Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/29/is-that-what-ppl-do.html
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this century’s most consequential whistleblower.
Now he’s got some competition!
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Snowden, Lethem, Sheckley - three personal heroes. Oh boy.
If you mean the one who works for the CIA, um, how bout we think again about that word (whistleblower) that everyone is using.
Snowden qualifies. I think whoever this CIA employee is doesn’t.
Snip:
In all seriousness, even to call this spook a “whistleblower” is ridiculous on its face. You don’t get to call someone from the US intelligence community a whistleblower unless they are actually whistleblowing on the US intelligence community. That’s not a thing. A CIA officer who exposes information about government officials is an operative performing an operation unless proven otherwise, because that’s what the CIA does; it liberally leaks information wherever it’s convenient for CIA agendas while withholding all other information behind a veil of government secrecy.
A CIA officer who exposes information about CIA wrongdoings without the CIA’s permission is a whistleblower. A CIA officer who exposes information about someone else is just a spook doing spook things. You can recognize the latter by the way the mass media supports, applauds and employs them. You can recognize the former by the way they have been persecuted, imprisoned, and/or died under mysterious circumstances.
But if you listen to the billionaire media, we should be calling this CIA officer a whistleblower, we should be enraged at The New York Times for exposing that CIA officer’s identity, and we should be raising a small fortune on GoFundMe for “legal aid” that this CIA officer will never need.
"The idea that the media needs to ‘protect’ a high-level CIA officer making explosive claims about the president, which have now been used as the basis for impeachment proceedings, is such an insane perversion of journalistic ethics,” journalist Michael Tracey tweeted today on this new development.
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I have not finished Ed’s book. TBH, the first part was boring because it’s fairly typical for a young hacker. (Also I have been bad about posting on THESE VERY FORUMS when I should be AVOIDING SCREENS)
Gladwell is bad, which doesn’t necessarily mean the book is good… but it’s a signal worth account for 
Yes, we can’t use a loose colloquial word like whistleblower unless we have the correct ideological interpretation.
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Snowden should really get a Nobel Peace Prize at some point.
And Good lord why are Cory’s snips so often the least informative part of the referenced article? I’ve noticed it for some time and It’s really odd.
I disagree with that article. This whistleblower is an executive-branch employee reporting unlawful activity by the executive. He reported on activity directly related to his job. He would be subject to retaliation by the executive if not protected.
(From the article):
The political/media class of the United States do not care about whistleblowers. They do not care about truth, and they do not care about justice.
Those are strong, broad opinions, but nothing about them should remove this guy’s whistleblower protections.
Edit: Re-reading the part you posted, that author’s attack on the Trump whistleblower seems incredibly aggressive and irresponsible because it ignores the corroboration we already have of much of the whistleblower report and it plays directly into Republican talking points seeking to discredit the whistleblower. Calling him “an operative performing an operation unless proven otherwise,” when we can actually read the public report and see much of the evidence already (and Democrats are investigating what we don’t have), seems…so strange. What is the author trying to accomplish?
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Getting rid of the CIA, probably
Good luck with that, especially by teaming up with Trump and Fox News
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Um, there would seem to be several senses of the word!
Ah, so Deep Throat wasn’t a whistleblower. Got it.
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Ed will never see the outside of Russia again. He will never be taken back into the fold of America. This noise about his returning and being given a fair trial is just hooey. Once he was on US soil, he would be picked up and never seen again. He spilled the wrong beans on the wrong people to ever get another chance at normalcy. It’s really sad, because he changed our entire perceptual universe where surveillance is concerned. He did us all a huge service at enormous cost to himself.
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Check out the interview with Snowden on Fresh Air. It’s really interesting because he answers a lot of the standard questions/attacks.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/761918152/exiled-nsa-contractor-edward-snowden-i-haven-t-and-i-won-t-cooperate-with-russia
Also, I still remember watching the movie Citizen Four where someone gave Snowden Cory’s book “Little Brother” while he was typing away on a computer with an EFF logo sticker on it.
I told Cory that he should get a blurb from Snowden for the paperback edition.
What the author is trying to accomplish is attention to context. As she wrote,
A CIA officer who exposes information about government officials is an operative performing an operation unless proven otherwise, because that’s what the CIA does; it liberally leaks information wherever it’s convenient for CIA agendas while withholding all other information behind a veil of government secrecy.
If that context – that is, the CIA’s surreptitious and incredibly abusive track record – doesn’t raise a red flag for you, well, I’m sure the CIA appreciates your confidence in it.
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So, this was not a leak to the press, but rather a whistleblower complaint that went through proper channels (to the inspector general and to the chairs of the House & Senate Intelligence Committees). The House Intelligence Committee (i.e., elected officials) then released the unclassified version of the complaint to the press. The author of that piece is simply wrong, according to whistleblower law, when she asserts that this guy was not a “whistleblower.”
It seems like the author wants to make the whistleblower complaint (and by extension, the House investigation) a referendum on some broad issue like, “Has the CIA done bad things in the past?” or “Can any CIA employee be trusted?” That should not be the focus; the focus should be on the facts of Trump’s misconduct. The complaint is just a starting point for the House investigation. Many of the facts recounted in the complaint have already been corroborated (and many are not even disputed). Focusing on the “CIA’s game,” as the author puts it, misses the point of the impeachment inquiry, IMO. Trump’s actions—and those of his underlings—are the point.
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The author is someone who thinks mass uprisings in Hong Kong, Syria, Lybia, Venezuela and Ukraine have actually been part of a neo-colonialist CIA plot. Heck, she seems to think CIA is behind everything:
“Take off the revolutionary’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the terrorist’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the news man’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the filmmaker’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the professor’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the billionaire’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the whistleblower’s mask, and it’s the motherfucking CIA.”
She might be a little on the paranoid side of analysis, IMO.
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