NEW YORK, June 4 (RIA Novosti) – Campaigners for greater transparency in the US launched a whistleblowing website on Wednesday designed to help government employees and others release classified information in secret.
ExposeFacts.org was launched in Washington by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a campaign group, featuring a submission system called “SecureDrop”. It comes in the wake of revelations of widespread US government eavesdropping by a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden.
“Our purpose is to illuminate concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war,” the institute’s director, Norman Solomon, told RIA Novosti.
“We are standing up for a free press, privacy, transparency and due process as we seek to reveal official information — whether governmental or corporate — that the public has a right to know.”
The group employs five journalists and features a 50-member board of whistle-blowers, journalists and former government officials. It includes Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who released the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers in 1971.
“As someone who served four different administrations, two Republican and two Democrat, I can say that when officials are assured that they will not be held accountable for their decision-making or for their choices or for their arguments or their considerations, even very intelligent men and women are capable of making crazy policies – stupid, disastrous – as we saw in Vietnam, and in Iraq, and right now on the subject of the climate,” Ellsberg said in a video message.
