Jesselyn Radack

Jesselyn Radack (born December 12, 1970) is an American national security and human rights attorney known for her defense of whistleblowers, journalists, and hacktivists. She graduated from Brown University and Yale Law School and began her career as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.

She is notable for defending prominent whistleblowers, including National Security Agency whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake, each of whom was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, as well as for her own experience as a whistleblower at the U.S. Department of Justice.

While working at the Justice Department, she disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) committed an ethics violation in their interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban", captured during the United States invasion of Afghanistan, without an attorney present. Radack alleged that the Department of Justice attempted to suppress that information. The Lindh case was the first major terrorism prosecution after 9/11. Her experience is chronicled in her memoir, TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban", and in the documentary Silenced.

Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at ExposeFacts' Whistleblower and Source Protection Program. She has been widely published and quoted regarding whistleblowing, surveillance, Internet freedom and privacy. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the L.A. Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Legal Times, and numerous law journals. She frequently appears in the press, including on the major television networks, NPR, PBS, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC.