When is something whistleblowing, when is it a leak, when is it malicious, and when is it espionage? It's easy to allow leaks about illegal acts, but if you start allowing leaks about secret but legal acts too, then things get blurry.
I personally don't think a government, ultimately a servant of the people, should be allowed to keep secrets from the people, but that's currently legal for e.g. military reasons, and thus needs to be considered.
Imagine for a second a parallel universe where the government wasn't evil, and while some of the released documents was showing illegal activity, others did not and in fact contained secret information about national security matters where releasing the information undermines the work (e.g. Russia/China/... monitoring, intercept measures, etc.).
> So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
The legal system would be fundamentally broken if you could evade judgement by going into hiding, regardless of reason.
Snowden should have been pardoned a long time ago, but his time in hiding is and should be inconsequential from a legal standpoint until laws are changed and pardons are made. It's up to the citizens of the U.S. to fix their country and welcome him home.
Indeed, but the enemy usually has the intelligence services to know it anyway, leaving your citizens uninformed as the only real side-effect.
I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore. On the other hand, the secrecy is used for evil, such as keeping citizens in the dark around government plans to control popular opinion in their favor, falsely positioning themselves as the people's superiors.
Depends per subject and intelligence service and enemy (there is more than one).
> I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore.
Why?
Think of it this way. I'm Dutch. Our secret services hacked into the GRU's camera system. This allowed attribution. Our secret services also did the physical last mile infiltration of Stuxnet.
Did I, as random Dutch citizen have to know this? No. As the enemy does not know it, and will know it when the Dutch population knows. These are two examples where a need to know basis makes sense, and is very limited.
By contrast, with something like a secret mass surveillance program, there is no "end" where you keep something a secret for 18 months but then everybody finds out about it through official channels, so things like that don't get to be a secret. One way or another the public needs to timely find out what's being done in their name.
Isn’t this the opposite of what it should be? How else can we hold government accountable?
^^^Exactly THIS ! Missing the "Forrest for the tree's ! One day our kids will asked us:
Kids:"Why did you guys let it happen ?"
Parents: "Oh we wanted to stop them, but the people that could, they were not completing the correct forms !... So you know, better let the gov just kept on spying on us all... Can't have improper forms now !"
What you refer to as 'perfection' I would call 'reasonable due diligence and discretion'. If you don't know what's in the files you're releasing, you don't even know if you're providing sufficient information to prove your point. If a whistleblower can release any amount of unrelated information, whistleblowing becomes indistinguishable from espionage.
> Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
The requirement to notify congress would appear to give potential high-level whistleblowers a way to field complaints to sympathetic ears. Among the 538 representatives and senators, there are plenty of folks who would champion this cause while working to secure the anonymity of the whistleblower.
> 1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
Requirement of perfection and a superhuman level of ability to sift through more information than any individual could before sharing it with anyone who could help with doing so.
> Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress.
Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
Moreover, "official channels" even when they work don't disclose the existence of the program to the public, which is a necessary public good, because otherwise even if that gets it shut down, the structures and incentives that led to its creation aren't addressed and it just happens again until they get it running with a group of people not willing to risk their own careers to report it up the chain.
> There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it
So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?