Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced that the FBI has formed a new team focused on investigating potential leaks to the press. During a press conference on Friday, Sessions said that leak investigations have tripled since President Donald Trump took office. Civil liberties groups criticized Sessions's remarks. Ben Wizner of the ACLU said, "A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole." We speak with John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who exposed the Bush-era torture program and became the only official jailed in connection with it.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/8/formerly_jailed_cia_whistleblower_john_kiriakou

Kiriakou went to prison after he publicly disclosed that the CIA used waterboarding in interrogations. He wrote about his experience in the new book “Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison.”

Kiriakou was an intelligence operative for the CIA for 14 years, from 1990 to 2004. After the World Trade Center attack of Sept. 11, 2001, he was involved in the capture of the third-highest ranking leader of al-Qaida in Pakistan. He blew the whistle on CIA torture in 2007 in an interview with ABC News.

After that, while working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he ran into trouble because of an interview with a New York Times reporter in which he revealed the name of a former non-covert CIA agent who talked about his job on social media. The disclosure led to Kiriakou’s prosecution in 2012 for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a 1982 amendment to the National Security Act of 1947—a prosecution seen as payback for his admission to ABC that the United States waterboarded prisoners.

Kiriakou served more than two years behind bars. He was released in 2015 and now is working to reform the security state in America.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/qa_with_john_kiriakou_ask_the_cia_whistleblower_a_question_20170718

JOHN KIRIAKOU KNOWS a lot about leaking classified information. He went to prison for it.

A former CIA agent who said too much about the Bush-era torture program, he’s also the first CIA leaker to go to jail for his trouble. Kiriakou served just under two years in federal prison, though before the Department of Justice offered a plea deal, it seemed more likely he’d serve as many as 45.

History has frowned on the “enhanced interrogation techniques” Kiriakou helped expose, but he’s still a controversial guy. Leakers usually are. They operate in gray areas. Kiriakou isn’t a cheering squad for loose-lipped aides and intelligence agents everywhere, but does see whistleblowing as essential. He’s critical of the way the CIA (and the White House, and the Department of Justice) deal with leakers, but holds national security sacrosanct. He’s got beef with President Trump, and with former President Obama as well.

So how does the intelligence community’s current predicament—from the Vault 7 dump to WikiLeaks generally to their fraught relationship with President Trump—look to a guy like Kiriakou? Basically, a mess. One that could nudge the Trump administration’s “deep state” paranoias closer to reality.

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/cia-whistleblower-talks-vault-7-wikileaks-president-trump/?mbid=social_fb_onsiteshare

On tonight’s Big Picture, Thom talks to former CIA analyst and whistleblower John Kiriakou and journalist James Bamford about the recent Wikileaks dump, known as “Vault 7” and what it reveals about hacking and surveillance techniques used by the CIA.

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy interview, Kiriakou talks about a CIA that has grown ever larger following 9/11. Unchecked by oversight or budgetary constraints, it has, in his experience, metastasized from an analytical organization to a global paramilitary force with its own policy agenda.

He thinks that President Donald Trump makes a big mistake in underestimating the power and reach of the agency. He believes it was responsible for getting rid of Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and that there is more to come about the so-called “Trump dossier” of incriminating material compiled by the Russians.

http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/03/10/cia-vs-donald-trump/