Link to UBS Whistleblower Birkenfeld Petition on Change.org

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Mr. Birkenfeld was the UBS banker who blew the whistle to the Feds on abuses of account secrecy by a number of U.S. clients and directed them toward sources of information for many others. UBS AG was forced to pay $780 million in fines and penalties to the U.S., but it seems not before they struck a deal to make sure no one would ever be inclined to blow that particular whistle again. Though the most egregious tax cheats were given probation, Mr. Birkenfeld was given a sentence of almost 3 1/2 years in jail which he started serving in January. He was falsely alleged to have witheld information on his own clients who were culpable, but transcripts of his testimony before a Senate Banking subcommittee shows that this was just not the case. Besides being a glaring injustice, his treatment obviously creates a huge chilling effect on others who are or will be contemplating blowing the whistle on misbehavior at any large bank.

Petition to Grant Clemency to UBS Bank Whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld

See more at the National Whistleblowers Center webpage on Bradley Birkenfeld, and on these videos: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/15/ubs and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5QCN0vqjZE&feature=player_embedded

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1. Update on results of petition

The petition got results, just not the results I was expecting. The eye-opening "60 Minutes" segment interviewing Birkenfeld and his lawyer which had already been scrubbed from the CBS website (deleted w/o a trace from the allegedly full 1/10/2010 episode replay video) was removed from YouTube as well. Sorry but it will no longer play.

My change.org petition, while still available if you know the URL or search for the name "Birkenfeld" is not available to browsers of change.org's "Most Recent" list. Thus no one is not specifically looking for it will find it. Since the responses were sent only to the President's public mail address, I have to assume that the pressure on YouTube to remove the video (it came down 1 hour after I posted it in the petition) and on change.org to bury my petition came from there.