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  One central principle of Serbia’s new whistle-blower laws would have a direct bearing on Snowden’s case. The principle: it is not a crime to report a crime. If a whistle-blower provides evidence that, say, a government official or government agency has engaged in criminal activity, the whistle-blower cannot be prosecuted simply because other laws forbid the disclosure of such activity. This principle in effect opens the door to the “public interest defense” that US law prohibits. If this principle were applied in the United States, a legal proceeding against Snowden could no longer be restricted to the narrow question of whether he had revealed classified information or not. “I’d be thrilled if we could have Serbia’s new whistle-blower law here in the US,” said Devine.

  Meanwhile, public education and mobilization are vital, said Norman Solomon, whose work on behalf of Jeffrey Sterling led to the founding of the nonprofit project ExposeFacts.org. “If people don’t realize how much they owe to whistle-blowers in their own lives, they can overlook how important whistle-blowers are,” Solomon told me. “We want to bring whistle-blowing out of the shadows. It shouldn’t be something that is furtive. We should bring it into the light, encourage and support it financially and through public education and activism.

  “Reforming the role of journalism is critical,” Solomon continued, arguing that, “Whistle-blowers shatter the stenography to power that corporate media often convey. For example, whistle-blowers remind us that governments lie, especially in times of war, whereas Americans usually get quite a different message from the corporate media.”

  Really? Americans don’t know that their government lies?

  “As an abstraction, many Americans know the government lies,” Solomon replied. “But people forget it in the heat of the moment, as we saw when the Bush administration invaded Iraq on the basis of false claims about weapons of mass destruction—claims the corporate media, starting with the New York Times, were happy to amplify for months before the invasion. It’s like history starts again and again.”

  Too much of the mainstream media, especially in Washington, is too close to the government, argued Jesselyn Radack, who left GAP to join ExposeFacts.org. Reflecting on her role as an attorney for Snowden, Drake, and other whistle-blowers, Radack told me that the Washington press corps’ tendency to echo rather than question government officials meant that “the US government has the biggest megaphone in the world. If they want there to be a smear piece on Snowden, all they have to do is make a phone call and their story is on the front page of the New York Times or some other major outlet. Look at the headlines that ran after Snowden was stranded in the Moscow airport: ‘Snowden Flees to Russia.’ Not a single mainstream journalist called me, his attorney, to ask if that was true. If they had, I would have explained that he only ended up there because the US government cancelled his passport. Nobody bothered to ask.”

  Excessive closeness to the government not only complicates the news media’s First Amendment role as a watchdog on government, it also can deter whistle-blowers from providing the kind of eye-catching exposés that attract audiences. Remember, this is what cost the New York Times the Snowden scoop. As Snowden told a Times reporter after the fact, the clincher was the newspaper’s withholding, at the behest of the Bush administration, the publication of James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s article. Snowden would not trust his story, and his life, to the Times, despite its reach and influence. The Times’ loss was the Guardian’s gain—a lesson for journalists and their executive superiors everywhere.

  Where Were the Exxon Whistle-blowers?

  As I finished writing this book, a blockbuster news development offered valuable lessons about whistle-blowing. Two journalistic investigations published in fall 2015 revealed that Exxon had been lying for decades about global warming. According to exposés compiled separately by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, Exxon’s top executives and its board of directors knew perfectly well by the mid-1980s that burning oil, gas, and other fossil fuels would raise global temperatures and unleash impacts—harsher heat waves, deeper droughts, stronger storms, faster sea level rise—that could imperil humanity’s future. The oil giant’s leaders knew these things because Exxon’s own scientists had researched the issue extensively and reported their findings repeatedly. And management took the findings seriously; it even adjusted corporate practices. For example, when constructing new transportation facilities, Exxon engineers took the anticipated future sea level rise into account.

  Subsequent reporting by Inside Climate News revealed that Exxon was not alone: Other oil companies were also aware of climate science in the 1980s—and likewise took steps to protect their own investments from the consequences.

  But that was in private. Publicly, Exxon and its oil industry peers denied what they knew about climate change. Company executives and spokesmen insisted that the science behind man-made climate change was highly uncertain and therefore should not guide government policy. Exxon (later, ExxonMobil) led the charge. Beginning in 1997, the oil company spent at least $29.9 million to fund public relations groups, lobbying campaigns, and other efforts to portray man-made climate change as a “premise that … defies common sense” as Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil’s chairman and CEO, argued in a 1997 speech opposing the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

  Big Oil’s lies had enormous effect. Combined with the political muscle that came from being the richest business enterprise in history, the misinformation Exxon and its corporate brethren peddled over the past three decades was the single most powerful obstacle to vigorous government action against climate change. Big Oil’s influence was most apparent within the Republican Party, where rejection of mainstream climate science became a litmus test that virtually all GOP members of Congress and presidential candidates saluted. If not for this reflexive opposition, the US government would undoubtedly have taken stronger steps, sooner, to limit the fossil fuel burning that drives global warming.

  The chain of causality extended still further, for action by the United States would have broken the stalemate that blocked international climate action for the past twenty-five years. During these years China and other emerging economies repeatedly asked, why should we cut our emissions when the biggest climate polluter on earth, the United States, refuses even to acknowledge the problem?

  As I reported from the UN Paris climate summit in December 2015, the agreement reached there would have been much more ambitious if the US delegation did not have to worry that mandatory emissions cuts and other nonvoluntary measures would qualify the accord as a treaty and thus ensure its rejection by the Republican-dominated US Senate. Likewise, the summit’s laudable goal—to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and “to pursue” a limit of 1.5 C—would be much easier to attain post-Paris if fossil fuel interests and the politicians they buy had not blocked progress for the preceding two decades. Those two decades of emissions had helped to increase the global temperature to 1 degree C above the pre-industrial level, meaning that emissions post-Paris had to fall at a stunning pace.

  “Crimes against humanity.” That’s what Hans Schellnhuber, the German scientist who advised Pope Francis on his 2015 climate change encyclical, Laudato Si, called the actions of climate science deniers and others who deliberately blocked corrective policies. By helping to keep carbon emissions rising for decades beyond when the company’s own scientists knew that this invited disaster, Exxon’s leaders helped to destabilize the climate that every person on earth relies upon for food, water, and other essentials of life. If that isn’t a crime, what is?

  As the father of an eleven-year-old daughter, I share Schellnhuber’s view, and his anger. I know other parents who feel the same. Civil society—parents, climate activists, faith organizations, local and state governments, educational institutions, businesses and other commercial enterprises, and ordinary people throughout the world—are now called upon to push national g
overnments to honor the Paris Agreement. The Paris outcome is one of numerous recent bright spots suggesting it is still possible to secure a livable planet for our children. Nevertheless, it remains a crime that we were put in this situation in the first place so that special interests could maximize their already bountiful profits.

  Here’s the whistle-blower connection: these crimes on the part of Exxon and other oil companies might have been halted if the outside world had learned about them sooner. If a whistle-blower from within Exxon—say, one of the scientists who did the research documenting that man-made global warming was real—had come forward to reveal these truths back in the 1980s, Exxon and the rest of Big Oil might not have gotten away with their treachery. If an Exxon insider had spoken out, the way tobacco industry scientist Jeffrey Wigand spoke out, things might have been different. The US media would have been less likely to fall for the lie that climate science was uncertain. Smarter news coverage would have kindled greater public awareness and calls for action. Government officials would have been more likely to treat climate change as the emergency it was, rather than to dodge, weave, deny, and delay. The world would be a safer place today.

  Like Ray McGovern’s guilty feelings about the names of tens of thousands of dead American troops on the left side of the Vietnam War Memorial, are there now former Exxon employees who regret not coming forward to expose their industry’s lies? If there are, they haven’t shared those feelings publicly. But they must live with their choice, and with our collective knowledge of it.

  So anyone who thinks that whistle-blowing is a fool’s errand or a fringe concern, please think again. That is not the lesson of the Exxon episode, or of the travails of Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, John Crane, and the many other whistle-blowers featured in this book.

  The truth, it seems to me, is that our lives, our liberty, and much else may depend on whistle-blowing and the tribe of singularly brave, eccentric, morally stubborn individuals who give it life. Whistle-blowers sometimes break the law. They are not always easy to deal with, and they are not always right. But without them, society—which is to say, all of us—risks tumbling into one disaster after another. Bless them, I say. Bless them, warts and all.

  Endnotes

  Most of the direct quotations contained in this book come from interviews the author conducted with the sources named. Only when this is not the case—for example, when a quotation was first reported by a news article—is a reference cited in these Notes. The same rule applies to general statements of fact, with an additional qualifier: if such statements derive from the author’s interviews, or if the source of a statement is made clear in the narrative, no citation is give; if the statement derives from another source, that source is listed below.

  Pg. 3: “It’s fair to say …”: AJ+, August 5, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKnnnufSYLo/

  Pg. 5: “political romantic …”: New York Times, June 8, 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/books/review/no-place-to-hide-by-glenn-greenwald.html

  Pg. 7: “I only have one fear …”: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and U.S. Surveillance State, by Glenn Greenwald, (New York: Picador, 2014), page 19

  Pg. 9: “If you seek to help …”: Ibid, page 32

  Pg. 11: “a coward [who] betrayed his country …”: NBC News, May 28, 2014: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/kerry-snowden-coward-traitor-n116366

  Pg. 12: “I must admit, in my darker moments …”: The Hill, October 3, 2013: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/326315-former-nsa-chief-jokes-about-putting-snowden-on-kill-list

  Pg. 12: James Woolsey’s made his death sentence comments on CNN, November 19, 2015: http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/11/19/ex-cia-director-james-woolsey-edward-snowden-intvw-nr.cnn

  Pg. 12: “I would love to put a bullet …”: BuzzFeed, January 16, 2014: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edward-snowden-dead#.rtMV5Q449Y

  Pg. 12: “Snowden?’ they asked …”: The Nation, October 10, 2014: http://www.thenation.com/article/edward-snowden-speaks-sneak-peek-exclusive-interview/

  Pg. 13: Kerry, Ellsberg comments about Snowden: Huffington Post, May 29, 2014: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/29/daniel-ellsberg-john-kerry-snowden_n_5412980.html

  Pg. 18: “I mean, who would believe …”: New York Times, August 13, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/us/nsa-leaks-make-plan-for-cyberdefense-unlikely.html

  Pg. 19: “The real issue is not just privacy …”: Comments at the new School in New York City and recorded on video for “Times Talks”: http://timestalks.com/laura-poitras-glenn-greenwald-edward-snowden.html

  Pg. 25: Coleen Rowley’s corrective letter: The Guardian, May 25, 2002: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/25/afghanistan.usa

  Pg. 29: Hayden’s Senate testimony is reference in The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by James Bamford, (New York: Anchor, 2009), pg. 122

  Pg. 32: “I’m sorry about that …”: Poitras’s documentary The Program: http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001733041/the-program.html

  Pg. 35: “Baginski reportedly told him …”: “The Secret Sharer,” by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, May 23, 2011: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer

  Pg. 38: “The case of Thomas Drake represented …”: AJ+, August 5, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKnnnufSYLo/

  Pg. 41: Bradley Manning’s leak to Wikileaks was detailed in “The Trials of Bradley Manning,” by Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone, March 14, 2013: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-trials-of-bradley-manning-20130314

  Pg. 42: “I want people to see …” Ibid.

  Pg. 49: Katharine Gun’s whistle-blowing was described in The Guardian, January 31, 2016: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/31/katharine-gun-observer-iraq-war-whistleblower-hollywood-film-official-secrets

  Pg. 50: “The point is not …”: The Washington Post, March 7, 1979: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/03/07/tapes-show-nixon-role-in-firing-of-ernest-fitzgerald/048cd88e-60e5-498d-a8e2-e3b39461356b/

  Pg. 51: Charles Grassley comments about Earnest Fitzgerald on Capitol Words: http://capitolwords.org/date/2006/03/06/S1780-2_honoring-a-ernest-fitzgerald/

  Pg. 52: “Other notable case” paragraph’s whistleblower stories were told in The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide, by Tom Devine and Tarek F. Maassarani (San Francisco: Berett-Koehler, 2011), pg. 13

  Pg. 52: “For those who think”: Ibid, pg. 18

  Pg. 62: Ralph Nader’s coining of the term “whistleblower” was reported in the Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2013: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323368704578596083294221030

  Pg. 63: GAP’s strategies for “turning information into power” were described in The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide, by Tom Devine and Tarek F. Maassarani (San Francisco: Berett-Koehler, 2011), op. cit., pgs. 5 and 15

  Pg. 69: The account of the Zimmer nuclear power plant is based on the author’s interviews with Devine and Clark for The New York Times, January 22, 1984: http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/22/us/nearly-completed-nuclear-plant-will-be-converted-to-burn-coal.html

  Pg. 75: The story of Dr. Carl Teleen was told in Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest, by Charles Peters and Taylor Branch (New York: Praeger, 1972), pg. 244-245

  Pg. 84: The New York Times published its Editor’s Note about its inaccurate coverage of the build up to the Iraq war May 26, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html?_r=0

  Pg. 85: My scoop was published in Vanity Fair, November 2003, “Nuclear Insecurity”: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/11/whistle-blowers-on-vulnerable-us-nuclear-facilities

  Pg. 86: “I have values …”: The Whistleblower’s Survival Guide: Courage Without Martyrdom, Tom Devine (Washington, D.C.: The Fund for constitutional government, 1997), pg. 23

  Pg. 94: Snowden’s and Ellsberg’s comments the Hope X conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YPdOOoNmYSQ

  Pg. 100: Gustav von Rudel’s affidavit providing a minute-by-minute eyewitness account of the Beer Hall Putsch—eight typewritten, single spaced pages in German—was submitted to the Munchner Merkur newspaper of Munich but inexplicably never published. Crane shared a copy of the affidavit, and an accompanying telegram from von Rudel affirming its authenticity, with the author, who can share it with anyone wishing to verify my greatly abbreviated summary of its contents. The affidavit and telegram are also published in full in an Appendix to the German edition of Bravehearts, issued by Hanser Verlag of Munich.

  Pg. 104: “Under the current system …”: http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-talks-about-anniversary-whistleblower-protection-act

  Pg. 108; Congress’s transfer of NSA’s spending authority was reported by The Baltimore Sun, July 20, 2003: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2003-07-20/news/0307200276_1_nsa-eavesdropping-agency/2; Congress’s halting of the Traiblazer program was reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, op. cit.

  Pg. 109: Background on Dan Meyer and the USS Iowa tragedy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_P._Meyer

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion

  Pg. 117: “We are now becoming a police state …”: “The United States of Secrets,” Frontline, May 13, 2014: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/

  Pg. 121: “[President Obama] could end mass surveillance …”: Times Talks, op cit.

  Pg. 122: “Baldly lying to the public”: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding (New York: Vintage, 2014), page 52

  Pg. 124: The FBI agents’ views about Petraeus were reported in The Washington Post, April 23, 2014: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/petraeus-set-to-plead-guilty-to-mishandling-classified-materials/2015/04/22/3e6dbf20-e8f5-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html