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Title: Beyond Whistleblowing Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 24, 2014 Language: en Topics: journalism, Read All About It Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2014/12/24/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 naïve 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,
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.
[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.