LRC finally understands where the libertarian talking up of blackmail gets us:

LRC:

“Other whistleblowers say the same thing. When the former head of the NSA’s digital spying program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, and that the U.S. was quickly becoming a totalitarian state, the Feds tried to scare him into shutting up:

[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.

[Lila: That means the Feds can implicate him…or  you…. in some cooked up wrong-doing, in which they can be prosecutor, judge and jury….and hold all the “evidence” – i.e. emails you didn’t know you wrote, conversations and words torn from their context, phone calls strung together into a circumstantial daisy-chain of the kind that convicted Rajat Gupta]

Other NSA whistleblowers have also been subjected to armed raids and criminal prosecution.”