I'm changing the course of this diary, which had been on the Supreme Court's bold ruling on GPS tracking requiring a warrant because, as the first commenter pointed out, he had already written about this.
BUT WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF CONTROL OF INFORMATION, John Kiriakou, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer gained the dubious distinction of being the SIXTH person charged in the Obama administration's record-breaking war on whistleblowers.
Worse, in Kiriakou's case, the Obama Justice Department appears to be covering crimes of the Bush administration - namely, the Cheney-beloved practice of waterboarding, something Attorney General Holder himself agreed was torture.
Hypocrisy alert: Obama gave a pass to all the CIA officers who committed torture. Reality alert: You are more in danger of criminal charges under Obama if you blew the whistle on waterboarding than if you actually waterboarded someone. (Obviously, exposing torture is a protected disclosure).
The Obama administration makes good spin out of selective leaks of supposedly "highly-classified information" when Obama wants to grab unprecedented levels of executive power (i.e. refusal release the secret Justice Department memo authorizing the assassination of an American citizen without due process, while leaking talking points to the front page of the New York Times) or when Obama wants to cover his own posterior (i.e. the minute-by-minute play-by-play of the glorified killing of Osama bin Laden in The New Yorker and coming soon to a theater - I mean movie, not political - near you).
Obama already covered up the Bush Administration's secret surveillance (see, the Espionage Act case against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake case), but now the Obama Justice Department is using the policy of prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act to cover up the Bush Administration's other cardinal sin: torture. This is not the Obama I campaigned for, contributed to, and voted for.
Some of the things giving me the jitters about Obama's most recent power grab:
(1) There is a competent prosecutor. Patrick Fitzgerald, who I actually respect, is prosecuting this case.
(2) The complaint against Kiriakou is brought under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 793(d), which prohibits mishandling of national defense information by a person in "lawful having possession of" the information. Apparently the Justice Department realized Espionage Act cases under section 793(e) - mishandling of information the defendant has "unauthorized possession of" are proving problematic, (i.e. Daniel Ellsburg, Drake, Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, and Bradley Manning, etc.) Kiriakou is accused of mishandling information the government is saying he possessed legitimately.
(3) Despite the spectacular collapse of the Drake case and imminent implosion of the Sterling case, Obama is still on a mission to silence whistleblowers. And, most disturbingly, the Drake and Kiriakou cases are about two of the most controversial policies emanating from the Bush administration: secret surveillance & torture. Obama is looking forward, not backward for accountability for torture, but has no problem looking back to attack whistleblowers.
Bottom line: This is about sending a message to whistleblowers, anti-democratic control of information, and cover up - none of which are legitimate uses for our criminal justice system or the Espionage Act, which was written to target spies not whistleblowers.