Snowden writes: "'I've been waiting 40 years for someone like you.' Those
were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan
and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much
- and to be irrevocably changed - by revealing secret truths."
Edward Snowden. (photo: Guardian UK)
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking - It's an Act of Political Resistance
By Edward Snowden, The Intercept
03 May 16
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking - It's an Act of Political Resistance
I've been waiting 40 years for someone like you." Those were the first words
Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an
immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much - and to be
irrevocably changed - by revealing secret truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge
that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit,
throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, 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 it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant
to justify the sacrifice.
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn't have to wait 40 years to witness other
citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon
Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning
provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to
WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and
another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of
extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the
new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The
documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)
We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy
shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities
can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this
temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it
permits the people of this country to learn about critical government
actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows
direct action through voting - in other words, in a way that empowers an
informed citizenry to defend the democracy that "state secrets" are
nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring
information forward, it gives me hope that we won't always be required to
curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant
task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass.
(Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote
killing operations, as "cutting the grass.")
A single act of whistleblowing doesn't change the reality that there are
significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline,
beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue,
despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with
the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society
- if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that
injustice - they might still be held to account. The thread by which good
governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the
man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.
Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a
collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here
we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has
existed for as long as our government.
There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for
senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak a
CIA officer's name to retaliate against her husband, as appears to have been
the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by in
which some senior official does not disclose some protected information that
is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties but clearly "damaging
to national security" under the definitions of our law.
This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda "conference call of
doom" story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the
threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to
a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific
communications they had intercepted, including locations of the
participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the
officials' claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an
extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of
terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a
news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as 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 the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?
The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it's not seen as a threat, as
a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the
disparate components of the institution - not just its head but its hands
and feet, every part of its body - must be assumed to have the same power to
discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern
political monopoly of information control, particularly if we're talking
about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful
activities. If you can't guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of
controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world's
unmentionables - including your own - begins to look more like a liability
than an asset.
At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who
was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the
professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information
officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer
when they were publicly making statements like "We try to collect everything
and hang on to it forever," and everybody still thought that was a cute
business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do
precisely that. I wasn't briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense,
but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency's
director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of
insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as
they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.
Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance
as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the
challenge. That's a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government
worker today.
I've argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It's not a
virtue of who you are or your background. It's a question of what you are
exposed to, what you witness. At that point the question becomes Do you
honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to
influence policy? I would not encourage individuals to reveal information,
even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing
so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.
This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are
outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political
force, it's critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced
from scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I came to understand how
one strategic consideration, such as waiting until the month before a
domestic election, could become overwhelmed by another, such as the moral
imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a global trend that had
already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on my sense of
overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed
for my entire life, was engaged in such an extraordinary act of deception.
At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing
event - and by "radical" I don't mean "extreme"; I mean it in the
traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. 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 simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I
tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about
the structural risk to their career. They're concerned about rocking the
boat and "getting a reputation." The incentives aren't there to produce
meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow
from the bottom to the top.
As someone who works in the intelligence community, you've given up a lot to
do this work. You've happily committed yourself to tyrannical restrictions.
You voluntarily undergo polygraphs; you tell the government everything about
your life. You waive a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental
goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. It's a
just cause.
And when you're confronted with evidence - not in an edge case, not in a
peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program - that the government
is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently
believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or
policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you've sworn to
your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be
reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?
One of the extraordinary things about the revelations of the past several
years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in the
context of the United States as the "uncontested hyperpower." We now have
the largest unchallenged military machine in the history of the world, and
it's backed by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize
any use of force in response to practically any justification. In today's
context that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our
leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism in itself or because they
think it's an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we
had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car
accidents and heart disease, and we don't see the same expenditure of
resources to respond to those more significant threats.
What it really comes down to is the political reality that we have a
political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of
weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism - of
the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously - than they are of the
crime itself.
As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by
policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation
of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are
suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was
originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to
avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national
security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely
proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means
the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also
become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to
operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the
principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, "Though
we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained."
When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear
an oath - not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an
oath to the Constitution. So there's this friction, this emerging contest
between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold,
and the actual activities that you're asked to participate in.
These disclosures about the Obama administration's killing program reveal
that there's a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with
the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or
clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the
authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and
without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.
Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we've always understood
that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial
constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there's no room for a
judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided - without the
public's participation, without our knowledge and consent - that the
battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don't represent an imminent
threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the
subversion of language, to meet that definition.
Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the
technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about
surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the Holy
Grail of drone persistence, a capability that the United States has been
pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter
in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put
any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor,
unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network
addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a
particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device
lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route. Once you
know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over
several cities, you're tracking the movements not just of individuals but of
whole populations.
By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce
our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference
being that we paid for the tags and they're in our pockets. It sounds like
fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it's so trivial to implement
that I cannot imagine a future in which it won't be attempted. It will be
limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but
surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.
Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism.
We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with
the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually
believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our
national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but it's not American. It is in this
sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of
political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp,
inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.
The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they
have seen that they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They
know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable
check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of
government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources,
tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final
calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.
And there are more of us than there are of them.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Edward Snowden. (photo: Guardian UK)
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-jus
t-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/https://theintercept.com/2016/0
5/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-just-leaking-its-an-act-of-politic
al-resistance/
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking - It's an Act of Political Resistance
By Edward Snowden, The Intercept
03 May 16
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking - It's an Act of Political Resistance
've been waiting 40 years for someone like you." Those were the first words
Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an
immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much - and to be
irrevocably changed - by revealing secret truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge
that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit,
throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, 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 it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant
to justify the sacrifice.
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn't have to wait 40 years to witness other
citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon
Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning
provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to
WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and
another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of
extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the
new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The
documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)
We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy
shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities
can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this
temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it
permits the people of this country to learn about critical government
actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows
direct action through voting - in other words, in a way that empowers an
informed citizenry to defend the democracy that "state secrets" are
nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring
information forward, it gives me hope that we won't always be required to
curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant
task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass.
(Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote
killing operations, as "cutting the grass.")
A single act of whistleblowing doesn't change the reality that there are
significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline,
beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue,
despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with
the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society
- if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that
injustice - they might still be held to account. The thread by which good
governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the
man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.
Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a
collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here
we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has
existed for as long as our government.
There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for
senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak a
CIA officer's name to retaliate against her husband, as appears to have been
the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by in
which some senior official does not disclose some protected information that
is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties but clearly "damaging
to national security" under the definitions of our law.
This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda "conference call of
doom" story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the
threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to
a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific
communications they had intercepted, including locations of the
participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the
officials' claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an
extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of
terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a
news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as 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 the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?
The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it's not seen as a threat, as
a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the
disparate components of the institution - not just its head but its hands
and feet, every part of its body - must be assumed to have the same power to
discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern
political monopoly of information control, particularly if we're talking
about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful
activities. If you can't guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of
controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world's
unmentionables - including your own - begins to look more like a liability
than an asset.
At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who
was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the
professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information
officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer
when they were publicly making statements like "We try to collect everything
and hang on to it forever," and everybody still thought that was a cute
business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do
precisely that. I wasn't briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense,
but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency's
director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of
insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as
they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.
Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance
as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the
challenge. That's a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government
worker today.
I've argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It's not a
virtue of who you are or your background. It's a question of what you are
exposed to, what you witness. At that point the question becomes Do you
honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to
influence policy? I would not encourage individuals to reveal information,
even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing
so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.
This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are
outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political
force, it's critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced
from scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I came to understand how
one strategic consideration, such as waiting until the month before a
domestic election, could become overwhelmed by another, such as the moral
imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a global trend that had
already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on my sense of
overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed
for my entire life, was engaged in such an extraordinary act of deception.
At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing
event - and by "radical" I don't mean "extreme"; I mean it in the
traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. 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 simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I
tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about
the structural risk to their career. They're concerned about rocking the
boat and "getting a reputation." The incentives aren't there to produce
meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow
from the bottom to the top.
As someone who works in the intelligence community, you've given up a lot to
do this work. You've happily committed yourself to tyrannical restrictions.
You voluntarily undergo polygraphs; you tell the government everything about
your life. You waive a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental
goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. It's a
just cause.
And when you're confronted with evidence - not in an edge case, not in a
peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program - that the government
is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently
believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or
policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you've sworn to
your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be
reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?
One of the extraordinary things about the revelations of the past several
years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in the
context of the United States as the "uncontested hyperpower." We now have
the largest unchallenged military machine in the history of the world, and
it's backed by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize
any use of force in response to practically any justification. In today's
context that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our
leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism in itself or because they
think it's an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we
had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car
accidents and heart disease, and we don't see the same expenditure of
resources to respond to those more significant threats.
What it really comes down to is the political reality that we have a
political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of
weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism - of
the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously - than they are of the
crime itself.
As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by
policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation
of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are
suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was
originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to
avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national
security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely
proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means
the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also
become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to
operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the
principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, "Though
we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained."
When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear
an oath - not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an
oath to the Constitution. So there's this friction, this emerging contest
between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold,
and the actual activities that you're asked to participate in.
These disclosures about the Obama administration's killing program reveal
that there's a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with
the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or
clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the
authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and
without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.
Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we've always understood
that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial
constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there's no room for a
judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided - without the
public's participation, without our knowledge and consent - that the
battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don't represent an imminent
threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the
subversion of language, to meet that definition.
Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the
technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about
surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the Holy
Grail of drone persistence, a capability that the United States has been
pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter
in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put
any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor,
unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network
addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a
particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device
lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route. Once you
know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over
several cities, you're tracking the movements not just of individuals but of
whole populations.
By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce
our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference
being that we paid for the tags and they're in our pockets. It sounds like
fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it's so trivial to implement
that I cannot imagine a future in which it won't be attempted. It will be
limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but
surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.
Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism.
We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with
the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually
believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our
national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but it's not American. It is in this
sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of
political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp,
inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.
The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they
have seen that they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They
know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable
check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of
government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources,
tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final
calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.
And there are more of us than there are of them.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
