An update on the subject of this thread:
Government Executive:
Three House members take up TSA whistleblower’s cause
March 28, 2012
A short quote:
One of the government’s longest-running whistleblower controversies recently took a new twist when three House Democrats successfully filed a friend of the court brief with the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the 2003 firing of an air marshal who gave a television news reporter what his agency said was “sensitive security information.”
Robert MacLean was a civil aviation security specialist working for the Transportation Security Administration in 2003 when he was briefed about possible new terrorist threats from al Qaeda. Soon after, he and fellow air marshals were informed via unencrypted messages on their cellphones that their cross-country and international overnight missions on the at-risk flights were being canceled.
and
Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, which filed MacLean’s appeal, told Government Executive his team went to court over “one of whistleblowers’ core principles, that statutory rights prevail over agency rules.”
During the first 30 years of statutory whistleblower rights, MacLean’s “termination would have been crudely illegal,” Devine wrote in a recent blog post. “Federal workers have the right to directly warn the public about government actions threatening public health and safety, unless the information is classified or its release specifically prohibited by congressional statute.” In MacLean’s case, he wrote, MSPB “erased that basic premise and now an agency can cancel WPA free speech rights by banning public disclosures about its own misconduct.”
Devine said the stakes in the case are “unsurpassed by any whistleblower dispute of recent years -- not just for whistleblower decisions, but for public safety as well.”