Annotations for Speakers: Hannah Gurman

Thank you for having me.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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?

Thank you so much for having us.