Snowden's no Whistleblower

There was a BBC article over the weekend repeatedly describing Snowden as a whistleblower.  That is wishful thinking by the writers, who will not be named, because they aren't alone.  Many of the people in the public press describe him that way.   Whistleblowing is "making a disclosure evidencing illegal or improper government activities".  In a broad context, that means I can say the government is doing something improper and become a whistleblower.  That is what has lead to the use of the term in almost every venue from Civil Rights violations to the hallowed halls of OSHA, where the improper use of a thermostat can qualify for a whistleblower report.  The new DODD-FRANK provisions allow the reporting of wrongdoing by businesses.  That will be even more interesting, but none of this is whistleblowing in the context of Edward Snowden.

It takes more than a public disclosure of something a person thinks should be public to be named a whistleblower.  A lot of what the Federal government does would not make the public happy, if they were provided every detail.   The reason you don't see 10,000 whistleblower cases every year in the public is common sense of most people who see government wrong-doing.

Most of them work for the government and bring those matters to the attention of people they work for.  In my time working for the government, I reported a few things that were either criminal or unethical.  None of them were welcome information to the people who got the reports, but in only one of those cases did any type of recrimination occur.  Even in that case, I didn't need whistleblower protection because the matter never became public, and the person who was named was "taken care of" although still employed.  At the time,  I didn't like that, and it became the central reason I retired from government.  Being away from government for several years has changed my mind about what was done.

We need a Whistleblower Protection Act for Federal employees who see wrongdoing and report it, only to find themselves ostracized and discriminated against.  Especially, where the government is doing something classified and the matter being reported on requires the use of classified information.  There are two sides to this.

First, the public disclosure of classified information, by definition, harms the United States.  Newspapers don't seem to mind this, but a few government people who give them information have forgotten that part.   There is no longer very much discipline in handling disclosures of classified information, regardless of their source.  We have gotten the idea that it is OK, when it isn't.  Find out who is doing it and prosecute them.

This isn't new, by any means, but the scope is new.  There are, even without Snowden, enough disclosures every day to cause us significant harm.  Our enemies love it; our friends don't trust us, and the people inside government get the idea that nobody cares.  That would be because there aren't enough who do.

Agencies that think Whistleblower Protection is something they can ignore need to remember that part too.   Every time they ignore a  whistleblower internally, they run the risk of having someone take things to the public that shouldn't be there.  There are some famous cases of this in the last few years.  However, the Whistleblower Protection Act specifically exempts the kind of person Snowden was - a contractor, not a Federal employee, and an Intelligence Community employee - neither one of which get protection.  President Obama widened those exemptions.

We should start thinking about protecting our country instead of the individual rights of newspaper reporters and people who give classified information to the press.  The only ones who appreciate our situation are the Russians and Chinese who have both benefited from what he gave to them, and already do a good deal more to prevent the same thing from happening in their own countries.  Amazon books: