[June 13th marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]
On historical
parallels that contextualize two contrasting sides to the 21st
century whistleblower, and how to reconcile the pair.
Not long after
CIA and NSA subcontractor Edward
Snowden revealed classified documents to a group of journalists in an
effort to blow
the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional government programs, the U.S. Department
of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage
Act of 1917. In the excerpts from my
new book in that last hyperlinked post, I argue at length for the multiple
layers of exclusionary, discriminatory, mythic patriotism that precipitated and
are embodied by the Espionage Act and its complement, the Sedition Act of 1918;
while many of those elements have been dismantled over the years, others remain
fully in force more than 100 years later. Those layers help remind us that “espionage”
has always been tied to xenophobic and bigoted visions of particular American communities;
while there’s no doubt that Snowden knew the risks
he was taking when he released the documents (as all this week’s whistleblowers
did when they took their actions), we need to be very careful to go along with
charges under the Espionage Act without a full engagement with the histories
surrounding that law.
At the same
time, Snowden’s actions after he blew the whistle, and for the more than 8
years since, link him to a distinct historical context: the connections between
American spies and Russia. The Russia to which Snowden fled seeking
asylum in June 2013 and where he has remained ever since, gaining permanent
resident status in October 2020, is not the Cold War Soviet Union with
which alleged spies like Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg worked, of course. But not only is Vladimir Putin’s
Russia just as much of a hostile adversary to the US on the world stage, it’s
also one that has repeatedly and prominently taken covert action against the
US, including the repeated
efforts at election hacking that have taken place during Snowden’s time in
Russia. Snowden
has claimed that he is not cooperating with Putin’s Russian government and
intelligence services, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. But I likewise
have no reason to disbelieve that Putin sees Snowden as a
potential ally, as someone who is at least similarly opposed to the US
government; authoritarian regimes don’t generally grant permanent residency to
those they view as dissidents, after all.
It might seem
that these two historical contexts can’t comfortably coexist—the first
challenges the very idea of “espionage” as it’s been constructed; while the
second notes that some Americans have apparently worked as spies on behalf of
one of the nation’s most longstanding global foes. I can’t lie, Edward Snowden does
indeed seem both to contain and to produce conflicted and contradictory layers.
But so does American history, not only overall but also and especially when it
comes to nuanced categories like spies—and, at least a good bit of the time, whistleblowers.
It’s very important not to conflate those two categories, and I’m not in any
way trying to do so here. But in the case of a whistleblower like Snowden from
within the intelligence community, and one who subsequently moved to another
nation whose intelligence community has been as opposed to the US’s as any over
this decade, it’s fair to say that the category of spy is also part of the conversation—which
then requires us to grapple with the history of that category and its
construction, as well as with however we might or might not apply it to aspects
of Snowden’s ongoing story. I don’t have any answers here, but rather complicated
and crucial questions that this particular 21st century
whistleblower forces us to engage.
Last
WhistleblowerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?
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