In the Trump Era, Leaking and Whistleblowing Are More Urgent, and More Noble, Than Ever
Glenn Greenwald:
"For the past 15 years, the U.S. government under both parties has
invented whole new methods for hiding what it does behind an
increasingly impenetrable wall of secrecy. From radical new legal
doctrines designed to shield its behavior from judicial review to
prosecuting sources at record rates, more and more government action has
been deliberately hidden from the public.
One of the very few
remaining avenues for learning what the U.S. government is doing —
beyond the propaganda that it wants Americans to ingest and thus
deliberately disseminates through media outlets — is leaking and
whistleblowing. Among the leading U.S. heroes in the war on terror have
been the men and women inside various agencies of the U.S. government
who discovered serious wrongdoing being carried out in secret, and then
risked their own personal welfare to ensure that the public learned of
what never should have been hidden in the first place.
Many of
the important, consequential revelations from the last two
administrations were possible only because of courageous sources who
came forward in this way. It’s how we learned about the abuses of Abu
Ghraib, the existence of torture-fueled CIA “black sites,” the Bush
warrantless eavesdropping program, the wanton slaughter carried out in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the recklessness and deceit at the heart of the
U.S. drone program, the NSA’s secret construction of the largest system
of suspicionless, mass surveillance ever created, and so many other
scandals, frauds, and war crimes that otherwise would have remained
hidden. All of that reporting was possible only because people of
conscience decided to disregard the U.S. government’s corrupt decree
that this information should remain secret, on the ground that
concealing it was designed to protect not national security but rather
the reputations and interests of political officials."
