The battle for the whistleblower : an interview with John Kiriakou

Sahra Essalhi, 2019

The present dissertation explored the whistleblowing phenomenon in the United States and highlighted the case of Edward Snowden. Judging the persona of the whistleblower has always been a matter of discussion in the American community. It is an area of debate where the views vary and oppose one another. The exclusive case of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Snowden made the government project him as a traitor while the public seemed to support his message and consider him a hero. The deliberation about his image kept the momentum of not settling on a final judgment. Within the scope of this dissertation, the attained results affirm that the young whistleblower is a national hero. As reinforcement to the confirmed hypothesis, the current work asserts a collection of convincing arguments to put an end to the long lasting debate about the image of Snowden, proving that whistleblowers are often subject of rejection by the government if their message falsifies in any shape or form the credibility of the system upon which it operates.

First Amendment Studies, 2020

Edward Snowden's revelations ignited public discourse on whistleblowing and whistleblower protection legislation. Given the polemics over whistleblower distinctions throughout mediated exchanges between US officials and the press, this manuscript constitutes a synchronic ideographic analysis of pertinent, recognized ideographs as they were operationalized in relation to whistleblowing within the Snowden discourse. While news media and the public agreed that Snowden operated as a whistleblower, the US government adamantly denied this classification. Instead, US officials manufactured a media trial, and in three distinct phases, purged whistleblowing from the public forum, rhetorically criminalized Snowden as a threat to national <security>, and utilized whistleblowing as a means to propagate the war on <terrorism> and defend covert surveillance. These processes afforded US officials the ability to funnel whistleblowers through private channels, effectively neutralizing the public power of whistleblowers. It is argued that removing whistleblowers from the public forum, while packaged as a protective measure for whistleblowers, operates as a defensive measure for state officials and authoritarianism writ large as it disarms a democratic populace of a foundational tool of free speech and dissent.

Zeszyty Prasoznawcze, 2019

A whistleblower is a person who publicizes and denounces illegal or unfair practices in his workplace. As history has shown, whistleblowers are great sources of information for journalists. A few examples being Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the forefront of the scandal concerning the Pentagon Papers and Mark Felt, who was a whistleblower involved in the Watergate scandal. Without people like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt, it would be impossible to present and explain some of the biggest 20th century political scandals in the United States. The aim of the paper is to analyze the role of key whistleblowers and other key people who played an important role in disclosing that information to journalists through the use of databases and other forms of new technologies. The overall concept of what will be referred to as 'second generation whistleblowing' is the result of observations and analysis of the activities of both whistleblowers as well as dynamically changing journalism, media and information in the 21st century.

Whistleblowing, Communication and Consequences: Lessons from the Norwegian National Lottery , 2021

2011

By submitting this thesis/dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification.

Human Relations, 2017

This paper investigates the role of ‘truth’ as an object of contention within organizations, with specific reference to the ‘politics of truth’ in the WikiLeaks case. For an empirical illus- tration of a ‘truth game’ this paper draws on varied accounts of the WikiLeaks whistleblow- ing website. The paper shows how different ‘truth games’ are mobilised by different organi- zational actors engaged in a politics of truth. The paper demonstrates the existence of differ- ent truth games at work in the WikiLeaks case. It shows WikiLeaks’ profound challenge to hegemonic games of truth in terms of a ‘networked parhessia’, which entails a radical trans- formation of the process of truth telling in support of whistleblowers and in pursuit of an ex- plicitly emancipatory, anarchist political agenda. Networked parhessia provides a new infra- structure to enable a ‘parhessia of the governed.’ This paper demonstrates how WikiLeaks is of singular importance as a case study of organizational resistance in the way it moves be- yond micropolitical acts of resistance, such as whistleblowing, towards an engagement with wider political struggles.

International Dialogue, 2015

2019

As addressed in previous issues of ephemera, in contemporary political economy, the conjunction of openness and closure, visibility and invisibility, and transparency and secrecy of information is precarious (e.g. Bachmann et al., 2017; Curtis and Weir, 2016). Information and ‘truth’ have been turned into objects of contention, and it is increasingly contested what is considered sound information and truth, who has access to which type of information, and who is in the position to shape and control information and promote truth(s) (Munro, 2017). The struggles and complexities of negotiating information, truth and the ‘politics of truth’ (Foucault, 2007) are also accompanied by the fact that, in a society in which mass communication and media gain in importance, organisations have become ‘leaky containers’ (Lyon, 2002). This is evidenced in an exemplary way by the NSA affair and Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance, the WikiLeaks-disclosures, commonly associated with the...

2020

Zusammenfassung: Viel wurde bereits über die autoritären Tendenzen von US-Präsident Donald Trump gesagt. Trumps hetzerische Rhetorik und drakonische Politik enthüllen die Gewalt, welche in dem aktuellen politischen Diskurs und in den gegenwärtigen Machtverhältnissen eingebettet ist. Während Trumps verbale Übergriffe auf Journalist*innen gut dokumentiert sind und weithin diskutiert werden, werden seine Bemühungen-und auch die seines unmittelbaren Vorgängers Barack Obama-Whistleblower*innen zum Schweigen zu bringen, weitaus weniger untersucht. Ausgehend von Diskurstheorie und Diskursanalyse untersucht dieser Beitrag die Erfahrung von drei prominenten Leaker*innen sowie die epistemische Gewalt, die Amerikas Krieg gegen Whistleblower untermauert.

Yale Journal of International Law, 2020

This article discusses the comparative responses from the U.S. and the European Court of Human Rights to the conundrum posed by whistleblowing in national security. Concluding that both systems have focused excessively on the subjective aspect of whistleblowing as a facet of freedom of speech, the article proceeds to propose an innovative, institutional framing of the conflict over public disclosures, building on the transnational precedent that confirms the social value of whistleblowing for democratic self-government and public accountability. Concretely, this means that when state secrecy covers illegal and illegitimate activities of the executive power, then whistleblowers should be entitled to protection against criminal sanctions. Such an approach shifts the criterion of protection from balancing between subjective rights and the public interest, to the legitimacy of the disclosed activity. At the same time, legitimate state secrecy should be protected through sanctions (primarily employment-related and only exceptionally criminal) to leakers.