William Binney, NSA whistleblower, at the Congress on Privacy & Surveillance. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 2013. (Photo: Rama / DoD)A new organization for whistleblowing will launch on Wednesday morning when the ExposeFacts.org website goes live and the group begins its first day with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
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NSA whistleblowers William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe will speak at the news conference along with EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, a member of the ExposeFacts editorial board.
ExposeFacts “aims to shed light on concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war,” the group says — and its website will feature a whistleblower submission system known as “SecureDrop.”
Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official, has been singled out for praise by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who told the Wall Street Journal: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for highlighting how the Intelligence Community punishes reporting abuses within the system.”
Wiebe worked at the NSA for 36 years. Since retiring, both Wiebe and Binney have made several key public disclosures regarding the NSA’s massive surveillance program.
As a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Coleman-Adebayo became a whistleblower when the EPA ignored her complaints about a U.S. company harming the environment and human health in its vanadium mining in South Africa.
Binney, Wiebe and Coleman-Adebayo are on the ExposeFacts advisory board. The first person to become a member of that board was Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, whose video statement in support of ExposeFacts will be released at the news conference.
ExposeFacts will be an ongoing project of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
The June 4 news conference begins at 9:30 a.m. in the Zenger Room of the National Press Club.
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