Hacker News Reader

Comment by merrywhether | Hacker News Reader

I'm always struck by the strange cognitive dissonance US law has for corporate whistleblowers vs governmental whistleblowers. How can you recognize the value of one while dismissing the value of the other? It's not like a whistleblower defense is a get-out-of-jail-free card either, as you must prove that what you did was actually in the public interest. It's a shame that there's no movement for reform in this area, because ultimately it would be very interesting to see Snowden return to the US for a "fair trial" and see the public response (both within the US and globally) to the outcome.

View on HN

Law at both federal and state levels (in most states) has fairly strong protection for government whistleblowers in general; the Espionage Act specifically lacks whistleblower provisions, which certainly presents an issue when whistleblowing relates to the kind of defense-related information to which the Espionage Act applies, but that's not indicative of a general approach in law to government whistleblowers.

This doesn't strike me as cognitive dissonance. From the government's perspective, Snowden didn't reveal illegal activity and so is not a whistleblower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower

"or threat to public interest"

It doesn't have to be illegal.

Clapper and Alexander lying to congress is illegal.

The bulk collection of phone metadata (which he exposed) was subsequently ruled unlawful: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/07/nsa-phone-rec...

That's great and all, but what about the other one million+ documents he absconded with not related to the phone metadata record collection?

At what point does he cease being a whistle blower?

I feel like this isn't a bad point. Anyone have a response because the whistlerblower tag gets used a lot but he did release a lot that seemed to be normal spying.

His argument was that it should be not his decision whether releasing a document is in the public interest, but rather something journalists should take care of (although he did select those journalists himself, so it's not fair to say it's a completely independent process).

Still better than a full dump à la WkiLeaks, but the big question is whether the journalists have the OpSec skills to avoid leaking the documents to other governments.

That is an awful defense. You can't just dump all the documents on a journalist and then blame the journalist for what is being released.

It doesn't matter if it was directly or through an intermediary, everything that Snowden gave to journalists, Snowden leaked to the public.

I'm not saying that he shouldn't be held responsible if all of those documents were to leak. He did, however, specifically select journalists who already experienced heavy surveillance from state actors and had at least some knowledge of proper OpSec and encryption to mitigate this risk to some degree. He acknowledged that it could leak, but still thought it's a risk worth taking (I can't remember his exact words, I think it was brought up in an interview.)

Why should he be the one to decide if the leaking of over a million highly classified documents is a "risk worth taking" to inform Americans of the phone metadata program? Doesn't that seem just odd to you? If I wanted to blow the whistle on a program I thought was illegal, I'd gather supporting documents and evidence of that one program (to include supposed emails I had sent in an attempt to follow the proper "channels" for reporting illegal activity - which in Snowden's case are conspicuously absent from the data he stole) so as to not discredit my work/sacrifice by leaking magnitudes more than I needed to.

Why not just leak documents related to that one issue? If he had, I would not hesitate in the least to call him a whistle blower, and in fact I think he'd be living as a free man right now if that were the case.

First, the reason is because this whistle blowing was /necessary/ due to a /lack of oversight/ and to a lack of eventual release for that oversight to the public.

Second, we don't know the number of potential documents, nor how they may have been divided among those to whom they were disseminated.

Addressing the first point, it should take work and review, on an ongoing basis, to re-affirm the classification of that material. By default there should be a /reasonable/ and /short/ expiration time. If it costs too much to keep those secrets than that in and of it's self is a reason for not HAVING so many secrets to keep!

The cost, otherwise, is to our freedoms; to the very liberty for which our government is supposed to be protecting.

Greenwald couldn't figure out how to use PGP on his own and then frequently communicated via CryptoCat. His OpSec skills at the time of the leak were questionable at best.

The phone metadata is just a small part of the lawless behaviour of intelligence services he released proof of to journalists. For example he also released proof of industrial espionage (Petrobras), political spying during negotiations (Belgacom), of tapping internet traffic indiscriminately (Tempora), of undermining encryption standards(Bullrun), installing malware on routers, of personnel misusing selectors to target their loved ones with impunity.

Perhaps you believe in your country right or wrong, but many don't nowadays, many feel little allegiance to national boundaries or national agencies which actively undermine our society.

What I find most interesting here is that this attempt by security agencies to collect it all actually means that their operation can be compromised by the smallest cogs in their machine whom they foolishly gave full access to. You can be absolutely sure that if Snowden walked out with this data, Chinese, Russian and other spies have the whole trove as well dating back years, because their security around private contractors was awful - GCHQ shared all this with the US without restraint, and of course all their data is now open to the world. So the ambition to collect it all and the entire collection of data (including data on western judges, politicans etc etc) is actually highly damaging to national security, even if you believe that flimsy excuse.

At some point if you're exposed to all this you might feel you have to take sides with humanity and take a stand, before these tools are used for widespread repression. At that point you start being a whistleblower, and your life will probably be destroyed by the powers that be (as his has been, or as Binney's was), because they now have that power.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001733041/the-pro...

I think the biggest lesson from Snowden is not technical, but the simple argument that the power of state and citizen must be in balance for society to function, and we must constantly guard against the state aggrandising power, because that is in its nature.

> I'm always struck by the strange cognitive dissonance US law has for corporate whistleblowers vs governmental whistleblowers.

It doesn't: there are multiple different programs for reporting perceived illegal activity. Snowden never availed himself of any of these, but instead committed espionage.

> It doesn't: there are multiple different programs for reporting perceived illegal activity. Snowden never availed himself of any of these, but instead committed espionage.

These programs had been used by multiple people before, with no results. They are for show, so that people like you can point to them to show that there's "oversight".

Whistleblowing of the type done by Snowden is a last resort when there is no other option. The options you speak of are not credible avenues for change.

He tried. He found out that because he wasn't a government employee, those programs treated him like shit.[0]

> One of the things that has not been widely reported by journalists is that whistle-blower protection laws in the US do not protect contractors in the national security arena. There are so many holes in the laws, the protections they afford are so weak, and the processes for reporting they provide are so ineffective that they appear to be intended to discourage reporting of even the clearest wrongdoing. If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony. One only need to look at the case of Thomas Drake to see how the government doesn't have a good history of handling legitimate reports of wrongdoing within the system.

> Despite this, and despite the fact that I could not legally go to the official channels that direct NSA employees have available to them, I still made tremendous efforts to report these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the proper clearance who would listen. The reactions of those I told about the scale of the constitutional violations ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom to go through what Drake did.

[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/snowden-not-all-spying-bad-but-nsa-...

Every time I've been a contractor[1], I've been treated likewise.

[1]never been contracted out to a government agency of any level.

The legality shouldn't even be part of the conversation.

Government activity that is fascistic is usually going to be completely legal or made legal once revealed. We saw the government do this with the USA Freedom Act. Before that, they claimed to have authorization under the FISA and PATRIOT Acts. They do not want oversight, and the "abuses" are actually functioning exactly as intended. This is also why they endlessly lie to our faces about what is going on and don't get fired, even when they have been outed repeatedly.

Also, there's the documented fact [0][1] that whistleblowers at the NSA who go through the "proper channels" ultimately gets you fired, ostracized, raided, and prosecuted. So really, it's a non-starter to claim that they should have reported illegal activity.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake#Drake_act...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...

Think about it from the prosecution's perspective. He revealed one program that was legal at the time but later ruled illegal, dozens of programs that are entirely legal, and thousands of documents that describe ongoing work on specific targets that were also perfectly legal and incredibly sensitive. What he did was equivalent to the SPE hack, where the attackers dumped emails without regard to whether what they contained was illegal in any way but were certainly harmful to SPE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com