I was meaning to write something about this elsewhere: it's tricky because the official government view of where whistleblowing is appropriate is generally agai

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.