Government whistleblowers are increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies.
They’re
ordinary Americans and, like most of us, they carry smartphones that
automatically get backed up to the cloud. When they want to talk to
someone, they send them a text or call them on the phone. They use Gmail
and share memes and talk politics on Facebook. Sometimes they even log
in to these accounts from their work computers.
Then, during the course of their work, they see something disturbing. Maybe it’s that the government often has no idea if the people it kills in drone strikes are civilians. Or that the NSA witnessed a cyberattack against
local election officials in 2016 that U.S. intelligence believes was
orchestrated by Russia, even though the president is always on TV saying
the opposite. Or that the FBI uses hidden loopholes to bypass its own rules against infiltrating political and religious groups. Or that Donald Trump’s associates are implicated in sketchy financial transactions.
So
they search government databases for more information and maybe print
some of the documents they find. They search for related information
using Google. Maybe they even send a text message to a friend about how
insane this is while they consider possible next steps. Should they
contact a journalist? They look up the tips pages
of news organizations they like and start researching how to use Tor
Browser. All of this happens before they’ve reached out to a journalist
for the first time.
Most
people aren’t very aware of it, but we’re all under surveillance.
Telecom companies and tech giants have access to nearly all of our
private data, from our exact physical locations at any given time to the
content of our text messages and emails. Even when our private data
doesn’t get sent directly to tech companies, our devices are still
recording it locally. Do you know exactly what you were doing on your
computer two months ago today at 3:05 p.m.? Your web browser probably
does.
Yet
while we all live under extensive surveillance, for government
employees and contractors — especially those with a security clearance —
privacy is virtually nonexistent. Everything they do on their work
computers is monitored. Every time they search a database, their search
term and the exact moment they searched for it is logged and associated
with them personally. The same is true when they access a secret
document, or when they print anything, or when they plug a USB stick
into their work computer. There might be logs of exactly when an
employee takes screenshots or copies and pastes something. Even when
they try to outsmart their work computer by taking photos directly of
their screen, video cameras in their workplace might be recording their
every move.
Government workers with security clearance promise
“never [to] divulge classified information to anyone” who is not
authorized to receive it. But for many whistleblowers, the decision to
go public results from troubling insights into government activity,
coupled with the belief that as long as that activity remains secret,
the system will not change. While there are some protections for
whistleblowers who raise their concerns internally or complain to
Congress, there is also a long history of those same people being
punished for speaking out.
The
growing use of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that criminalizes the
release of “national defense” information by anyone “with intent or
reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United
States or to the advantage of a foreign nation,” shows how the system is
rigged against whistleblowers. Government insiders charged under the
law are not allowed to defend themselves by arguing that their decision
to share what they know was prompted by an impulse to help Americans
confront and end government abuses. “The act is blind to the possibility
that the public’s interest in learning of government incompetence,
corruption, or criminality might outweigh the government’s interest in
protecting a given secret,” Jameel Jaffer, head of the Knight First
Amendment Institute, wrote recently. “It is blind to the difference between whistle-blowers and spies.”
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