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Title: Beyond Whistleblowing
Author: Ret Marut, CrimethInc., Anonymous
Date: December 24, 2014
Language: en
Topics: security culture, anti-technology, state power,CrimethInc
Source: CrimethInc blog, December 24, 2014
Notes: Retrieved from http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2014/12/24/beyond-whistleblowing/#more-5384

Ret Marut, CrimethInc., Anonymous

Beyond Whistleblowing

Citizenfour is just the latest expression of public fascination with the

figure of the whistleblower. Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Chelsea

Manning, Edward Snowden--the whistleblower defects from within the halls

of power to inform us about how power is being misused, delivering

forbidden information to the people like the holy fire of Prometheus.

But can the whistleblower save us? Is whistleblowing enough? What

limitations are coded into a strategy of social change based around

whistleblowing, and what would it take to go beyond them?

Certainly, whistleblowers look good compared to the institutions they

expose. Faith in authorities of all stripes is at an all-time low, and

for good reason. In a news clip in Citizenfour, we see Obama claim to

have ordered an inquiry into the NSA before Snowden’s revelations

surfaced, petulantly implying that he was Snowden before Snowden. The

President calls cynically for a "fact-based" discussion--when the only

useful source of facts has been the illegal leaks of the man he is

decrying. It is difficult to imagine a starker contrast between courage

and cynicism.

Yet it’s one thing to unmask tyrants--it’s another thing to depose them.

"The greatest fear that I have... is that nothing will change. People

will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know the lengths

that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to

create greater control over American society and global society. But

they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and

fight." --Edward Snowden

The theory of social change implicit in whistleblowing is that if the

crimes of a government are revealed, popular outrage will force the

government to fix itself. "I believed that if the NSA’s unconstitutional

mass surveillance of Americans was known," Snowden said, "it would not

survive the scrutiny of the courts, the Congress, and the people." Yet

Snowden’s greatest fear has been realized: reforms to restrict NSA

surveillance programs have been defeated by the elected representatives

Snowden pinned his hopes on.

Snowden and other whistleblowers have succeeded in discrediting

governments, but not in halting the expansion of the surveillance state.

They have revealed how invasive and unaccountable our rulers are, but

they have not equipped us to defend ourselves. Is it possible that the

same factors that position whistleblowers to achieve such an impact also

hinder their revelations from bearing fruit?

Why does the whistleblower make such a compelling protagonist? Above

all, because he is positioned to speak from within the system: he is

invested with all the legitimacy of the institutions he exposes. He did

not begin as a rebel or an outsider; he believed in the system, and felt

betrayed when he learned it did not adhere to its own regulations.

Whistleblowing is premised on a democratic discourse: if people know

enough, they can "speak truth to power," and this speech itself will

somehow catalyze change.[1] Of course, this presumes a political system

based in dialogue.

Snowden’s own revelations show how naive this conception is. The

departments that built this surveillance infrastructure--that now seek

to imprison Snowden alongside Chelsea Manning--hold power by virtue of

coercive force, not persuasive arguments. Merely speaking truth is

insufficient; we are not in a dialogue, but a power struggle.

Likewise, it is a mistake to treat the backroom machinations of

politicians and bureaucrats as temporary malfunctions in an otherwise

transparent and egalitarian order. These are not excesses, but business

as usual; they are not exceptions to the rule, but essential to rule

itself. Since the heyday of whistleblowing in the 1970s--Daniel

Ellsberg, Deep Throat, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the

FBI--investigative journalists have exposed scandal after scandal.

Treating all of these as anomalous implies that the state itself is

inherently legitimate, and simply needs reforming. But it’s backwards to

think that citizens can police the state. The stronger the state, the

more power it will bring to bear against its citizens--not to mention

everyone else.

There are other drawbacks to framing the whistleblower as the primary

protagonist of social change. Not only can this imply that the system is

fundamentally legitimate, it also presents those who hold privileged

positions within the system as the agents of change. Yet for the most

part, these people are the least likely to step out of line; a thousand

mechanisms of selection, insulation, and incentive ensure that they are

not susceptible to crises of conscience. It should be no wonder that

Mannings and Snowdens are so rare, relative to the faceless thousands

who collude in the functioning of the state apparatus. The problem is

not that human beings are naturally selfish or insensitive, but that the

infrastructure of power promotes selfishness and insensitivity.

It is a mistake to stake the future of humanity on those within the

halls of power. Instead, we should be asking how people from all walks

of life might work together to disable the infrastructure of oppression.

System administrators like Edward Snowden do indeed wield

disproportionate influence over the fate of our species, but sysadmins

cannot create a solution by themselves. Centralizing a few computer

experts as the subject of social struggle only obscures all the other

demographics whose participation is essential in any movement for

liberation. This oversight explains the despair Julian Assange and Jacob

Appelbaum hinted at in their 2013 talk at the Chaos Communication

Congress, when they described sysadmins as a class that should organize

to defend its own interests, warning that it would soon be too late to

halt the descent into digital tyranny. In fact, people outside the

institutions of power will go on fighting against injustice regardless

of the consolidation of power on the internet--many frankly have no

choice. The rapidly increasing numbers of the marginalized, unemployed,

and oppressed must figure at the center of any strategy for change

alongside defectors from the programming caste. If programmers

conceptualize their interests as distinct from the rest of humanity, and

organize to defend those interests rather than to participate in a

struggle much greater than themselves, they will be doomed, along with

the rest of the species. Programmers should not organize themselves as a

class--they should switch sides in the class war.

As Snowden feared, in the absence of proposals for how to fight it, the

revelation of state surveillance only exacerbates the chilling effect it

is intended to achieve. The average newspaper reader, upon learning that

the NSA is tracking his whole life via his smartphone and credit card,

is not likely to take to the street in outrage, but to become more

guarded and submissive. Yet silence and obedience will not protect us:

they only embolden those in power to target ever broader circles of

potential enemies. Nor can encryption and other security measures

suffice to keep us safe: the government will always have superior

technology at its disposal. If we conceptualize resistance as a merely

technical issue, we will be defeated from the start. Encryption is

important, but the only real security we could achieve would be a

movement powerful enough to stand up for anyone targeted by the state.

However much intelligence government agencies gather, they can only

utilize it to the extent that they are able to bear the political

consequences. The sooner we join in an open struggle against them, the

safer we all will be.

Let’s return to the figure of the whistleblower. The ideal hero is like

us: an Everyman, only endowed with supernatural courage and destiny.

Heroes represent a step we could take, but do not--a step we often do

not take for fear that we are not gifted the way they are, not chosen by

destiny. And this is precisely what is dangerous about heroes: they tend

to sideline those who believe in them.

This is not to denigrate whistleblowers. Snowden and Manning have given

everything to be true to their consciences, out of the most selfless

intentions. But the best way to honor their courage and sacrifice is to

step onto the same path. The message they have for us is not just the

information they delivered, but above all their conduct itself, their

decision to defect from the side of oppressive power to the side of the

people. Rather than simply revering Snowden’s exceptional bravery, let

us ask ourselves what the equivalent to his deed would be in each of our

own lives. It might not be whistleblowing, but something else.

What would it mean for the rest of us to defect from the power

structures that we participate in? To identify what is intolerable in

our own mundane complicities, and break them off once and for all? This

is a step each of us can take, wherever we are situated in the

architecture of power.

Whistleblowing alone will not bring about social change. That takes

direct action. Remember, there was no whistleblower in Ferguson--it was

not a revelation of police misconduct that triggered the most important

wave of protest against police brutality in two decades, but the fact

that people acted on their outrage. The killing of Michael Brown was

understood nationwide as a tragedy because people protested, not because

a video recorded it, nor because an insider revealed that his killer

violated some statute. Objecting to government activity on the grounds

that it is illegal or corrupt leaves us powerless against all the forms

of brutality and abuse that are already legal. We need to develop the

capacity to stand up to the authorities, regardless of the laws.

Otherwise, all the whistleblowing in the world will be futile.

Today, we don’t lack awareness of the surveillance state so much as we

lack concrete examples of how to take action against it. In the spirit

of Jeremy Hammond, we might hypothesize that what we need is not just to

reveal the misdeeds of the state, but to identify its strategic

vulnerabilities. From protecting Tunisian activists against surveillance

to revealing the names of members of the Ku Klux Klan, Anonymous has

demonstrated the tactical advantages of hacking in concert with social

movements. Richard Stallman himself has pointed out that

denial-of-service actions are simply a new form of blockading--just as

protesters from New York to the Bay Area blocked interstate highways,

online activists blockade the information superhighway. Protests that

combine online and offline direct action offer opportunities for new

alliances cutting across class, race, and geography.

Meanwhile, the functionaries who keep the surveillance apparatus running

operate out of offices in placid suburbs from Fort Mead to Hawaii.

Following the lead of the protesters who targeted Google in San

Francisco, we can imagine offline demonstrators opening a new front in

the struggle. Perhaps this could turn the tables on those who consider

themselves the masters of the digital universe from the comfort of their

desks.

So whistleblowers, sysadmins, and hackers of all hats must make common

cause with other movements and populations, understanding whistleblowing

as one of many tactics in a much larger struggle. Alone, whistleblowers

and other digital dissidents will be tracked down and imprisoned like

Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, or trapped like Julian Assange and

Edward Snowden. Together, with all our diverse abilities and

perspectives--from programming skills to the clarity that comes of

having nothing to lose--we will be more powerful than any of us could be

alone.

"I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the

NSA," Snowden insisted in his more innocent days. Today, any real

pragmatist must acknowledge that it would be easier to dismantle the NSA

and all the unaccountable institutions it defends than to reform them.

The simple desire to be granted privacy and left in peace brings us into

direct conflict with globally networked state power. This is a daunting

prospect, but it’s also a good time for it, as millions of other people

around the world are being propelled into the same conflict by the

ecological, economic, and racialized crises produced by this top-heavy

power structure.

And here we arrive at the heart of the matter. The chief target of the

NSA has never been so-called "terrorists," but grassroots movements that

challenge the distribution of power. In this light, the decision to

broaden the scope of NSA surveillance to include the entire population

of the United States is not surprising after all. The goal never really

was to find the proverbial terrorist needle in the haystack. The real

targets of the surveillance apparatus have always been the activists in

Tunisia, the revolutionaries in Egypt, the anarchists in Greece, #M15,

occupy, #blacklivesmatter, the revolution in Rojava--and all the social

movements yet to come, as crisis begets crisis.

It is no longer realistic to imagine social change as a matter of policy

discussion, if it ever was. We need to be thinking in terms of

revolution. Whether you act from behind a keyboard or a barricade, let’s

find each other and learn to be powerful together.

Footnote

[1] The idea that the mere revelation of some hidden truth could somehow

awaken people into freedom is most evident in the 9/11 Truth movement

and similar purveyors of conspiracy theory. But those are simply extreme

manifestations of a narrative that is pervasive in our society, in which

millenarian powers are ascribed to information itself.