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Fair enough point. But self-defeating, no? This seems as idiotic as a police forcing being responsible for investigating themselves. What do you think would hav

Fair enough point. But self-defeating, no? This seems as idiotic as a police forcing being responsible for investigating themselves. What do you think would have happened if he had gone though "official channels"?

version_five 4y ago
It's definitely ironic to suggest a whistleblower goes through the approved process of the entity against which he's blowing the whistle. I'd say that really this just shows the limitations of the concept of whistleblower laws- essentially they're just a feel good concept that lets people blow the whistle against entities the people in power want them too (like the silly Facebook thing). I don't really have an opinion about Snowden, but I'd say good or bad, if you're really planning on exposing "the system" you can't really expect any protection, and I think it's impossible to build in that kind of protection. An simple and maybe flawed example would be vigilante justice. Someone can decide to kill someone extra judicially. They may be "right" in some way, but there is never going to be an allowance for it.
- schoen 4y ago
  There are meaningful benefits from the existing whistleblower laws; they're just focused on a very different set of problems and concerns. The existing whistleblower laws handle cases where a small number of people are, in fact, not following the official rules. This might be sexual harassment or embezzlement or something, or someone otherwise using government resources for personal aggrandizement. They don't really handle cases where a government entity has deliberately chosen (more or less following proper procedures or more or with the acquiescence or support of its leadership) to do something that some people think is bad. What someone might (perhaps dismissively) term a political objection to the entity's decisions or actions.
nonameiguess 4y ago
The official channel is Congressional oversight committees for intelligence. They all have clearances and are independent of the executive branch and the agencies they oversee. The extent to which you trust them is up in the air, I guess, but they're at least supposed to be representatives of the public. It's more like the city council investigating the police than the police investigating themselves. As for what would have changed, what changed given he publicly disclosed instead? As far as I know, none of the programs he blew a whistle on were ever found to be illegal, no one in charge of them was fired or went to prison, and the major effects have been crackdowns in the way insider threats are mitigated, the depth that clearance investigations and polygraphs go into, the public has become less trusting of the federal government, and backers of authoritarian foreign regimes have a lot more ammunition to paint the USA as full of hypocrites if we ever take any effort to aid resistance to them.
schoen 4y ago
I was meaning to write something about this elsewhere: it's tricky because the official government view of where whistleblowing is appropriate is generally against "waste, fraud, and abuse". These notions are famously very narrow. A category that doesn't exist in the government's conception is something like "I think there should be a political debate about, or judicial review judging the legality of, this thing which has previously not been subject to political debate or judicial review because of its secrecy". Or "I think this thing is immoral, but it's not necessarily illegal". It's easy to support whistleblowing on these grounds (especially if you personally agree with those judgments on the whistleblowers' part!), but it's not easy to integrate such exceptions into the official government secrecy system, not least because of their subjectivity. There are various ideas for official mechanisms that would build in more official adversarial review or high-level transparency for classified government actions and programs. I remember it briefly seemed like Congress might have been willing to create the official FISA court advocate who would argue before the FISA court against the government's legal interpretations and argue that they should not be allowed to use new surveillance methods under prior legal authorities.

version_five 4y ago

It's definitely ironic to suggest a whistleblower goes through the approved process of the entity against which he's blowing the whistle. I'd say that really this just shows the limitations of the concept of whistleblower laws- essentially they're just a feel good concept that lets people blow the whistle against entities the people in power want them too (like the silly Facebook thing). I don't really have an opinion about Snowden, but I'd say good or bad, if you're really planning on exposing "the system" you can't really expect any protection, and I think it's impossible to build in that kind of protection. An simple and maybe flawed example would be vigilante justice. Someone can decide to kill someone extra judicially. They may be "right" in some way, but there is never going to be an allowance for it.

schoen 4y ago
There are meaningful benefits from the existing whistleblower laws; they're just focused on a very different set of problems and concerns. The existing whistleblower laws handle cases where a small number of people are, in fact, not following the official rules. This might be sexual harassment or embezzlement or something, or someone otherwise using government resources for personal aggrandizement. They don't really handle cases where a government entity has deliberately chosen (more or less following proper procedures or more or with the acquiescence or support of its leadership) to do something that some people think is bad. What someone might (perhaps dismissively) term a political objection to the entity's decisions or actions.

nonameiguess 4y ago

The official channel is Congressional oversight committees for intelligence. They all have clearances and are independent of the executive branch and the agencies they oversee. The extent to which you trust them is up in the air, I guess, but they're at least supposed to be representatives of the public. It's more like the city council investigating the police than the police investigating themselves. As for what would have changed, what changed given he publicly disclosed instead? As far as I know, none of the programs he blew a whistle on were ever found to be illegal, no one in charge of them was fired or went to prison, and the major effects have been crackdowns in the way insider threats are mitigated, the depth that clearance investigations and polygraphs go into, the public has become less trusting of the federal government, and backers of authoritarian foreign regimes have a lot more ammunition to paint the USA as full of hypocrites if we ever take any effort to aid resistance to them.

schoen 4y ago

I was meaning to write something about this elsewhere: it's tricky because the official government view of where whistleblowing is appropriate is generally against "waste, fraud, and abuse". These notions are famously very narrow. A category that doesn't exist in the government's conception is something like "I think there should be a political debate about, or judicial review judging the legality of, this thing which has previously not been subject to political debate or judicial review because of its secrecy". Or "I think this thing is immoral, but it's not necessarily illegal". It's easy to support whistleblowing on these grounds (especially if you personally agree with those judgments on the whistleblowers' part!), but it's not easy to integrate such exceptions into the official government secrecy system, not least because of their subjectivity. There are various ideas for official mechanisms that would build in more official adversarial review or high-level transparency for classified government actions and programs. I remember it briefly seemed like Congress might have been willing to create the official FISA court advocate who would argue before the FISA court against the government's legal interpretations and argue that they should not be allowed to use new surveillance methods under prior legal authorities.