E. Snowden: Whistleblowing is an act of political resistance
“I’ve waited 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg said to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate affinity, both of us knowing what it meant to risk so much—and to change so much irrevocably—by revealing hidden truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is that you live with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, in the same offices, in the same unit, throughout the organization, who see what you saw and silently comply, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths, but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being they sought to protect and the diminution of the democracy that would justify that sacrifice.
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to see other citizens break that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. Chelsea Manning provided logs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Cablegate material to WikiLeaks in 2010. I was exposed in 2013. Now it’s 2016, and another person, with courage and conscience, has made available the remarkable set of documents published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published on October 15 in The Drone Papers.)
We are witnessing a compression of the active period within which bad policies can take refuge in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before being exposed by acts of conscience. And this compression of time has significance beyond the headlines. It allows the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record, but in a way that allows for immediate action through voting—in other words, in a way that empowers informed citizens to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are supposed to protect. Seeing individuals who are capable of revealing information gives me hope that we will not have to forever stop the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, rooting out official illegality as frequently as we mow the lawn. (Interestingly enough, some have begun to describe remote assassination operations as "mowing the lawn.")
A single act of whistleblowing does not change the reality that there are significant parts of government that operate below the waterline, beneath public visibility. These secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who carry out these actions must now live in fear that if they engage in activities that go against the spirit of society – even if a citizen acts as a catalyst to stop the machine of injustice – they could be held accountable. The thread on which good governance hangs is equality before the law, because the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he might be found against them.
The hope lies beyond, when we move from remarkable acts of disclosure to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Then we will have taken a substantial step toward solving a problem that has been around for as long as our government.
Not all leaks are alike, nor are their perpetrators. General David Petraeus, for example, provided his illicit mistress and favored biographer with information so secret that it defied classification, including the names of secret agents and the president’s private thoughts on strategic matters. Petraeus was not prosecuted for a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but instead was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. If a low-ranking active-duty soldier had taken a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend simply to secure a smile, he would be facing decades of prison, not a bunch of character citations from the Deep State elite.
There are authorized leaks as well as authorized disclosures. It is rare for senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak the name of a CIA employee in retaliation against her husband, as appears to have been the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by without a senior official disclosing protected information that is beneficial to partisan political efforts but clearly “detrimental to national security” under our legal definitions.
This dynamic can be clearly seen in the story of the “disastrous teleconference” involving al-Qaeda, in which intelligence officials, perhaps seeking to exaggerate the terrorist threat and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, released to a neoconservative website extremely detailed accounts of specific intercepted conversations, including the locations of the participants and the exact content of the discussions. If the officials’ claims are to be believed, they irrevocably burned an excellent means of learning the precise plans and intentions of the terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a news cycle. Not a single person appears to have been disciplined as a result of the story that cost us the ability to listen to the alleged al-Qaeda hotline.
If harmfulness and authorization make no difference, what explains the distinction between permissible and impermissible disclosure?
The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it cannot be seen as a threat, as a challenge to institutionalized privileges. But if all the disparate elements of the institution – not just its head, but its hands and feet, every part of its body – are to be considered equally powerful in discussing matters of concern, that poses an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, especially if we are talking about revelations of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, illegal activities. If you cannot guarantee that only you can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the sum of all the unspoken secrets in the world – including your own – begins to look more like a hindrance than an asset.
Truly unauthorized disclosures are necessarily an act of resistance – when they are not simply for press consumption, to boost the public profile or reputation of an institution. However, that does not mean that they all come from the lower working class. Sometimes the people who come forward happen to be near the top of power. Ellsberg was at the top. He was briefing the Secretary of Defense. You can't go much higher unless you're the Secretary of Defense, and there's simply no incentive for someone so high up in the public interest to get involved in disclosures, because that person already has the influence to change policy immediately.
At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a low-ranking soldier who was much closer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was in the middle of my career. I was sitting at the table with the CIA's chief intelligence officer, and I would brief him and his chief technology officer when they made public statements like, "We're trying to collect everything and keep it forever," and everyone still thought it was a cute business slogan. Meanwhile, I was designing the systems they would use to accomplish just that. I wasn't briefing the political side, the Secretary of Defense, but I was briefing the operational side, the director of technology for the National Security Agency. Official wrongdoings can act as catalysts for various levels of insider information holders to disclose information, even at great risk to themselves, as long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.
The challenge is to reach out to these individuals, to help them realize that their primary loyalty as public servants is to the public, not to the government. That's a significant mindset shift for a government employee today.
I've argued that whistleblowers are chosen by circumstance. It's not a virtue that has to do with who you are or your background. It's a question of what you're exposed to, what you're a witness to. At that point the question becomes, "Do you honestly believe that you have the ability to fix the problem, to influence policy?" I wouldn't encourage people to disclose information, even about wrongdoing, if they don't believe they can do it effectively, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.
This is simply a pragmatic, strategic view. The Whistleblowers are at the extremes of probability, and in order to be effective as a political force, it is vital to maximize the amount of public good produced by the rare seed. In making my decision, I came to understand how one strategic view, such as waiting until the month before a domestic election, could be overridden by another, such as the moral imperative to provide an opportunity to interrupt a global trend that had already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on the sense of overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed my entire life, had engaged in such a remarkable act of deception.
At the heart of this development is that whistleblowing is a manifestation of radicalization – and by “radical” I don’t mean “extreme.” I mean it in the traditional sense of radix, the root of the problem. At some point you recognize that you can’t just move a few letters around on a page and hope for the best. You can’t just report this problem to your boss, as I tried to do, because inevitably bosses get stressed. They think about the structural risk to their careers. They’re worried about making a mess and getting a “bad reputation.” The incentives to produce meaningful reform are lacking. Essentially, in an open society, change has to flow from the bottom up.
As someone who works in the intelligence community, you have sacrificed a lot to do this job. You have willingly bound yourself to tyrannical restrictions. You voluntarily submit to lie detectors, you reveal everything about your life to the government. You give up many rights because you believe that the fundamental goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the most sacred. It is a righteous cause.
And when you are faced with evidence—not in an extreme case, not in a singularity, but as a basic consequence of the program—that the government is undermining the Constitution and violating the ideals in which you so fervently believe, you must make a decision. When you see that the program or policy conflicts with the oaths and obligations you have sworn to society and to yourself, then that oath and obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To whom do you owe greater allegiance?
One of the most remarkable things about the revelations of the past several years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred within the context of the United States as the “undisputed superpower.” We now have the largest undisputed military machine in the history of the world, and it is supported by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize any use of force in response to almost any In today’s context, that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism itself or because they think it is an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we had an attack like 9/11 every year, we would still lose more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to these more significant threats.
Where we really end up is the political reality that we have a political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of weakness. Our politicians are more afraid of the politics of terrorism – the accusations that they are not taking terrorism seriously – than they are of the crime itself.
As a result, we have arrived at this unparalleled possibility, unfettered by politics. We have become dependent on what was supposed to be the restraint of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are suddenly charged with far greater political significance and impact than originally anticipated, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to avoid revising laws or executive actions in the context of national security and establishing restrictive precedents that, even if perfectly correct, would impose limits on government for decades or more. This means that the most powerful institution humanity has ever seen has also become the least . Yet the same institution was never designed to operate in such a way, having instead been expressly founded on the principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, "Though we are strong, we are limited by our will."
When you first take office at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and take an oath – not to the government, not to the service, not to secrecy. You take an oath to the Constitution. So there's this friction, this emerging competition between the obligations and the values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you're called to participate in.
These revelations about the Obama administration's assassination program reveal that there is a segment of Americans who are deeply concerned with the unlimited, unchecked exercise of force. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked force than claiming for oneself the right to execute a person outside the context of combat and without the involvement of any kind of judicial process.
Traditionally, in military affairs, we have always understood that the use of deadly force in battle could not be subject to prior judicial restraints. When armies are fighting each other, there is no room for a judge on the battlefield. But now the government has decided – without the public’s input, without our knowledge and consent – that the battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who do not pose an immediate threat in any meaningful sense of those terms are being redefined, through language, to fit within those definitions.
Inevitably, this conceptual pays off, along with the technology that allows officials to promote of surgical precision killing and non-intrusive surveillance. Take, for example, the Holy Grail of perpetual use a capability the United States has always sought. The goal is to develop solar powered drones that can hover for weeks without landing. Once you have the ability to do that, and you attach any standard signal-gathering device to their undersides to relentlessly track the origin of, say, the different network addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you are able to know not only where a particular device is located and in what city, but also what apartment each device is in, what it is going to at any given time, and by what route. Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this for several cities, you're now tracking the movements of not just individuals but entire populations.
By our modern need to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something akin to that of tagged animals, with the main difference that we paid for our tags and they are in our pockets. It sounds like a fantasy of paranoia, but on a technical level it is so trivial to implement that I can’t imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. Initially it will be limited to war zones, as we have come to expect, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.
Here we see the double-edged sword of our uniquely American brand of nationalism. We have been raised on the principles of exceptionalism, to think that we are the best nation with a manifest destiny to lead. The danger is that some people will actually believe this claim, and some of them will expect the manifestation of our national identity, that is, our government, to behave accordingly.
Unchecked power can be many things, but it is not American. It is in this sense that the act of exposing wrongdoing has increasingly become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower rings the alarm bell and lifts the lamp, inheriting the tradition of a line of Americans beginning with Paul Revere.
The individuals who make these revelations feel so strongly about what they have seen that they are willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know that we, the people, are ultimately the most powerful and reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary ability, extraordinary resources, vast access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final analysis there is only one figure that matters: each individual citizen.
And there are more of us than of them:
Article source: https://theintercept.com
Translation: https://medialibre.net
Published by Ellak.gr:
E. Snowden: Whistleblowing is an act of political resistance
