Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

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.

Yeah I get that it's more hip to be cynical. The problem is that cynicism is often an unconsidered attitude without any real substance or rigorous argument behind it.

> Why do you feel it needed to be exposed?

Well because it is basically at scale warrantless wiretapping, of almost every major communication platform(technically its on the internet, and not the phone system, I know).

You can feel free not to care if the government has backdoor access, without a warrant, to every major US tech company, I guess.

But a lot of people did not know that the government had this, and thus why they are glad that it was exposed.

If you don't care about at scale warrentless wiretapping, feel free to just say so. Just say "I don't care if the government has a warrant or not, before they spy on every major communication platform".

Other people, though, actually care about warrants and privacy protections, from the government.

When I worked in a large-ish organization in the late 1990's, there were some "interesting" hiring practices and office dynamics, to say the least. Our organization had a phone hotline and an email address to raise concerns. I decided to send a short, objective message after observing the negative effects of these practices on the workplace morale.

My message was then promptly sent to the very same hiring manager running the show, and the local director who was equally involved. Obviously, nothing positive came out of it, and there was a fair amount of unpleasantness afterwards.

Back then I was younger and somewhat naïve, but fortunately that mindset changed quickly. None of these hotlines or whistleblower mailboxes work as intended. More often than not, you just end up creating trouble for yourself and for others with a net negative outcome while the original problem remains unaddressed.

The people in the positions of power have everything going for them, it's in their interests to maintain status-quo and expand their spheres of influence. The last thing they want is for an upstart whistleblower to try and make a change.

weren't there some intelligence operations during the vietnam war where "benign" peanut butter orders predicted troop movements?