A whistleblower’s Take on America, Thirty Years On

Thirty years ago this week, on October 30, 1996, the New York Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold story on a husband-and-wife CIA analyst team that accused the Agency of hiding the truth about chemical agent exposures among tens of thousands of Persian Gulf War veterans. The decision my wife Robin and I made to tell our story to journalist Phil Shenon was a straightforward one on moral and political grounds: veterans were sick, and their government knew more than it was telling them.

Though I was still in the Army Reserve when the crisis started in August 1990 with Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked attack on Kuwait, I wasn’t mobilized or deployed for the subsequent Operations DESERT SHIELD and DESERT STORM. Instead, I worked it from my post at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC)—a story I’ve told in detail in two books, one focused on the Gulf War Syndrome issue and the other a memoir.

The Agency denied everything. Two days after the story ran, its executive director told reporters that “nobody is hiding anything.” Barely five months later, the CIA held a televised news conference to apologize to veterans for failing to share what it knew about chemical weapons at Iraq’s Kamisiyah depot—documents that, the Times reported, “provided dramatic support” to our allegations.

The institutional lies and policy failures I witnessed—and that DESERT STORM veterans paid for with intractable physical and neurological pain and disability—caused many of them to lose any trust in the institutions that were once central to their lives.

And then on September 11, 2001, the entire country was confronted with the lethal consequences of a fresh and dramatic failure of political leadership and institutions.

As I watched al Qaeda’s attacks unfold that morning, two things were immediately clear to me: who was responsible, and that our inevitable response was going to change America and the world. In the years that followed, it became clear that most of the change for the country and the global community was for the worse.

An American president—George W. Bush—unleashed a war against a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 disaster—a needless conflict that killed thousands of American servicemembers and vastly more Iraqis, paved the way for the rise of ISIS, and politically destabilized the entire region to this day.

And in the rush to respond to Osama bin Laden’s murderous assault on us, the Congress foolishly handed still more power to an already too powerful presidency…and allowed a sitting president to assert powers his office did not lawfully possess.

The sweeping, surveillance-centric PATRIOT Act was signed into law less than two months after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. It originally had more than a dozen provisions that were supposed to end—or “sunset,” in legislative lingo—after several years. All but two of those provisions are now permanent law, and some of the most intrusive, like so-called “sneak-and-peek” searches, were never subject to a sunset at all.

For his part, President Bush authorized a secret electronic mass surveillance program, code named STELLAR WIND, that deliberately bypassed federal courts—a direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and a clearly (to me, at least) impeachable offense.

As the so-called “War on Terror” dragged on, the abuses of the PATRIOT Act and STELLAR WIND came to light through whistleblower revelations and occasional Congressional oversight action. But instead of terminating programs that had clearly violated Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, Congress only tinkered with the PATRIOT Act and ultimately made a version of STELLAR WIND ostensibly lawful via the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. In doing so, the people we elected to uphold our constitutional rights instead laid the foundation for an American surveillance dystopia that now monitors our communications, our travel, our buying habits, and our associations with other people, organizations, and causes.

In 1996, it took whistleblowers and a paper trail to force the government to admit what it had done. Today, one piece of that surveillance state operates in plain sight—and that is exactly why it is coming under attack from the citizens it targets.

In cities like Fullerton and Santa Ana in California, as well as in my home area of Fairfax County, Virginia, the revolt against Flock cameras is well underway. Fullerton’s city council has voted to switch its cameras off for six months, Santa Ana’s council has ordered a review of its contracts, and Fairfax County’s supervisors have paused new installations.

In the post‑9/​11 era, no government-funded surveillance technology has energized public opposition like the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) manufactured by Flock and a host of its competitors. It’s easy to understand why.

Most forms of data gathering via government surveillance—whether carried out by agencies using their own technology or simply buying it from data brokers—take place outside of public view. The ALPRs are clearly visible, and citizens know the cameras are spying on them—paid for with their own tax dollars and approved by local leaders who, as Fullerton shows, are beginning to fear real consequences for their pro-mass surveillance political acts.

One thing is clear to this very jaded but ever-optimistic constitutional rights defender. People across this country are taking their disillusionment and anger over one component of out-of-control government surveillance and channeling it into organized political action. They are using their own power to, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “alter their former systems of government” to try to end at least one form of domestic government surveillance.

Thirty years ago, it took two whistleblowers to expose what our government was hiding. This time, citizens can see the problem literally staring them in the face—and they are doing something about it. May the “Flock Revolt” spark many more such liberty-centric changes across the land.