Why should we not support those who expose wrongdoing? That's the core of the issue you're ignoring here, whistleblowing is not just releasing whatever things you want.

If we as a nation want those activities, then we should make them legal and clearly defined. If not, then stopping those activities from taking place hardly sounds like "treason".

> then we should make them legal and clearly defined

We did, in 1998, in the Public Interest Disclosure Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Disclosure_Act...

And we made things a bit better for NHS Whistleblowers with the Freedom to Speak Up Review and and NHS Improvement (was Monitor) Freedom to Speak Up policy which is compulsory for NHS Trusts

https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/freedom-to-speak-up-whi...

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sir-robert-franci...

Sorry, I think I wasn't clear. I meant making the activities that people blow the whistle on legal/clearly defined as expected practice, rather than whistleblowing itself. If as a country we're OK with doing X and not with people whistleblowing about the country doing X, then we should make X clearly defined as legal.

I don't think we should make these things legal, personally, but I think they should either be legal so whistleblowing doesn't make sense or illegal and whistleblowing is encouraged.

We have made surveillance legal, and provided a framework of protections, under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

Before RIPA we had a bunch of different public bodies using surveillance with little control over what they were doing. After RIPA they can still use surveillance if they follow the correct procedures, and some of the abuses were reigned in.

The police especially have strong powers to use surveillance.

And so something that falls entirely within both the letter and spirit of those regulations wouldn't be something a person would have protections for 'whistleblowing', right? Since it's not really whistleblowing in those cases.

England has some weird bits of law.

http://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/protection-of-official-data...

If you leak data that damages the capability of the armed forces to carry out their tasks the maximum sentence is 2 years.

Compare that to:

http://www.lawcom.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cp230_pr...

> By way of contrast, sections 57 – 59 of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, when commenced, will make it an offence punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment for a Crown servant to disclose without authorisation anything to do with the existence or implementation of particular warrants granted pursuant to the Investigatory Powers Act, including the content of intercepted material and related communications data.

So, while it might be right that official secrets is made more restrictive, but with an increased max sentence, that is a bit worrying because other law tends to anchor to OSA sentences, and we don't want longer sentences all over other data privacy laws.

It's not treason to warn your nation about internal usurpers, and that's what some police were guilty of here. In a democracy, power belongs to the people, and when the government takes that away and operates in excess of their remit, they are the ones who are guilty of treason, not the whistleblower.

Is it treason to expose abuses of power and illegal practices?

Yes it is.

Anyone who works in a classified/borderline field signs multiple documents that skirt around this, limit rights, and especially allow some form of nonjudicial prosecution.

As for that being right or wrong on either side, that is a long and frustrating argument.

Not really. There can be whistleblower protections that supercede other laws and contracts. There can be illegal contracts, which are not valid regardless of whether you sign them. Do you believe every issue is governed by a single law that is set in stone for eternity?

Whistleblower laws haven't been working well. A wrong step could get you excluded from protections, put you in a situation where you can't defend yourself, you could be in a field where other organizations can bully their way in making everything more complex, if you're lucky you could just get kicked out with black marks on your records (with any information related sealed), if you do everything right it could end up pretty much ignored (or lost in paperwork) and similar.

Are laws set in stone for eternity? No.

Must acts that are committed now be judged by the laws that exist now? Yes.

How do laws change? Are the changes ever retroactive? Do laws ever exist on the books longer than they are enforced or considered moral? Seems like everything is black and white for you, but reality rather disagrees.

Anyway, there already are whistleblower protection laws in many places.

I hold this comment to be untrue. It is clear in common-law that our peers may find a law to be untenable.

So you may have some comparisons... How many people were actually killed by the military operations uncovered by snowden/Assange versus how many people were killed by the disclosure itself...