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dénonciateur throughout much of the twentieth century, until the word’s
WWII-era association with being a “denouncer” or “informant” for the
Germans led to a preference for lanceur d’alerte (“one who launches a
warning”). German, a language that has struggled with its culture’s Nazi
and Stasi past, evolved beyond its own Denunziant and Informant to settle
on the unsatisfactory Hinweisgeber (a “hint- or tip-giver”), Enthueller
(“revealer”), Skandalaufdecker (“scandal-uncoverer”), and even the
pointedly political ethische Dissidenten (“ethical dissident”). German uses
few of these words online, however; with respect to today’s Internet-based
disclosures, it has simply borrowed the noun Whistleblower and the verb

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leaken. The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part,
employ terms that bear the pejorative sense of “snitch” and “traitor.” It
would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue
those words with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would
frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an honorable duty.
Ultimately, every language, including English, demonstrates its culture’s
relationship to power by how it chooses to define the act of disclosure.
Even the nautically derived English words that seem neutral and benign
frame the act from the perspective of the institution that perceives itself
wronged, not of the public that the institution has failed. When an
institution decries “a leak,” it is implying that the “leaker” damaged or
sabotaged something.
Today, “leaking” and “whistleblowing” are often treated as
interchangeable. But to my mind, the term “leaking” should be used
differently than it commonly is. It should be used to describe acts of
disclosure done not out of public interest but out of self-interest, or in
pursuit of institutional or political aims. To be more precise, I understand a
leak as something closer to a “plant,” or an incidence of “propaganda-
seeding”: the selective release of protected information in order to sway
popular opinion or affect the course of decision making. It is rare for even a
day to go by in which some “unnamed” or “anonymous” senior government
official does not leak, by way of a hint or tip to a journalist, some classified
item that advances their own agenda or the efforts of their agency or party.
This dynamic is perhaps most brazenly exemplified by a 2013 incident
in which IC officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and
deflect criticism of mass surveillance, leaked to a few news websites
extraordinarily detailed accounts of a conference call between al-Qaeda
leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and his global affiliates. In this so-called
conference call of doom, al-Zawahiri purportedly discussed organizational
cooperation with Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, and
representatives of the Taliban and Boko Haram. By disclosing the ability to
intercept this conference call—that is, if we’re to believe this leak, which
consisted of a description of the call, not a recording—the IC irrevocably
burned an extraordinary means of apprising itself of the plans and intentions
of the highest ranks of terrorist leadership, purely for the sake of a
momentary political advantage in the news cycle. Not a single person was

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prosecuted as a result of this stunt, though it was most certainly illegal, and
cost America the ability to keep wiretapping the alleged al-Qaeda hotline.
Time and again, America’s political class has proven itself willing to
tolerate, even generate leaks that serve its own ends. The IC often
announces its “successes,” regardless of their classification and regardless
of the consequences. Nowhere in recent memory has that been more
apparent than in the leaks relating to the extrajudicial killing of the
American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in Yemen. By breathlessly
publicizing its drone attack on al-Aulaqi to the Washington Post and the
New York Times, the Obama administration was tacitly admitting the
existence of the CIA’s drone program and its “disposition matrix,” or kill
list, both of which are officially top secret. Additionally, the government
was implicitly confirming that it engaged not just in targeted assassinations,
but in targeted assassinations of American citizens. These leaks,
accomplished in the coordinated fashion of a media campaign, were
shocking demonstrations of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a
seal that must be maintained for the government to act with impunity, but
that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim credit.
It’s only in this context that the US government’s latitudinal relationship
to leaking can be fully understood. It has forgiven “unauthorized” leaks
when they’ve resulted in unexpected benefits, and forgotten “authorized”
leaks when they’ve caused harm. But if a leak’s harmfulness and lack of
authorization, not to mention its essential illegality, make scant difference to
the government’s reaction, what does? What makes one disclosure
permissible, and another not?
The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed
acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the fundamental prerogatives of an
institution. If all the disparate components of an organization, from its
mailroom to its executive suite, can be assumed to have the same power to
discuss internal matters, then its executives have surrendered their
information control, and the organization’s continued functioning is put in
jeopardy. Seizing this equality of voice, independent of an organization’s
managerial or decision-making hierarchy, is what is properly meant by the
term “whistleblowing”—an act that’s particularly threatening to the IC,
which operates by strict compartmentalization under a legally codified veil
of secrecy.

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A “whistleblower,” in my definition, is a person who through hard
experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become
incompatible with the principles developed in—and the loyalty owed to—
the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be
accountable. This person knows that they can’t remain inside the institution,
and knows that the institution can’t or won’t be dismantled. Reforming the
institution might be possible, however, so they blow the whistle and
disclose the information to bring public pressure to bear.
This is an adequate description of my situation, with one crucial
addition: all the information I intended to disclose was classified top secret.
To blow the whistle on secret programs, I’d also have to blow the whistle
on the larger system of secrecy, to expose it not as the absolute prerogative
of state that the IC claimed it was but rather as an occasional privilege that
the IC abused to subvert democratic oversight. Without bringing to light the
full scope of this systemic secrecy, there would be no hope of restoring a
balance of power between citizens and their governance. This motive of
restoration I take to be essential to whistleblowing: it marks the disclosure
not as a radical act of dissent or resistance, but a conventional act of return
—signaling the ship to return back to port, where it’ll be stripped, refitted,
and patched of its leaks before being given the chance to start over.
A total exposure of the total apparatus of mass surveillance—not by me,
but by the media, the de facto fourth branch of the US government,
protected by the Bill of Rights: that was the only response appropriate to the
scale of the crime. It wouldn’t be enough, after all, to merely reveal a