There was unanimous agreement among the nation’s top security and intelligence managers on Tuesday over the need for Congress to extend whistleblower protections to spies-for-hire.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) used her time during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on cybersecurity to pitch legislation she introduced earlier his year that would shield contractors in the intelligence community from prosecution or retaliation for revealing waste, fraud, and abuse.
An intelligence authorization bill last year afforded these protections exclusively to government employees working in spy agencies.
“One of the challenges we have in government is this divide between the contractors and government employees,” Sen. McCaskill said to the committee’s panel of witnesses, which included Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA chief Adm. Michael Rogers, and Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work.
“I can’t think of a good policy reason that we would give whistleblower protections to employees and not to contractors,” she added.
Sen. McCaskill noted that Defense Department contractors were recently given whistleblower protections, and that she was “not aware of any classified or sensitive information that’s made its way to a damaging place as a result of these protections.”
Director Clapper told the Senator that “absolutely” he supports bringing intelligence contractors into the fold of those protected for making conscientious internal disclosures. He added that his office has already published an internal intelligence community directive that “includes whistleblower protections for contractors.”
“After all,” Clapper noted, “that was the source of our big problem here with Mr. Snowden who was a contractor.”
Deputy Secretary Work echoed Clapper’s support, as did NSA Director Rogers who reminded Senators that he was speaking as “the head of an intelligence agency.”
Sen. McCaskill’s legislation was introduced in March, and would protect disclosures made by contractors to supervisors within their chain of command, the department inspector general, or the Government Accountability Office. It would not protect any kind of disclosures to members of the press.
