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  But by then Snowden had long since concluded that trying to raise concerns through official channels was a fool’s errand—a guarantee his mission would fail and he would be fired or worse. He explained his reasoning in an interview with the New York Times after going public. At the time, furious government officials and inside-the-Beltway media voices were denouncing Snowden for unilaterally deciding that certain types of classified information should be made public. If Snowden had concerns about the legality of the NSA’s surveillance programs, the critics argued, he should have conveyed those concerns up the chain of command through the procedures established to handle such matters.

  President Obama made this argument shortly after Snowden’s disclosures began appearing in the Guardian in June 2013. “I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Obama said. “So there were other avenues available for someone whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

  Hillary Clinton voiced the same objection two years later while running for president. Asked at the Democrats’ debate in October 2015 whether Snowden was “a hero or a traitor,” Clinton responded that Snowden had deliberately broken the laws of the United States and should face the consequences. “He could have been a whistleblower,” Clinton said. “He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower. He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that.”

  But Obama’s and Clinton’s statements were supported neither by law nor the real-life stories of whistle-blowers such as Thomas Drake. The protections they claimed awaited Snowden were shams in Drake’s case, and the “positive response” Clinton envisioned for Snowden was anything but positive in Drake’s case. In addition, as a matter of law, Snowden was not protected by federal whistle-blower statutes, because he was an NSA contractor, not an NSA employee.

  For his part, Snowden answered his critics by invoking not only the brutal retaliation mounted against Drake but also simple common sense. It was fine in the abstract to urge becoming a whistle-blower, he told the Times. The problem in his case, Snowden added, was that his superiors at the NSA were the very people who had put in place the surveillance Snowden was protesting; likewise on Capitol Hill, the Senate and House intelligence committees had already been informed of this expanded surveillance and had endorsed it. “The system does not work,” Snowden told the Times. “You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.”

  A second whistle-blowing lesson Snowden drew from Drake’s experience was that taking one’s concerns to the media had to be done transparently and with plenty of ammunition. Apparently a canny student of the relationship among the news media, the public, and the government, Snowden understood that a given administration can usually withstand a negative story if that story remains prominent for only a day or three, as the Baltimore Sun articles based on Drake’s leaks did. What’s required to capture the public’s attention and put real pressure on a government are revelations that pierce the static of the 24/7 media babble and make news not for just a few days but for weeks on end. That in turn requires not just a single exposé, no matter how sensational, but a continuing stream of newsworthy information.

  In this regard and others, Daniel Ellsberg’s example from forty years before was at least as instructive as Drake’s recent troubles. The Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times over a period of six weeks, with one or more articles appearing each day. As one front-page blockbuster after another was published, a narrative began to take shape in the public mind along with a certain dramatic curiosity: what jaw-dropping revelation would appear in tomorrow’s paper, and in the day’s after that? The rest of the media soon followed the Times’ lead, ensuring that the underlying issues were elevated to a prominence that could not be ignored.

  A larger lesson of Ellsberg’s example was that merely talking to a reporter, especially anonymously as Drake had done, did not suffice: a whistle-blower had to provide official documents that concretely proved his accusations. “If you’re going to shoot at the King, you have to shoot to kill,” explained Ellsberg. “The media don’t want to risk angering the King if they don’t have documentary proof.” Thus whistle-blowers who leak to the press “have to put out documents, and they have to put out a lot of them if they want to have a big effect.”

  Yet even as Snowden put out a lot of documents, he eschewed the WikiLeaks model of releasing all information at his disposal. He held back certain documents and removed specifics from others, for fear of revealing information that could put US operatives in danger or imperil legitimate security objectives. Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding reported in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy that Assange had rejected the journalistic convention of not publishing the names of individuals who might be put in danger by such visibility. Assange subsequently denied the charge, portraying it as part of an effort to smear him and WikiLeaks. In the end, the names were not published.

  Unlike WikiLeaks, which seemed to revel in embarrassing the US government, Snowden argued that democratic governance did not mean that the public had to know the names of each surveillance target or intelligence operation of the US government. What it meant was that “we as Americans and members of the global community have a right to know the broad outlines of government policies that have a significant impact on our lives.” Snowden insisted on giving Poitras, Greenwald MacAskill, and their journalistic colleagues at the Guardian and Washington Post final authority to decide which parts of the information he disclosed should and should not be published. For all the attacks that partisans of the status quo leveled on Snowden’s supposed recklessness, his actions were in fact carefully modulated, which strengthened their impact.

  Nothing about Edward Snowden impressed the whistle-blower experts at the Government Accountability Project more than his sheer effectiveness. Yes, Snowden was courageous; yes, his revelations were eye-popping. But during their thirty years at GAP, Tom Devine and Louis Clark had counseled hundreds of whistle-blowers who displayed great courage and brought forward astonishing revelations. What distinguished Snowden was his ability to draw vital lessons from the experiences of previous whistle-blowers and formulate a strategy that avoided the usual bureaucratic traps and delivered extraordinary results. Of course, since releasing classified documents without authorization was unequivocally illegal, Snowden also had to be willing, like Ellsberg before him, to break the law and face the consequences.

  “It comes down to the difference between lawful whistle-blowing and civil disobedience whistle-blowing,” said Devine. “None of the lawful whistle-blowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance activities, and Drake was far from the only one who tried, had any success. They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistle-blowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistle-blowing. And in the national security arena, civil disobedience whistle-blowing is what works.”

  Entering the Tribe

  Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake did eventually meet face to face. It happened in Moscow, on October 7, 2013, when Drake joined a small delegation of whistle-blowing advocates who flew to the Russian capital to present Snowden with an award and express their solidarity with him. “It was an extraordinary moment,” Drake told me. “It was like meeting myself in the mirror. I had always hoped someone like him would come along after me.”

  Snowden has not spoken publicly about meeting Drake, and he did not respond to repeated requests, through intermediaries, to be interviewed for this book. But a second
hand account comes from Ray McGovern, the former CIA agent who criticized Michael Hayden’s support of torture earlier in this book. McGovern was part of the delegation to Moscow.

  “We were picked up in a van and led to what looked like a nice dining room in a restaurant,” he told me. “Ed was waiting there for us. I walked in first and said, ‘Ray McGovern.’ He nodded and said, ‘Hi Ray, I’m Ed.’ Then Ed’s eyes fixed behind me, at Tom Drake. I could tell by his look of wonderment and recognition what Ed was thinking, and I’ve since verified it with him: My god, it’s Tom Drake. I told the press in Hong Kong that it was Tom’s example—four years of the US government threatening to put him in jail—that taught me how to proceed. Here’s Tom Drake, who’s responsible through his own example for me being successful in achieving my mission. Wow, here he is in the flesh. There was this kind of awe, recognition, and deep appreciation. I asked Ed a year later, ‘Was that what you were thinking?’ He said, ‘Yeah, man, you got it.’ You can tell when something profound is happening, and that was one of those moments.”

  Whether they knew it or not, the moment Drake and Snowden blew the whistle they entered a tribe. It was the same tribe Daniel Ellsberg had joined in 1971, the same tribe hundreds of lesser-known individuals joined in the years following. A person entered this tribe not via where he or she was born or to whom. Membership depended on a person’s moral choices and actions. Did the person refuse to stay silent in the face of apparent wrongdoing? Did the person speak out about that wrongdoing, despite the risks? Did the person then refuse to back down in the face of the retaliation he or she invariably encountered from the individuals or institutions accused? This moral stubbornness despite personal cost is in the metaphysical DNA of every member of the tribe known as whistle-blowers.

  “I think it does make sense to think of whistle-blowers as a tribe, because they identify with each other,” said Clark of GAP. “Whatever their particular issues or the outcome of their individual cases, they’ve gone through the same struggles. It’s like Vietnam or World War II veterans, there’s a camaraderie because of what they experienced that provides that glue in their relationship. When [former GAP attorney] Tom Carpenter and I went to Russia in 1999, it was really interesting to meet with Russian whistle-blowers. We’d brought along some American whistle-blowers, and they got unbelievably attached to one another, even though they had huge differences in culture and language and all sorts of things. It was striking.”

  Edward Snowden was the only whistle-blower many people of his generation had ever heard of, but in fact he was only the latest in a long line of individuals who had made similar choices and paid a comparable or greater price in their professional and personal lives. If few attained the level of fame and influence Snowden did, some nevertheless made a substantial difference and even managed to live to tell the tale with only limited cost to their careers and emotional equilibriums.

  Probably the best-known whistle-blowers are those whose stories Hollywood found dramatic enough to turn into motion pictures. The 1973 movie Serpico told the story of Frank Serpico, a New York City cop played by Al Pacino, who blew the whistle on fellow police officers who took bribes, sold drugs, and otherwise made a mockery of their oath to uphold the law. The Insider, released in 1999, focused on Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco company scientist played by Russell Crowe, who revealed that his corporate superiors were deliberately increasing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to addict customers; Pacino appeared in this movie too as a 60 Minutes producer who put Wigand’s story on the air, despite his own superiors getting cold feet. Silkwood (1984) featured Meryl Streep in the title role of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear industry worker who was killed when her car was run off the road the night she was on her way to tell a New York Times reporter about unsafe working conditions at her plant.

  In Great Britain, one of the most consequential whistle-blowers of recent years, Katharine Gun, was likewise slated to have her story told on the big screen. Gun was working inside the British equivalent to the NSA—the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ—in 2003 when she received an email directing the GCHQ to help the United States spy on other governments’ delegations at the United Nations. At the time, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were trying to convince the UN Security Council to pass a resolution backing the invasion of Iraq. The email Gun saw was a memo from the NSA telling the GCHQ to collect “the whole gamut of information that could give American policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to United States goals.” Gun, appalled at how her government was secretly conniving with the United States in the face of public opposition throughout Europe to invading Iraq, leaked the memo to the Observer newspaper. The resulting uproar helped derail any Security Council endorsement, leaving Bush and Blair to launch the invasion alone. Gun was fired and threatened with prison but never regretted her actions. She later said: “I’ve only ever followed my conscience.”

  In the next tier are whistle-blowers who have received substantial mainstream media coverage, such as the three women Time put on its cover as the magazine’s 2002 “Persons of the Year”: Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent mentioned above; Sherron Watkins, a vice president at Enron Corporation who discovered the irregular accounting procedures that later brought Enron and its customers to grief; and Cynthia Cooper, a vice president at the WorldCom corporation who uncovered $3.8 billion of accounting fraud, at the time the largest such incident in US history.

  Scanning the archives of the Government Accountability Project yields another batch of success stories that are less known but no less valuable to the public good. “The history of whistle-blowers really began in the modern era in the United States with Ernie Fitzgerald,” said Clark. As a financial analyst for the Air Force, Fitzgerald in 1968 exposed $2.3 billion in cost overruns for the C-5A cargo plane. Fitzgerald made his revelations in testimony to the US Congress, speaking candidly despite pressure from superiors. President Nixon personally ordered that he be fired. “I said get rid of that son of a bitch,” the White House taping system recorded Nixon telling presidential aide Charles Colson.

  “The point is not that [Fitzgerald] was complaining about the overruns but that he was doing it in public,” Nixon later told aide John Ehrlichman. Fitzgerald sued for wrongful termination and was reinstated—fourteen years later. When Fitzgerald finally retired from government service, Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa praised him as “the father of all whistle-blowers” and the inspiration for Grassley making whistle-blower protection his signature issue. Grassley saluted Fitzgerald for proving that “one person [who is] determined to make a difference can in fact make a difference.”

  Other notable whistle-blowers include Dr. David Graham, a Food and Drug Administration scientist, who sparked the removal of the painkiller Vioxx from the market after linking the drug to 50,000 fatal heart attacks. Rick Piltz, a federal climate policy analyst, revealed that a former oil industry lobbyist whom George W. Bush installed at the White House Council on Environmental Quality was censoring US government reports on climate change. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist and the man who put global warming on the public agenda in 1988 when he testified to the US Senate that man-made climate change had begun, likewise spoke out against the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to gag him. Aldric Saucier, the US Army’s chief civilian scientist, helped to defeat additional funding for the “Star Wars” missile defense program after concluding that the nearly $1 trillion dollar scheme was an unworkable boondoggle. As described in more detail in Part Two of this book, whistle-blowers at the Zimmer nuclear power plant in Ohio revealed laughably shoddy building materials and practices, such as substituting junkyard metal for nuclear grade steel and falsifying X-rays on critical safety welds. Their exposés eventually forced cancellation of a plant that was 97 percent complete.

  There is, however, no sugarcoating the fact that the majority of whistle-blowers have an experience much closer to Thomas Drake’s than to Edward Snowden’s,
and this is as true of corporate as of government members of the tribe. In his book The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide, Devine writes, “For those who think that blowing the whistle is glamorous or a path to recognition, think again. The majority of whistle-blowers suffer in obscurity, frustrated by burned career bridges and vindication they were never able to obtain. The prominent, lionized beacons of hope are rare exceptions, and even most of them pay a horrible price with lifelong scars.”

  Yet somehow whistle-blowers keep coming forward, a testimony to their, what—moral superiority? Stubbornness? Foolishness?

  Clark argues that whistle-blowing is only going to become more frequent and valued in the years ahead because “it’s the only way we’ll have any chance of dealing with the level of corruption we face in modern society. The federal government seems to have decided it won’t provide funding for regulation and media companies are closing their investigative units. Congress passes laws like the Dodd-Frank Act (covering the activities of financial institutions) and the Food Safety Modernization Act, but then appropriates no money to enforce those laws. The task of regulating corporate behavior seems to be falling to whistle-blowers by default.”

  It’s a rare thing in today’s Washington, but whistle-blowing is an issue that attracts support from Democrats and Republicans alike, at least in principle. Lawmakers in both parties seem eager to tell the public that whistle-blowers are vital weapons in the battle against waste, fraud, and abuse in both the public and the private sectors. They do not always vote that way, of course; often, loyalty to a certain industry or federal agency trumps a lawmaker’s support for whistle-blowing in the abstract. The attacks Republicans and Democrats alike leveled against Edward Snowden—and both parties’ silence in the face of the national security bureaucracy’s assault on Thomas Drake—are but two examples of a broader trend. “National security whistle-blowing is the last frontier where politicians are unwilling to match their rhetoric with enforceable rights,” said Devine.