Malcolm Gladwell has an article in this month’s New Yorker that dismisses Edward Snowden’s claims to legitimacy and legal protection, while elevating Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers breach to an act of heroism; Gladwell sets out criteria for legitimate whistleblowing that treats Snowden as a “radicalized hacker” and Ellsberg as a “good leaker,” and says that Snowden should have gone through official channels, rather than disclosing to journalists.
Like many establishment figures who seek to (literally or figuratively) assassinate Snowden, Gladwell puts the “good leaking” in the safe and distant past, and insists that modern leakers are just doing it wrong – they should be like Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated DC insider who rubbed elbows with Kissinger.
The problem is that the Ellsberg method that Gladwell invoked is a gross misrepresentation of what Ellsberg actually did; and it’s also a denial of what has actually happened to the whistleblowers who tried the method Gladwell described. NSA whistleblowers who went through channels – Thomas Drake, William Binney, and others – were targeted for legal retaliation and had their lives ruined.
For outsiders, the story isn’t much better. In a fantastic essay on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks blow, executive director Cindy Cohn describes what happened when Mark Klein, a retired AT&T engineer who had been ordered to build a secret spying room for the NSA to use while tapping into AT&T’s fiber backbone, came to EFF with documentation of what he knew. John Negroponte, then Director of National Intelligence, used his influence to get the LA Times to spike a story on the spying, the US government denied and stonewalled, and the senators whom EFF reached out to strung the organization along, while DoJ lawyers got the courts to keep all of Klein’s evidence under seal for so long that the press stopped reporting on it.
In other words, Gladwell’s theory of “good leaking” is a disaster for actual good leakers. It took Snowden’s amazing act of courage and integrity to get any kind of public debate and action on the US government’s program of illegal mass surveillance.
