Truly
unauthorized disclosures are necessarily an act
of resistance — that is, if they’re not done
simply for press consumption, to fluff up the
public appearance or reputation of an
institution. However, that doesn’t mean they all
come from the lowest working level. Sometimes
the individuals who step forward happen to be
near the pinnacle of power. Ellsberg was in the
top tier; he was briefing the secretary of
defense. You can’t get much higher, unless you
are the secretary of defense, and the incentives
simply aren’t there for such a high-ranking
official to be involved in public interest
disclosures because that person already wields
the influence to change the policy directly.
At the
other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior
enlisted soldier, who was much nearer to the
bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the
professional career path. I sat down at the
table with the chief information officer of the
CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief
technology officer when they were publicly
making statements like “We try to collect
everything and hang on to it forever,” and
everybody still thought that was a cute business
slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems
they would use to do precisely that. I wasn’t
briefing the policy side, the secretary of
defense, but I was briefing the operations side,
the National Security Agency’s director of
technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all
levels of insiders to reveal information, even
at great risk to themselves, so long as they can
be convinced that it is necessary to do so.
Reaching those individuals, helping them realize
that their first allegiance as a public servant
is to the public rather than to the government,
is the challenge. That’s a significant shift in
cultural thinking for a government worker today.
I’ve
argued that whistleblowers are elected by
circumstance. It’s not a virtue of who you are
or your background. It’s a question of what you
are exposed to, what you witness. At that point
the question becomes Do you honestly believe
that you have the capability to remediate the
problem, to influence policy? I would not
encourage individuals to reveal information,
even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe
they can be effective in doing so, because the
right moment can be as rare as the will to act.
This
is simply a pragmatic, strategic
consideration. Whistleblowers are outliers of
probability, and if they are to be effective as
a political force, it’s critical that they
maximize the amount of public good produced from
scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I
came to understand how one strategic
consideration, such as waiting until the month
before a domestic election, could become
overwhelmed by another, such as the moral
imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a
global trend that had already gone too far. I
was focused on what I saw and on my sense of
overwhelming disenfranchisement that the
government, in which I had believed for my
entire life, was engaged in such an
extraordinary act of deception.
Change
has to flow from the bottom to the top.
At the
heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing
is a radicalizing event — and by “radical” I
don’t mean “extreme”; I mean it in the
traditional sense of radix, the root of
the issue. At some point you recognize that you
can’t just move a few letters around on a page
and hope for the best. You can’t simply report
this problem to your supervisor, as I tried to
do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous.
They think about the structural risk to their
career. They’re concerned about rocking the boat
and “getting a reputation.” The incentives
aren’t there to produce meaningful reform.
Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to
flow from the bottom to the top.
As
someone who works in the intelligence community,
you’ve given up a lot to do this work. You’ve
happily committed yourself to tyrannical
restrictions. You voluntarily undergo
polygraphs; you tell the government everything
about your life. You waive a lot of rights
because you believe the fundamental goodness of
your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the
sacred. It’s a just cause.
And
when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an
edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core
consequence of the program — that the government
is subverting the Constitution and violating the
ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to
make a decision. When you see that the program
or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and
obligations that you’ve sworn to your society
and yourself, then that oath and that obligation
cannot be reconciled with the program. To which
do you owe a greater loyalty?
One
of the extraordinary things about the
revelations of the past several years, and their
accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in
the context of the United States as the
“uncontested hyperpower.” We now have the
largest unchallenged military machine in the
history of the world, and it’s backed by a
political system that is increasingly willing to
authorize any use of force in response to
practically any justification. In today’s
context that justification is terrorism, but not
necessarily because our leaders are particularly
concerned about terrorism in itself or because
they think it’s an existential threat to
society. They recognize that even if we had a
9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing
more people to car accidents and heart disease,
and we don’t see the same expenditure of
resources to respond to those more significant
threats.
What it
really comes down to is the political reality
that we have a political class that feels it
must inoculate itself against allegations of
weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of
the politics of terrorism — of the charge that
they do not take terrorism seriously — than they
are of the crime itself.
As a
result we have arrived at this unmatched
capability, unrestrained by policy. We have
become reliant upon what was intended to be the
limitation of last resort: the courts. Judges,
realizing that their decisions are suddenly
charged with much greater political importance
and impact than was originally intended, have
gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to
avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of
the executive in the national security context
and setting restrictive precedents that, even if
entirely proper, would impose limits on
government for decades or more. That means the
most powerful institution that humanity has ever
witnessed has also become the least restrained.
Yet that same institution was never designed to
operate in such a manner, having instead been
explicitly founded on the principle of checks
and balances. Our founding impulse was to say,
“Though we are mighty, we are voluntarily
restrained.”
When
you first go on duty at CIA headquarters,
you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to
government, not to the agency, not to secrecy.
You swear an oath to the Constitution. So
there’s this friction, this emerging contest
between the obligations and values that the
government asks you to uphold, and the actual
activities that you’re asked to participate in.
These
disclosures about the Obama administration’s
killing program reveal that there’s a part of
the American character that is deeply concerned
with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of
power. And there is no greater or clearer
manifestation of unchecked power than assuming
for oneself the authority to execute an
individual outside of a battlefield context and
without the involvement of any sort of judicial
process.
Traditionally, in the context of military
affairs, we’ve always understood that lethal
force in battle could not be subjected to ex
ante judicial constraints. When armies are
shooting at each other, there’s no room for a
judge on that battlefield. But now the
government has decided — without the public’s
participation, without our knowledge and consent
— that the battlefield is everywhere.
Individuals who don’t represent an imminent
threat in any meaningful sense of those words
are redefined, through the subversion of
language, to meet that definition.
Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its
way home, along with the technology that enables
officials to promote comfortable illusions about
surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance.
Take, for instance, the Holy Grail of drone
persistence, a capability that the United States
has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy
solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air
for weeks without coming down. Once you can do
that, and you put any typical signals collection
device on the bottom of it to monitor,
unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example,
the different network addresses of every laptop,
smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a
particular device is in what city, but you know
what apartment each device lives in, where it
goes at any particular time, and by what route.
Once you know the devices, you know their
owners. When you start doing this over several
cities, you’re tracking the movements not just
of individuals but of whole populations.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but
it’s not American.
By
preying on the modern necessity to stay
connected, governments can reduce our dignity to
something like that of tagged animals, the
primary difference being that we paid for the
tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like
fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level
it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot
imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted.
It will be limited to the war zones at first, in
accordance with our customs, but surveillance
technology has a tendency to follow us home.
Here we
see the double edge of our uniquely American
brand of nationalism. We are raised to be
exceptionalists, to think we are the better
nation with the manifest destiny to rule. The
danger is that some people will actually believe
this claim, and some of those will expect the
manifestation of our national identity, that is,
our government, to comport itself accordingly.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s
not American. It is in this sense that the act
of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act
of political resistance. The whistleblower
raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting
the legacy of a line of Americans that begins
with Paul Revere.
The
individuals who make these disclosures feel so
strongly about what they have seen that they’re
willing to risk their lives and their freedom.
They know that we, the people, are ultimately
the strongest and most reliable check on the
power of government. The insiders at the highest
levels of government have extraordinary
capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous
access to influence, and a monopoly on violence,
but in the final calculus there is but one
figure that matters: the individual citizen.
And
there are more of us than there are of them.
From
The Assassination Complex:
Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare
Program by Jeremy Scahill and the
staff of The Intercept,
with a foreword by Edward Snowden and afterword
by Glenn Greenwald, published by
Simon & Schuster.
