its first 24 hours on the iOS market.And weve all heard the story of Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen, whose creation was reportedly earning $50,000 a day at the height of its 2013 explosion. While those are rare examples, theyre also testament to the []

If you or your companys IT system are besieged by black hat cyber attacks, an ethical hacker might be all that stands between crippling damage and a companys long-term prosperity. Its no wonder that the market for IT security specialists is exploding. Certification is the key so learn the tenets of ethical hacking andget []

Your laptop and mobile devices are top of the lineso why are you trotting out that raggedy decades-old suitcase when you go somewhere? Time to up your travel game with a complete 5-piece Herschel Travel Luggage bundleand well even give it to you for free!Of course, youve got to win the Ultimate Herschel Travel Bundle []

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Edward Snowden performs radical surgery on a phone to make ...

Eric Holder: Snowden did public service by leaking secrets

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Monday, May 30, 2016, 12:37 PM

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder thinks fugitive leaker Edward Snowden actually performed a "public service" when he passed on classified NSA secrets to journalists.

"We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made," Holder told David Axelrod on his CNN-produced podcast "The Axe Files."

Holder, who served as U.S. attorney general from 2009 to 2015 while Snowden was leaking top secret information, nevertheless maintained that the former contractor should face consequences.

"Now I would say that doing what he did and the way he did it was inappropriate and illegal," Holder said, adding that Snowden's actions "harmed American interests."

Oliver Stone reveals secret meetings with Edward Snowden

"I know there are ways in which certain of our agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised," he said.

"I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done," Holder added. "But, I think in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate."

Snowden said earlier this year that he would consider returning to the U.S. if he was granted a fair trial for his crimes.

After sparking global outrage in 2013 when he first began leaking classified information to journalists about the U.S. government's previously secret eavesdropping powers, the former NSA contractor took off for safer ground and was charged by the U.S. with espionage charges that could land him in prison for up to 30 years.

He first fled to Hong Kong, and then Moscow, where he has was granted permission to remain for at least three years.

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Eric Holder: Snowden did public service by leaking secrets ...

Eric Holder(Photo: Chris Kleponis, epa)

Fugitive former National Security Agency contractorEdward Snowden damaged U.S. interests but also performed a public service when he leaked national security documents in 2013, former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder said Monday.

Holder, in The Axe Filepodcasthosted by Democratic political operativeDavid Axelrod and distributed by CNN, said Snowden's exposure of global surveillance programs, some operated by the NSA,was "inappropriate and illegal." Holder said some agents were put in jeopardy and relationships with other nations were strained.

After Snowden's revelations, federal courts ruled against the NSA's mass collection of American phone records. Congress subsequently passed the USA Freedom Act, which limits the collection of such records.

"We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made," Holder said.

Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong and now lives inRussia, faces two counts of Espionage Act violations and one count of theft. He has said he would return to face those charges if he believed he would get a fair trial and would be allowed to use a "public interest" defense.

USA TODAY

What Edward Snowden thinks about the explosive Panama Papers leak

Holder, the first black U.S. attorney general, served from 2009 to 2015. Hesaid Snowden should come back to face the consequences of his actions.

"Go to trial, try to cut a deal. I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done," Holder said. "ButI think ...a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate."

Snowden did not directly react to Holder's comments. Snowden did, however,retweet Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists to whom he leaked information. Greenwaldposted: "People so often become honest and candid only once they leave government."

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Eric Holder gives props to Edward Snowden - usatoday.com

Edward Snowden.

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder has admitted that whistleblower Edward Snowden performed a "public service" by opening a debate about surveillance. However, speaking to David Axelrod of CNN and Chicago Institute of Politics podcast The Axe Files, he also said Snowden still needed to face penalties for what he did.

"We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made," he said. In a 2014 interview, he was much more hardline, saying that Snowden would have to plead guilty to even consider coming home.

He added, "He's broken the law in my view. He needs to get lawyers, come on back, and decide, see what he wants to do: Go to trial, try to cut a deal. I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done. But I think in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate." You can listen to the full episode here.

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Eric Holder: Edward Snowden performed a 'public service' - CNET