Human rights organizations. Hackers. Soviet dissidents. Animal welfare activists. Corruption-reporting apps. The world of whistleblowing is much more diverse than most people realize. It includes the prototypical whistleblowers—government and corporate employees who spill their organizations’ secrets to publicize abuses, despite the personal costs. But if you look closely at what the concept entails, then it becomes clear that there are many more varieties. There is a wide world of whistleblowing out there, and we have only begun to understand and explain it. In Whistleblowers, Leakers, and Their Networks: From Snowden to Samizdat, Jason Ross Arnold clarifies the elusive concept of "whistleblowing." Most who have tried to define or understand it have a sense that whistleblowers are justified secret-spillers—people who make wise decisions about their unauthorized disclosures. But we still have no reliable framework for determining which secret-spillers deserve the positively charged term whistleblower, and which ones should get stuck with the less noble moniker “leaker.” A better understanding can inform our frustratingly endless political debates about important cases—the Snowdens, Mannings, Ellsbergs, Deep Throats, etc.—but it can also provide guidance to would-be whistleblowers about whether or not they and their collaborators should make unauthorized disclosures.

The twenty-first century witnessed a new age of whistleblowing in the United States. Disclosures by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others have stoked heated public debates about the ethics of exposing institutional secrets, with roots in a longer history of state insiders revealing privileged information. Bringing together contributors from a range of disciplines to consider political, legal, and cultural dimensions, Whistleblowing Nation is a pathbreaking history of national security disclosures and state secrecy from World War I to the present. The contributors explore the complex politics, motives, and ideologies behind the revelation of state secrets that threaten the status quo, challenging reductive characterizations of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors. They examine the dynamics of state retaliation, political backlash, and civic contests over the legitimacy and significance of the exposure and the whistleblower. The volume considers the growing power of the executive branch and its consequences for First Amendment rights, the protection and prosecution of whistleblowers, and the rise of vast classification and censorship regimes within the national-security state. Featuring analyses from leading historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and political scientists, Whistleblowing Nation sheds new light on the tension of secrecy and transparency, security and civil liberties, and the politics of truth and falsehood.

This book analyzes whistleblowing platforms and the adoption of encryption tools in journalism. Whistleblowing platforms are becoming an important phenomenon for journalism in this era and offer safer solutions for communicating with whistleblowers and obtaining leaks. WikiLeaks and the Snowden case have been powerful game changers for today’s journalism, showing the potentials of and needs for encryption for journalistic purposes, together with the perils of surveillance. Whistleblowing platforms are also an interesting example of journalists and hackers coming together to support investigations with new tools and practices. The book introduces this phenomenon and features a qualitative study about whistleblowing platforms and their adoption in the journalistic field.

The 2010 release of US embassy diplomatic cables put WikiLeaks into the international spotlight. Revelations by the leaks sparked intense debate within international diplomacy, journalism and society. This book reflects on the implications of WikiLeaks across politics and media, and on the results of leak journalism and transparency activism.

A “brisk and interesting” exploration of exposing misconduct in America—from the Revolutionary War era to the Trump years (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker). PROSE Award winner in the Government, Policy and Politics category Misconduct by those in high places is always dangerous to reveal. Whistleblowers thus face conflicting impulses: by challenging and exposing transgressions by the powerful, they perform a vital public service—yet they always suffer for it. This episodic history brings to light how whistleblowing, an important but unrecognized cousin of civil disobedience, has held powerful elites accountable in America. Analyzing a range of whistleblowing episodes, from the corrupt Revolutionary War commodore Esek Hopkins (whose dismissal led in 1778 to the first whistleblower protection law) to Edward Snowden, to the dishonesty of Donald Trump, Allison Stanger reveals the centrality of whistleblowing to the health of American democracy. She also shows that with changing technology and increasing militarization, the exposure of misconduct has grown more difficult to do and more personally costly for those who do it—yet American freedom, especially today, depends on it. “A stunningly original, deeply insightful, and compelling analysis of the profound conflicts we have faced over whistleblowing, national security, and democracy from our nation's founding to the Age of Trump.” —Geoffrey R. Stone, award–awinning author of Perilous Times “This clear-eyed, sobering book narrates a history of whistle-blowing, from the American Revolution to Snowden to Comey, and delivers the verdict that the republic is at risk—a must read.” —Danielle Allen, award-winning author of Our Declaration

Whistleblowers and leakers have played a long and influential role in our history. For example, Samuel Shaw, a U.S. midshipman during the Revolutionary War, exposed the torture of British soldiers in 1777. His actions led to the first law protecting whistleblowers in the United States. More recently, Edward Snowden released top-secret National Security Administration (NSA) documents showing the extent of the U.S. surveillance program. His actions have been both criticized and praised. In this text, experts weigh in on the importance of whistleblowers and leakers, and the damage they might cause, so that readers can form their own opinions on this important issue.

UPDATED IN MARCH 2013 to include the historic $104-million Bradley Birkenfeld whistleblower case and more! From the nation’s leading whistleblower attorney, comes the third edition of the first-ever consumer guide to whistleblowing. In The Whistleblower’s Handbook, Stephen Martin Kohn explains nearly all federal and state laws regarding whistleblowing. In the step-by-step bulk of the book, he also presents twenty-one rules for whistleblowers.

The courageous acts of whistleblowing that inspired the world over the past few years have changed our perception of surveillance and control in today's information society. But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contents? This urgent intervention based on the work of Berlin's Disruption Network Lab examines this growing phenomenon, offering interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public by investigating whistleblowing as a developing political practice that has the ability to provoke change from within.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

A Story of Big Tech Censorship and Bias and the Fight to Save Our Country The madness of Google's attempt to mold our reality into a version dictated by their corporate values has never been portrayed better than in this chilling account by Google whistleblower, Zach Vorhies. As a senior engineer at Zach watched in horror from the inside as the 2016 election of Donald Trump drove Google into a frenzy of censorship and political manipulation. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas—when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems—was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country's history as wave after of censorship destroyed free speech and entire market sectors. Working with New York Times bestselling author Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption), Vorhies and Heckenlively weave a tale of a tech industry once beloved by its central figure for its innovation and original thinking, turned into a terrifying “woke-church” of censorship and political intolerance. For Zach, an intuitive counter-thinker, brought up on the dystopian futures of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Ray Bradbury, it was clear that Google was attempting nothing less than a seamless rewriting of the operating code of reality in which many would not be allowed to participate. Using Google's own internal search engine, Zach discovered their real "AI-Censorship" system called “Machine Learning Fairness,” which he claims is a merging of critical race theory and AI that was secretly released on their users of search, news and YouTube. He collected and released 950 pages of these documents to the Department of Justice and to the public in the summer of 2019 through Project Veritas with James O'Keefe, which quickly became their most popular whistleblower story, which started a trend of big whistleblowing. From Google re-writing their news algorithms to target Trump to using human tragedy emergencies to inject permanent blacklists, Zach and Kent provide a “you are there” perspective on how Google turned to the dark side to seize power. They finish by laying out a solution to fight censorship. Read this book if you care to know how Google tries to manipulate, censor, and downrank the voice of its users.