The only difference between a leaker and whistleblower is whether you agree with their motives and reasoning. It’s basically the same difference as between a revolutionary and insurgent or terrorist, or a partisan and rebel. The parallel goes even further because it’s essentially a sacrificial asymmetric resistance from within that is impossible to fully prevent.
We definitely need to remember that character assassinations will be used against anybody that threatens those in power, whether they do so rightly or wrongly (and that the truth often lies in between, though of course it could be much more towards one side than the other). There’s also a really difficult balance to strike because being too quick/willing to blow the whistle, or exposing irrelevant information in a massive dump, could end up doing more harm than good.
At risk of going against the HN grain: in a way, you need whistleblowing to be persecuted to provide a check against it being overused. If it weren’t persecuted then people could casually air way too much dirty laundry or weaponize it for personal reasons (like getting passed up for a promotion, or deciding on something an individual doesn’t like but which isn’t objectively bad). By making it have real and severe consequences, you need to have a very strong personal conviction that the truth outweighs the negative personal impact, which biases whistleblowers towards being moralistic (or mentally unwell). That isn’t to excuse the US government’s behavior though, I think the right thing to do would be to excuse the individual cases where it turns out the whistleblowing was necessary post-hoc, which had not often been done.
To give an example of what I’m talking about, consider what happened to Google in the past 10 years. Google for a long time marketed itself as a strongly moralistic company that wanted its employees to be the same. But it grew a lot in terms of headcount and media interest. Many Google projects faced a lot of internal resistance due to the moral implications (eg Dragonfly) but employees took it upon themselves to air the dirty laundry in public earlier than was justified (before it was fully committed and launched) - it’s hard to know if these would have launched without those leaks, but given the strong possibility they may not have, it did a lot of reputational damage just for something that was being considered. And today, you can read many headlines in eg Business Insider like “Google employees shit on Project Y” from people leaking internal e-mail threads and casual discussion groups to media. In that case whistleblowing/leaks are far more damaging and liberally used than they justify, and if people did the same thing to the Us military/intelligence community, it would be completely unable to operate at all.
> The only difference between a leaker and whistleblower is whether you agree with their motives and reasoning.
Well that depends. A lot of times "leakers" have no motives with respect to ethics, or weak ones. Like people who leak features for products for fun, or to thumb their nose at their employer.
We definitely need to remember that character assassinations will be used against anybody that threatens those in power, whether they do so rightly or wrongly (and that the truth often lies in between, though of course it could be much more towards one side than the other). There’s also a really difficult balance to strike because being too quick/willing to blow the whistle, or exposing irrelevant information in a massive dump, could end up doing more harm than good.
At risk of going against the HN grain: in a way, you need whistleblowing to be persecuted to provide a check against it being overused. If it weren’t persecuted then people could casually air way too much dirty laundry or weaponize it for personal reasons (like getting passed up for a promotion, or deciding on something an individual doesn’t like but which isn’t objectively bad). By making it have real and severe consequences, you need to have a very strong personal conviction that the truth outweighs the negative personal impact, which biases whistleblowers towards being moralistic (or mentally unwell). That isn’t to excuse the US government’s behavior though, I think the right thing to do would be to excuse the individual cases where it turns out the whistleblowing was necessary post-hoc, which had not often been done.
To give an example of what I’m talking about, consider what happened to Google in the past 10 years. Google for a long time marketed itself as a strongly moralistic company that wanted its employees to be the same. But it grew a lot in terms of headcount and media interest. Many Google projects faced a lot of internal resistance due to the moral implications (eg Dragonfly) but employees took it upon themselves to air the dirty laundry in public earlier than was justified (before it was fully committed and launched) - it’s hard to know if these would have launched without those leaks, but given the strong possibility they may not have, it did a lot of reputational damage just for something that was being considered. And today, you can read many headlines in eg Business Insider like “Google employees shit on Project Y” from people leaking internal e-mail threads and casual discussion groups to media. In that case whistleblowing/leaks are far more damaging and liberally used than they justify, and if people did the same thing to the Us military/intelligence community, it would be completely unable to operate at all.