Kinda Lonely

Sometimes, being a lawyer can be a lonely place to be. Unlike some other professions, we have a set of ethics rules that can make it really hard to do our jobs, keep our licenses and look at ourselves in the mirror every morning. Three recent cases brought this home to me.

The first case involved a lawyer in D.C. who took a reprimand a few weeks ago going public when he discovered some really bad conduct. The lawyer, a fellow named Thomas Tamm, worked for the government during the Bush II administration handling secret foreign surveillance wiretap applications. He discovered a secret program called, coincidentally, “The Program,” where the already secret and opaque system was bypassed with super-secret applications signed only by the attorney general, which went only to the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. When he asked colleagues, they told him the program was “probably illegal.” A contact who worked in Congress told him that whistleblowers usually didn’t do too well. The clear message was to close his eyes.