The Whistleblower Protection Act is a United States statute that shields federal government employees who report waste, fraud, or abuse from retaliation by their employers. U.S. whistleblower protection statutes contain a specific exemption that limits protections for disclosures related to national security and intelligence matters.[1]
John Kiriakou has described the law as containing a critical gap: national security employees are exempt from its protections. As Kiriakou explained, employees of agencies such as the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, the DEA, and congressional intelligence oversight committees have no legally protected path to disclose wrongdoing.[2] “If you want to make a revelation, there is no way to make a protected revelation,” Kiriakou said.[3]
Kiriakou noted that employees are officially directed to use their chain of command, but that avenue fails when the chain of command is itself the source of the illegal conduct. The only remaining option — going to the press — exposes the employee to criminal prosecution, financial ruin, and the destruction of their career.[4]
The case of Thomas Drake, a senior official at the NSA, illustrated the dysfunction of existing internal mechanisms. Drake exhausted every formal channel — the NSA inspector general, the general counsel, the Pentagon inspector general, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — before being charged with nine felonies including seven counts of espionage.[5]
Kiriakou has called for a legislative fix that would extend meaningful protections to national security whistleblowers.[4] Kiriakou says he is separately working with the AI Whistleblower Initiative on protections for the growing number of whistleblowers emerging from the AI industry.[6]
The Whistleblower Protection Act itself was written by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa — whom Kiriakou calls the biggest champion of whistleblowers in Congress — but it exempts national security whistleblowers, including employees of the CIA, NSA, NSC, and DIA, from its protections.[7][8] Of the 435 members of the House and 100 senators, Kiriakou says only four can reliably be counted on to protect whistleblowers: Grassley, Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon.[9] He contrasts this with the Obama administration, which he says did nothing legislatively to help whistleblowers and instead actively prosecuted eight national security whistleblowers while in office — versus zero such prosecutions in all of U.S. history before that.[10]
Kiriakou notes that other countries, including Canada, Ireland, Greece, and Zambia, have whistleblower protection laws of their own. In the United States, an employee of an agency like the Department of Agriculture who exposes wrongdoing is protected and celebrated; an employee of the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, or FBI who does the same is likely to go to prison.[11][12]
National security carve-out (News Beat)
John Kiriakou stresses that the Whistleblower Protection Act specifically exempts national-security whistleblowers: report waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to public safety while working for the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, White House or Homeland Security, and “you’re probably going to go to prison” — likely under the Espionage Act.[13][14]