A corporate whistleblower gets a payday (a good thing). While whistleblowers like Snowden that reveal illegal government programs risk the death penalty if they ever sit foot in US soil again.
This is progress, but we've got farther to go.
This is progress, but we've got farther to go.
Now I'm not saying what Snowden did was right or wrong but these two are not equatable.
Government protections for whistleblowers are important but protecting someone who had to break the law in order to whistleblow versus someone who did not are two very different things and I think mixing the topics may take away from the importance of one versus the other (protection from retaliation through a corporation versus being locked up due to the government) or worse simply conflate them and their associated arguments.
The difference that you are ignoring is that it's in the government's power to legalize or even incentivize whistleblowing on a company while at the same time it's equally easy for the government to outlaw whistleblowing on the country. The government of a country sets the laws. It defines what's lawful and what's not.
Therefore when it comes to whistleblowing on a country it becomes borderline irrelevant whether some laws are broken or not as long as the whistleblowing otherwise aligns with universally accepted human values and ethics.
The problem is that loyalty to your team (Team NSA, say), and loyalty to your oath, may sometimes conflict with loyalty to your country, which may itself conflict with loyalty to the human race. When that happens, you have to decide which loyalties you hold higher. Snowden did, and I can't say that he chose wrongly. But there are no "universally accepted human values and ethics" that determine what to do in that situation. It's often the stuff of literature precisely because the normal values and ethics are at war with one another.
Now, Snowden might have still be right, I'm not debating that, but chalking it up to a breach of employment contract is naive.
At some point people tell that story to themselves, because it makes it easier to function and reduces cognitive dissonance.
I think that people are often too slow to break ties with their 'team' when immoral behavior is at play.
To be clear, the oath to the constitution outweighs an NDA every time, due to the nature that the constutiton is the supreme law of the land.
Not at all. It's part of some human values and ethics, but definitely not universally accepted.
In fact, when I took an extra-curricular class in Ethics, it was literally the textbook example of a situation when Kantian and utilitarian ethics differ about what is right and wrong.
Like what if someone not affiliated with the company illegally hacked into Monsanto's servers in order to find information to then "whistleblow" on?
Ends, means, etc...
1. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.
2. Do unto others what you would have them do to you.
3. Never levy a punishment greater than the harm of the offense.
4. Avoid direct conflict with anyone who will kick your ass.Incentivise hard-to-prove offenses that benefit the offender as much as they harm the victim (e.g. theft), because at worst they'll be back where they started...
If a thief takes your MacGuffin, and gets caught, he must return it to you to make you whole, and then might also be required to forfeit an amount up to its value as punishment for thievery.
At the point when the cops nab him, it may appear that he stands to lose double what he stole, but that's only because what he stole never belonged to him in the first place.
This is why "treble damages" are a big deal, as 3 times the provable harm goes beyond what Lex Talionis normally allows.
If you steal a loaf of bread and get sentenced to 20 years in the galleys (like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables), that is quite clearly an unethical punishment. Simple restitution would mandate that the thief produce no more than one loaf to make the baker whole, and Lex Talionis would mandate that if the punishment were not to produce another loaf of bread, it should still need to be a tenth the magnitude of the punishment for someone caught stealing ten loaves of bread, and that in turn would be a thousandth the magnitude of the punishment for someone caught stealing a car.
What if you're suicidal? Wouldn't that make murder cool under this set of ethics?
As far as I know, suicide (or self-euthanasia) does not have a settled, common ethical ground. Some cultures abhor it, and some expect it. A few have some problems with the occasional suicide-by-murderous-rampage. Thus, any "universal" ethics would not be able to answer any questions about it in a consistent way.
Suicide is a corner case, anyway. The above 4 rules can probably handle at least 80% of ethical dilemmas without much additional thought.
Certainly, if you think you would like to know whether a government or multinational is acting against your interests, and you discover evidence of it in your employer, you should sever your relationship by rule #1, blow the whistle by rule #2, and try to remain anonymous by rule #4. Additionally, the worst retaliation you should fear is to have your own bad behavior outed to the public, by rule #3. But you already know your employer is unethical, so who knows what they might do to you?
The world would probably be a better place without rule #4, but that's describing what we are, not what we wish to be.
My personal ethics are far further from universal than the list I proposed.
Universal for me would include people in Asia, Australian Aborigines, South America, Inuit etc.
The Wikipedia page [0] shows many other references, but unfortunately does not currently distinguish between silver rule (don't be a hypocrite) and golden rule (be an exemplar of your own virtues).
The limited, proportional punishment maxim also has a page [1]. The origin is undoubtedly Middle Eastern, but migration, empire-building, and colonialism has spread it around the globe. It is not quite universal, but it may have more adherents than any other incompatible principles regarding punishment and revenge.
It is not surprising that concepts originating in the Middle East have spread far and wide. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the #1, #2, and #6 religions. Religions from India are #3, #4, #5, #7, and #9. Confucianism is #8, and Shinto #10. In addition to the religions, there have been at least a dozen empires that spread from or through that region.
Universal, for me, is a supermajority (>= 80%) of the economic power on the planet, which also makes a supermajority of the military influence. It's nice to throw non-influential cultures a bone every now and then, out of charity, but their children will be influenced by the cosmopolitan, global-market culture to a far greater extent than they will influence it in return. The cosmopolitan culture pushes itself into every corner of the globe with its mass-market broadcast media, and only pulls out the stuff that can be sold. It's like a "greatest hits" compilation album of every culture, heavily weighted by the history of world conquests.
The Australian Aborigines, for example, got to export the boomerang and the didgeridoo. South America gave everyone chocolate, cocaine, and samba. Jamaica gave everyone ska, reggae, and jerk chicken. If you wanted to get your core ethics in there, you should have built your empire sooner, or maybe invented the printing press or radio first.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye
This is why we have elections and a separation of legislative and executive branches. This is why Congress holds hearings on intelligence. The Church Committee happened, after all. And the courts can tell the NSA to not do things, and it (mostly) happens.
The incentives are mostly aligned, but the people being voted in seem to disagree with the idea that government whistleblowers need as much protection.
In this case, it's an elected government. It's fixable.
That is far too general of a position than what I'm comfortable with. Seems somewhat anarchist to me.
I have to agree with the GP that when pointing out breaking the law is breaking the law, there is a loss of legitimacy.
This is not anarchist in any sense of the word, colloquially or academically. It's hundreds of years (or more) of legal practice.
That's not a difference of kind, but of power.
When you make reporting an illegal activity illegal, you have made that activity legal.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
Not really and a bit hyperbolic. According to Snowden he went to 10 "district officials" of which none of them took action. The NSA as well as other DoD agencies have a channel for complaints like this to go through where they're seen by a group of people, not a district official. Snowden never made reference to filing one of those as far as I can find. All we have is his word he told someone relevant but completely skipped the appropriate channel for such reporting. So I'm not sure he actually exhausted his legal means.
I just don't have the data to say either way. But I'm still not sure I'd go with the "going illegal is generally acceptable" even after that; that's a risky judgement call that I think always has to be contextual.
We know the chain was complicit all the way up to Clapper, and so did Snowden, which then makes "proper paths" illegitimate.
Thats why I said "generally"
"Confusing" is such an odd term to label this as. It's not confusing at all. It's pretty clear from your comment you just plain don't think they're the same and you don't want anyone else to either. Furthermore, your whole argument is based on an assertion which is based on no evidence.
I would happily wager that Monsanto's employee agreement strictly forbids sharing trade secrets, private financial information with third parties, etc.
See this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/deutsche-bank-whistleblower-i...
EDIT: HA! I honestly didn't read the article before I commented, and then I saw this in it:
> The award of $22,437,800 was tied to an $80 million settlement between the SEC and Monsanto in February, according to the lawyer, Stuart Meissner in New York, in a statement.
So yeah, it's very likely a way to shut whistleblowers up, while also making themselves look good that they "reward" whistleblowers. But sure, I guess it could've been worse, like banishing him to Russia or whatever. But I doubt it's a 100% altruistic act, too.
I doubt Snowden was ignorant about what happened to those who "followed the rules". Their lives were ruined and nothing changed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon...
"None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”
So yes, he is in fact the textbook definition of a whistleblower.