What Whistleblowing Really Says About the State of American Democracy

In just the last year, two major leaks sprung that illuminated the innermost workings of US government. The first, from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, detailed the surveillance agencies various past, present, and future data mining programs. The other, published by WikiLeaks, revealed a draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership's provisions on intellectual property.

Add to this list the recent imprisonments of both Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, two very different whistleblowers, and there can be no doubt that 2013 was a pivotal year in the free information, anti-secrecy war.

While whistleblowing is now rightly front and center in the public consciousness, it does raise a rather interesting point: Is it troubling that public discourse has to rely on whistleblowing in the first place? In other words, is it a sad commentary on the state of American democracy that we rely almost solely on the Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens among us?

This reality was set in relief yesterday in a Reddit AMA hosted by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Citizen, TechDirt, and OpenMedia.ca. The groups’ AMA hoped to create a dialogue about WikiLeaks' recent release of TPP's copyright provisions. Senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch are currently fast-tracking TPP through Congress, allowing trade negotiations to secretly proceed with non-elected officials, making the WikiLeaks release all the more critical to public copyright dialogue.

One Reddit user, Sighfur, asked the AMA hosts, “What is the most unsettling part of this release to you all?” Clearly, the question was aimed at the the draft's text, but it opened up a much wider point of discussion for EFF's Parker Higgins.

“Speaking personally—that it happened this way at all,” Higgins replied. “We're now at the point where two of the biggest issues that EFF covers—NSA surveillance, and global intellectual property and internet regulation—now rely in large part on the work of whistleblowers for public debate and analysis.”

Implicit in this pro-whistleblower argument is that if government were simply more open and less secretive, then we wouldn't need whistleblowers in the first place. But, this truth seems to have been lost in the public dialogue over NSA surveillance and international copyright trade agreements.

Whistleblowing is fundamentally reactive. Only those secrets that can be pried open are the ones available to the embedded leaker. Thus, whistleblowing, while effective, can never truly take the place of proactively open governance. Which is what Higgins is getting at in his AMA response.

Even if we give our political leaders the benefit of the doubt—that the NSA is after terrorists, and that TPP isn't “extreme internet censorship”—it's still completely reasonable to demand public input on these issues.

As I recently wrote, the NSA's surveillance has so weakened the internet's fundamental architecture that we are now at greater risk of malicious hacking than ever before. And a few international trade representatives hashing out the internet's future though IP negotiations behind closed doors is also troubling. In both cases, those who makes use of or create new technologies should have a say in the future of technology, from data exposure straight on to copyright. This is currently not the case.

Even with the release valve offered by whistleblowers, the public is still at a significant disadvantage in influencing policy. If discourse were truly open and proactive, not so reactive, maybe this wouldn't be our reality. Then, of course, we'd have to reckon with that other reality: our vast remove from the vortex of power in Washington, where 535 legislators and one president (plus lobbyists of all stripes) make decisions for nearly 300 million Americans spread across 3,794,101 square miles of earth. When these numbers are considered, effective governance sounds virtually impossible, and yet here we are.

And if the US keeps persecuting its own whistleblowers, like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden (both of whom had security clearances), then the Jeremy Hammond variety of whistleblowing, which thrives on illegal intrusion, could become the norm. Short of revolution, this type of whistleblowing might just be our only hope.