Change! Obama Website Deletes Promise to Protect Whistleblowers

Two days after the National Security Agency’s PRISM program made headlines, President Obama’s Change.gov campaign website underwent a stealth makeover. The Sunlight Foundation noticed the change after June 8th. That was the last time that this Obama promise and others saw the light of day on on the president’s website.

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

Just like that, Obama no longer promises to protect those who blow the whistle on government misdeeds.

According to Sunlight’s blog:

While the front splash page for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama’s performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov.

According to the Internet Archive, the last time that content (beyond the splash page) was available was June 8th — last month.

Now Change.gov is just a splash page.

The timing of that web scrub is interesting. The at first anonymous leak revealing the NSA’s PRISM program came on June 6, 2013.

Snowden is far from the only so-called whistleblower to come under fire from the Obama administration. The most notorious case of the administration harassing a whistleblower is probably Aurelia Fedenisn, who says the State Department even threatened her kids when she went public about her findings as an inspector general investigating eight serious cases of wrongdoing within the then Hillary Clinton-run department.

h/t Huffington Post