Episode 120: Dissent and National Security

[Music] This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world's most influential democracy.

[Music] Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today's episode is going to focus on a topic that's been in the news quite a bit, and a topic that's ever present in American national security and foreign policy, but a topic we don't talk enough about, the role of dissent. What role dissenters within the policy establishment play.

These dissenters are often known as whistleblowers. We'll discuss that topic as well. But our real focus is on the role of individuals who are intimately involved with national security and intelligence, defense, the State Department, elsewhere, and their role in bringing to the public attention about misdeeds and deviations from constitutional authority and the appropriate uses of power.

We have with us two historians who have done more to elucidate and write about these issues than anyone else, Hannah Gurman and Kaetan Mistry. Hannah teaches U.S. history and American studies at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She's the author of The Dissent Papers, The Voices of Diplomats, and The Cold War and Beyond, which is a book I learned a lot from, an editor of A People's History of Counterinsurgency, and the co-editor of this new wonderful book called Whistleblowing Nation.

Hannah, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

We have also, Kaetan Mistry, who is a historian of the U.S. and the world and teaches at the University of East Anglia in England. He has authored Waging Political Warfare, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of the Cold War, which is really quite a fascinating story. I encourage people to read Kaetan''s wonderful work on this early important moment in the Cold War. He's edited Reforms, Reflection, and Reappraisals, the CIA and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1947, and he's the co-editor with Hannah, of again, this wonderful book, Whistleblowing Nation.

Kaetan, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

Before we turn to our discussion of dissent and national security, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What's the title of your poem, Zachary?

"Cross of Gold."

Wow, I didn't know we'd have William Jennings Bryan joining us today. Okay, Zachary, let's hear it.

"Aristotle wrote of the golden mean in a land of Grecian fields, and so too did the centuries proclaim moderation, my underlings, my dears. A scale is never balanced if the masses are uneven, and the tide can never come here if it never pulls from there. If the water is never gone, it will never reach the pier. And so too did the sages write of living in the middle, and so too did the poets sing of overzealous love. But what is there to do in life if virtue is a dove? Sometimes is there not a moment for a sudden movement, a second for a second path? A period for a period of change, and a time for a time of shift and sin? For is it not that the scale is never a truly balanced ship, that the oceans are only calm because they often overflow, that the sages were radical in their steady consultation, that the poets could never leave overzealous love for moderation? The cross of gold could martyr the farmer. Aristotle will smother his innocence, and moderation will suffocate the truth."

Wow, Zachary, that covers quite a lot there, and I love the movement from Aristotle to moderation and the truth. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the importance of radicalism and dissent in policymaking, but also in life and society in general.

Right, except at home, right? No dissent at home? I think there's actually too much dissent at home, and that's a good thing. Hannah, let's start with you if we could. This incredible book that you and Kaetan have edited with so many authors looking at dissent and the search for truth in national security.

Echoing Zachary's poem, how do we understand this relationship between secrecy and dissent, and why is there such an almost ever-present tension in American national security?

Sure. Well, first, I wanted to comment a little bit on the poem, because one thing that strikes me, a question that we were working through as we navigated the complexities of whistleblowing was whether or not it is a radical act. I think one of the points that we wanted to underscore, and one of the discoveries that we made, is that in many respects, whistleblowing is an act of desperation, but it is not necessarily radical.

It's a kind of historical phenomenon that has made it radical. So that's why it's important to trace this history. So you asked, you know, what are the tensions between secrecy and democracy? And those are always going to be, you know, central to national security, right? There's going to be the state that has a right to keep certain things secret, right? Max Weber famously pointed that out.

At the same time, the building of the national security state in the United States is relatively modern. So when we talk about state secrecy, we're talking about a modern regime that developed over the course of the 20th century, and really not before then. And so what we're talking about is the erection of a kind of overzealous obsession with state secrets that needs to be traced historically.

And one thing that's rather unique about the United States is that it has freedom of speech embedded in the Constitution, and it doesn't allow official state secrets like the United Kingdom and other democracies around the world, so the secrecy regime had to get around that fact. We have the principle of free speech, but we also have a state that needs to protect a growing number of secrets.

And that's part of what makes whistleblowing in the United States such a complicated phenomenon is that this regime developed in an ad hoc and improvisational manner to try to come up with a way around the fact that the United States doesn't have an official secrets act. And it left many fundamental issues of secrecy and democracy unresolved. So on the one hand, the ambiguity of official secrets makes whistleblowing more possible, but it also makes the act of whistleblowing extremely risky.

And that's where you get, you're kind of creating the conditions for this series of dramatic episodes that you see over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, but particularly in certain periods like the 1970s and the post 9/11 era.

That gives us really a powerful way of thinking about this and particularly the ways in which the growth of the national security state after World War II, the necessities of that also create sometimes these excesses and a tension between the public's right to know and an individual's right to speak, and what are at least perceived as the needs of maintaining secrecy in certain areas.

Kaetan, one of the topics that you cover in the book, you and Hannah and your authors, is the Espionage Act, which goes back, of course, a little earlier than the Cold War. I thought it'd be helpful maybe to begin with a discussion of that as well. What is the Espionage Act and how does it relate to this tension that Hannah described so well?

Right. So you mentioned the national security state, and it's famously a creation of the post World War II era, but many of the issues around national security and the protection of information date back to the beginning of the 20th century. The Espionage Act is a key plank of that infrastructure.

So as Hannah mentioned, the United States doesn't have an official secrecy act like the UK because of constitutional reasons, but it has a de facto secrecy regime and much of it has to do with the Espionage Act. So it emerges during the World War I era and it's a piece of legislation to police dissent and disseminate information, but it soon evolves into a classification tool. Now, it's a very flawed piece of legislation, which is recognised at the time and commentators continue to point out its flaws even now.

But what has happened over time is that it's ensured that the state can keep secrets whilst also allowing the press to publish them if it reaches the public domain. Yet the only way that it could reach the public domain, of course, is via whistleblowers and internal dissenters.

And what has happened is that a legal infrastructure is developed around it where the legal burden falls on that individual. All of which is to say, the Espionage Act is the key tool that's been used to prosecute whistleblowers from the earliest cases in the 1930s up until the very recent examples in the 21st century. Leading all the way up to Reality Winner and the revelations around Russian meddling in the election of 2016. So the Espionage Act is a key part of the modern secrecy regime in the United States.

And it's fascinating, Kaetan, that it goes back, as you said, to World War I, but emerges as a larger presence in our legal structure and our policy structure and our democracy after World War II. That's an interesting example of a decision in one era influencing events in another era. One of the strengths of your book, Hannah and Kaetan, is that you walk us through the many cases of the different ways in which this plays out.

We've seen this in front of us in recent years, with the impeachment hearings and related matters, but the book walks us through so many of these cases. Hannah, how does it work when an individual, let's say in the Pentagon, comes forward with evidence of wrongdoing?

Why is there a complicated structure around that and how does it work? Why isn't it just a matter of that individual releasing the information and the public responding? Your book shows there's obviously much more to this involving inspector generals and others.

Could you walk us through that process?

Sure. Well, I think the first distinction that needs to be made is that there are essentially two different categories of whistleblower. One of them you could call an internal whistleblower, meaning an individual who uses internal channels that were created and sanctioned by the state.

Those channels are varied, but for the most part, they developed after the 1970s in the wake of Ellsberg's infamous whistleblowing. And they were there to keep whistleblowing contained within the institution. They, it's important to point out, they have a very narrow conceptualization of what whistleblowing is, so you have to stay inside. And for the most part, these are around issues of waste, fraud, and abuse of power, not really dissent from the substance of a policy, per se. And in theory, these whistleblowers are protected under the law.

But in practice, they are often retaliated against and they don't have much influence. So you mentioned inspectors general, they're the people that are there to manage this process. And we saw how vulnerable even inspectors general are to political power. Often, historically, they themselves are partisan, or at least kind of attend to the bipartisan consensus that has historically treated whistleblowers with a fair degree of mistrust, so those are internal whistleblowers.

And then there's another category, called public interest whistleblowers, or we call them public interest whistleblowers, that is people who disclose information to the public in the name of a public interest, usually through journalists. And what's important to underscore is that there is in the United States, no legal protection for these whistleblowers. And in fact, the state does not recognize them as whistleblowers. That would be considered an unauthorized disclosure.

So probably the most famous whistleblower of the 20th century, Daniel Ellsberg, is not legally a whistleblower. And what happens when they disclose information to the public, is that you immediately have the state kind of pronounce them, you know, this is not whistleblowing. This is unauthorized disclosure.

And then that kick starts a process where the public has a controversial contest over whether or not this person is a hero or a traitor. Frequently, this person is sanctioned and punished. Sometimes they go to jail.

In Ellsberg's case, he was lucky in that his case ended in a mistrial, but you quickly focus on the whistleblower themselves in this divisive hero-traitor binary. And the substance of the disclosure is often marginalized.

And the fundamental question of how democracy handles secrecy and transparency becomes unresolved, so we were really kind of trying to tackle and observe the fact that there is this historical holding pattern that we're stuck in. Right?

It is not a story of linear progress. It's much more a story of periodic return, with leaving these fundamental questions unresolved.

Yeah, so this is a question for Kaetan. In other institutions in the American government, we often see that with new administrations, the dissenters become the ones in power in these institutions.

And that policy can really be shaped by political appointees. Why is it that in this sort of foreign policy and national security state, it's so hard for change like that to be enacted from above? Why do we need these whistleblowers? In a way, we really don't in other bureaucracies.

Yeah, that's a great point. One of the things that came about, one of our findings from the project, was that the issue is often considered in political terms. But the way it plays out is relatively apolitical, in curious kind of ways.

So when we talk about national security whistleblowing, then it should be, we should sort of underline the point that national security whistleblowing stands apart from whistleblowing in other sectors, in the corporate world, for example, other areas of the state. The fact that it deals with national security information, places it in a somewhat of a different category, which affects the questions of reform as well. So there's a contestation, as Hannah pointed out, around who exactly is a whistleblower.

But rather than sort of quibble over labels, there are some clear characteristics that emerge. What they are could be defined very sort of generally as an insider with privileged information who makes a disclosure. This doesn't always have to be classified information, interestingly enough.

The individual's identity often authenticates the information that's being exposed. Then you have this debate around whether they are a hero or a villain, a traitor, a savior. This often plays out when politicians and the press obsess around sort of the personal motives and political ideology, rather than the content of the disclosure itself.

Another characteristic is that the state moves to persecute national security whistleblowers, and this often leads to questions, again, of the character of the individual, rather than debate over the substance of that disclosure. This is a pattern that's repeated in virtually every case over the last century. It's very much embedded in US political culture, which is what distinguishes and makes the US context quite different from other countries.

It's something which has been quite stable over different administrations, often across different political parties, and also consistent throughout the US government, across the executive branch, the congressional branch, and the legislative branch. There is much greater consensus over the approach to national security whistleblowing and the persecution of them than is commonly understood.

That's really helpful in framing this and understanding the complexities of it, which your book brings out so well. Hannah, one of the other points that comes out so powerfully in the book, is that there was an effort in the 1970s in the United States.

Particularly following Daniel Ellsberg, who you mentioned before in his release of the Pentagon Papers, the internal history of the Vietnam War, which was very critical and exposed the lying of American political leaders about the war. Following that, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, there was a very strong effort within Congress to create legislation to protect whistleblowers and dissenters, and to manage this process and deal with many of the difficulties and paradoxes that Kaetan and you have pointed to.

Why didn't that process of reform work? Why are we still, as you say in the book, stuck in this liminal space on this issue?

Yeah, I think it's a great question, and it speaks to some of the ways that Kaetan mentioned. National security is historically the exception rather than the rule. While whistleblowing has become known to the American public largely through these cases that involve national security, like Daniel Ellsberg, like Chelsea Manning, like Edward Snowden, the legislation has historically carved national security whistleblowing out as an exception.

So the early laws that protected whistleblowers at the federal level did not protect national security whistleblowers at all. That was the exception to the rule. It's a really fascinating irony.

So somebody like Ernie Fitzgerald, who blew the whistle on Lockheed Martin during the Nixon administration, reporting that they had vast cost overruns that were really at the taxpayer expense. Fitzgerald became a sort of early icon of whistleblowing. The Carter administration kind of mentioned him a lot as it was advocating for whistleblowing legislation, but the legislation itself wouldn't have protected most national security whistleblowers, particularly public interest whistleblowers who disclose to journalists.

So that's a fundamental problem. Over time, Congress began to recognize that they needed to have more protections for national security whistleblowers. So over the last several decades, different branches of the national security establishment, including the Defense Department and the State Department and the Intelligence Establishment have created these internal channels that I mentioned earlier.

But also, as I said before, they don't protect people who go to the public. So there's really an intense faith in the idea that the system can handle it. But inherent to whistleblowing is a kind of recognition that the system isn't working.

And so, there has yet to be a kind of recognition that we need a public interest whistleblowing system, that you have some kind of outside adjudicator rather than the system kind of handling its own dissent. That seems structurally flawed, even though, as Kaetan mentioned, there has been a bipartisan consensus historically for that very system.

Right. And it does seem in your book for very good reasons that, Hannah, you and Kaetan sympathize very strongly with the Chelsea Mannings, the Edward Snowdens, the Vindman brothers, who recently were responsible for releasing information about misuses, abuses of power regarding Ukraine by the Trump administration. You're sympathetic to them.

You don't treat them as heroes, but you're sympathetic to them for seeing the risks they take, the career costs they pay, and particularly their efforts to inform the public. Is that a fair assessment?

I think one of the misconceptions around this topic is that it falls into sort of a left right binary or a hero villain binary or the idea that you have to either valorize or to criticize whistleblowers. Whereas, one of our attempts was to avoid those sort of very black and white kind of approaches, because the more we dug into the history of the phenomenon, which in many ways continues to the present, the more these sort of political ideological lines become blurred.

You mentioned the Ukraine whistleblowers, or Snowden, Manning, Ellsberg. You can go back to Nickerson in the 50s, Herbert Yardley in the 1930s. It's a very mixed bag in terms of what their politics would be, what their motives would be.

The one thing unifying them in many ways is the notion of public interest whistleblowing. Now you can define, you can argue about what the public interest is, but it certainly wasn't, these were not individuals who were just looking to raise their concerns internally. So the question then becomes, what is the significance of whistleblowing and how do the ramifications reverberate beyond that specific issue?

And it's had quite wide ramifications in terms of secrecy, but also the reporting of secrecy, and going back to the beginning of our discussion around democracy and dissent more generally. So an interesting way to sort of think about this would be if we use the analogy of concentric circles.

So the impact of whistleblowing may begin with the individual, you'll have new rules or laws that are brought in to prevent whistleblowing. But these have ripple effects which go out across institutions and affect different groups, so it's not just that the state is suspicious of a Daniel Ellsberg.

But there is suspicion and surveillance that's extended to collaborators. So Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer, Leonard Bodine, was also under surveillance. Famously, Ellsberg's psychologist's office was broken into, which of course begins the long road to Watergate.

This suspicion has also extended in surveillance to journalists who collaborate or work with whistleblowers. Very contemporary cases like Jim Risen, who lives at the New York Times, Judy Miller, who was also at the New York Times at the time, who famously would go to jail for not revealing a source. But then also censorship moves beyond the whistleblower to other officials and those closely associated with the state.

So a presidential commission or commission into a congressional commission, all the staffers around it would be forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement, a secrecy agreement. People who are not even state officials, perhaps scholars, historians who work, who have some sort of relationship with the state, who perhaps collaborate or work with the state in some way. Colleagues that you will know, Jeremi, as well, people who perhaps serve in government.

Subsequently, all of their work will have to go through pre-publication review. And these are lifetime secrecy agreements. They're not time restricted.

So there's a great article, one of the contributions in our books by Richard Immerman, well regarded distinguished historian, and he points out the many absurdities and inconsistencies in the pre-publication review, all of which is to say you have a wide, vast lineup of characters and there's very little that they have in common, but they're all caught up in this web that's spun by the state in response to whistleblowing.

It's quite extraordinary. As I was reading that chapter, I was thinking, of course, of John Bolton, whose recent memoir has been surrounded by controversy over the pre-publication review, which the Trump administration claims he didn't fully satisfy and he claims he did. And to have John Bolton in the same book in a certain sense as Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden is quite a range of actors, and it makes your point very well.

I did want to focus a bit on Snowden, just for one minute, because he's probably the most famous and controversial recent whistleblower. How should we think about him?

He blurbs your book also, and in many ways he embodies what you're talking about, someone who comes forward and informs the public about illegal uses of surveillance within our democracy, a topic that certainly threatens many of our core democratic values.

But he also potentially shares information with an American adversary, Russia. So how should we think about this? How do you think about this, Hannah?

Yeah. I mean, we've thought a lot about Snowden because, as you say, he is probably the most famous and significant whistleblower of this generation. And he also kind of amplifies a lot of the questions and issues that have been around for over a century.

So a few things to say about Snowden. I mean, I think a case could be made that Snowden is one of probably a minority of whistleblowers who had some impact on policy reform. So his revelations of warrantless surveillance, led to some reforms and put some limits on what information could be collected and how.

And although, it's also worth underscoring that those reforms were rather limited, but arguably, this is not really what matters most about Snowden. And it is worth pointing out that those reforms coexisted with Obama's response, which said, thank you, Edward Snowden, in a sense, for giving us an opportunity to have this debate.

And also, Edward Snowden, you broke the law and what you did was an unauthorized disclosure. So Obama's response to Snowden was very much emblematic of that paradox and the fundamental contradiction of public interest whistleblowing.

And similar to Ellsberg, as Obama pointed out, Snowden raised public consciousness about the tensions between democracy and secrecy that have really riddled the national security state for over a century. Another thing that is really important to recognize is that this is a transnational phenomenon.

We say it's the United States, but in several instances, and Snowden is one of them, the act of whistleblowing reverberates beyond the nation.

And in Snowden's case, around Europe in particular, there was a lot of response. And his disclosure helped to galvanize transnational advocacy around issues of surveillance.

And Kaetan could tell you a lot more about other cases, particularly Philip Agee in the 1970s, who Keaton is really the expert on, analogous histories of transnational responses to U.S. national security whistleblowing. But like Ellsberg, Snowden also becomes a cultural icon.

So one of the things we do in the book is not just look at legal contexts and questions at the state level, but also how do these whistleblowing cases reverberate beyond the state. And so you can't really, really appreciate Snowden's significance without understanding how he becomes a cultural icon, also not unlike Daniel Ellsberg.

So we think in the end, the public debate, the questions around fundamental issues of secrecy and democracy are one of the more significant kind of legacies of a Snowden, not unlike Ellsberg.

Right. And it's likely that not just those of us who are historians, but many people concerned about democracy will be debating and discussing Snowden for many years, as we're debating and discussing Ellsberg, here we are 50 years later.

I wanted to turn, as we always do at the close of our sessions, to a forward-looking question and a hopeful question, I hope.

One of the real lessons from your book, particularly, as you mentioned, some of the case studies. I loved, Kaetan, in your chapter on the 1970s and the anti-imperial, as you call them, dissidents and whistleblowers.

What should citizens today, especially younger listeners who are going into policy positions or going into institutions like universities, where all of us work, where oftentimes one does see things that are not right, sometimes even crossing the line of legality, what should we take as lessons from this?

If we believe that in a democracy, citizens should speak up when they see wrongdoing, but we also recognize, as you point out so well in this book, the other pressures, the professional pressures, but also the pressures of organizational purpose and policy that get in the way sometimes.

What are some of the lessons that readers should take away for their own activities in these settings? Kaetan, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, that's---we've reflected and thought about these questions as we were sort of bringing the book to a conclusion, and it may sound pretty simplistic, but dissent is a healthy feature of democratic society, and it's essential for a healthy debate.

When it comes to national security whistleblowing, I think one of the key changes that could be made is to acknowledge that these are whistleblowers. One way to protect whistleblowers, national security whistleblowers in particular, is to recognize that they are that.

And this, I think, requires a shift in the conceptualization of whistleblowing to include the notion of disclosures in the public interest. So much of the debate is framed by political and legal frameworks when there is a bigger debate, I think, that comes to the fore, particularly looking at the history of it. We mentioned somebody like Ellsberg at the time.

There was debate as to whether he was a whistleblower. Today, he is considered as an icon, as sort of the archetypal whistleblowers. Ernest Fitzgerald, who we mentioned, reputations change over time as a political pressures context.

So it's interesting how these phenomen[a] are reconceptualized over time. But thinking forward as to what we can do in the future, I think there are some questions, some issues that can be reformed, reforms that are not radical, things like changing the Espionage Act, we're having a discussion around it; reform of the classification system, which is something which periodically always comes up. Every single political party will agree that classification is excessive, yet there's never been a serious attempt to try to rectify that.

So we started the discussion talking about whistleblowing as a radical act, but many of the sort of changes that would perhaps be required are not radical. It requires [a] sort of people to challenge the framework and to engage in discussions, I think. And that would be the key thing to, I think, emphasize for the next generation who are coming through and will be joining institutions and looking to change them for the better.

It's a great point that we need to be attentive to our institutional structures and strengthen the structures and build upon them that protect this work. And as you say, the declassification process for secrecy, which is indeed something every administration promises to work on, but very few make progress on because it's either not a priority or something that they turn against, in fact. That's a really important point.

Hannah, you teach at an institution, the Gallatin School, which has a social mission attached to it, as all of our universities do, but particularly the Gallatin School. And I know you think about this, as Kaetan and I do, as a personal issue as well as a historical issue.

What advice do you give to students who will be entering work environments where these issues will come up, whether it's a public institution or a private institution?

What should they take away from this, from your book?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is something that's relevant to everybody, whether or not you work within the national security state. Another way of thinking about whistleblowing historically is that it invokes the idea of a professional ethic, that we all operate in different dimensions of our lives in a democracy.

Yes, we're citizens, if we have that in the United States---eroding privileges of citizenship---but we are also, in many cases, professionals. And whistleblowing is an important way of thinking about what you owe as a professional to both the institution, but also to the public.

And Ralph Nader, who was very influential in helping to popularize the concept of whistleblowing, would underscore that idea of a professional ethic.

And so, at a place in higher education, a lot of what you're doing is inculcating people into the beginnings of what will eventually become a profession.

And as long as we're talking a few weeks before one of the most pivotal elections in American history, it's worth pointing out that these questions of professional ethics are alive and well in COVID, right? The questions about if you work at the CDC or you head the CDC, how long does it take for you to go public with your argument that the Trump administration is politicizing its response to the pandemic?

And we saw that with the resignation of Dr. Rick Bright just this past week, so I think it is relevant.

It is, you know, our project was about national security whistleblowing, but I think there is a takeaway for anybody who's going to operate within any institution that there are going to be these questions about, you know, when and how do you take sensitive information public if you no longer believe it is being handled properly within the institution?

Right. That's very well said. And one of the points I often try to make to students is that, and to other people who are new to the national security world or other settings like that, is that whistleblowing or speaking truth to power seems obvious and easy from the outside.

But when you're inside, it's very hard and you have to have a true sense of your duty and professional ethic to remember your role, because the pressures against dissent, as you point out in this book, are so powerful.

Zachary, as a young person who thinks about these issues and talks about these issues a lot, do you feel that we're preparing young people, or what could we do better to prepare young people for both the professional ethic and responsibility that Hannah articulated, but also the difficulties and challenges in living up to that professional ethic on a day-to-day basis?

I do think we're doing a very good job at teaching young people to embrace this professional ethic. I think young people are wired to, not to be whistleblowers, but to appreciate whistleblowing and dissent. So in that sense, I think that it's a trend that will hopefully continue with my generation.

But I do think the real question is when my generation begins to get into the institutions of power, how much is it that the institutions shape them, or we shape the institutions? And so I think the real question in the next decade or so will be how do the institutions change within the generation, and less how the generation itself changes.

Well, that's very well said, and it comes back to your poem on the pressures and difficulties of moderation.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I think, Hannah and Kaetan, I think your book offers such an important historical perspective on issues that, as you both said, are now ever-present with us, and issues that are actually only going to grow in importance in coming years as we try to figure out what's happened in the last few years in American society, and as we try to move forward as an international community from this moment.

I want to thank you both for joining us today.

Thank you, Jeremi.

Thank you so much for having us.

And I want to encourage all of our listeners to read their wonderful book, Whistleblowing Nation, the History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy. It's available in paperback, and it has really wonderful case studies as well as an overview chapter and a concluding chapter, that I think allow listeners to learn more about the subject, and also dig into topics and figures like Ralph Nader, like Edward Snowden, like Judith Miller, the journalist who was in prison for protecting her sources, and many other cases that I think will be really interesting for our listeners.

I want to thank Zachary for his poem as always, and most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

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