Lindsay Mills. (They married in 2017.)
In 2005, he became a contractor for
American intelligence services, work-
ing as a security guard.
W
histle-blowing is very often an
upstanding act of courage, un-
dertaken at great personal cost, and re-
sulting in great public good. But the
presence of a lot of whistle-blowing—
an age of whistle-blowing—isn’t a sign
of a thriving democracy or a healthy
business world; it’s a sign of a weak
democracy and a sick business world.
When institutions are working well, ei-
ther they don’t engage in misconduct
or their internal mechanisms discover,
thwart, and punish it. Democracies have
checks and balances, including investi-
gations, ethics committees, and elec-
tions. Businesses have regulations, com-
pliance departments, and inspections.
Whistle-blowing is necessary when these
safeguards fail. But to celebrate whis-
tle-blowing as anything other than a
last resort is to give up on institutions.
An act of whistle-blowing is more
than an accusation of specific miscon-
duct; it’s an indictment of an entire sys-
tem of accountability. Whistle-blowers
don’t say, “My company sells drugs that
make you sicker.” They say, “My com-
pany sells drugs that make you sicker
and my company knows it’s doing this
and I alerted my bosses and asked them
to stop it and they won’t, because they
are making piles of money off this scam.”
Whistle-blowers have a lot in common
with one another. Most discover abuses
while holding positions of power within
their organizations, often in oversight
roles. They typically report those abuses
to their superiors, repeatedly, for months
and even years, before seeking help out-
side their organizations, usually from
lawyers or other advocates. Less fre-
quently, they go straight to the press.
Snowden doesn’t fit any part of this
pattern. Early in his training, he was
upbraided for failing to follow the chain
of command. He never held a position
of influence or oversight within the in-
telligence community. He didn’t come
across evidence of wrongdoing. He went
looking for it. Stanger says that Snowden
began “siphoning off classified infor-
mation” from the servers on which he
worked beginning in 2009, when he was
sent to Geneva as a contractor for the
C.I.A. Snowden says he began search-
ing for evidence of a mass-surveillance
program before being posted to Japan,
later that year, where he worked for Perot
Systems (which was acquired by Dell
soon afterward), at the N.S.A.’s Pacific
Technical Center, at Yokota Air Base.
His job there, he says, was “helping to
connect the NSA’s systems architecture
with the CIA’s.” To do this work, he
had extraordinary access to classified
documents, far above his standing in
the intelligence community.
He began prowling around. “To find
out about even a fraction of the malfea-
sance, you had to go searching,” Snowden
explains. “And to go searching, you had
to know that it existed.” N.S.A. mass-
surveillance programs had been the sub-
ject of the 1998 film “Enemy of the State,”
starring Will Smith; of the 2000 Nin-
tendo 64 video game Perfect Dark; and
of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2005 book,
“Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret
World of Global Eavesdropping.” But
Snowden says he began to suspect that
the United States was engaged in mass
surveillance only after being assigned
to assess China’s surveillance capabili-
ties. “I had the sneaking sense while I
was looking through all this China ma-
terial that I was looking at a mirror and
seeing a reflection of America,” he writes.
“And although you should hate me for
it, I have to say that at the time I tampeddown my unease.” Still, he was upset.
So he kept digging. Eventually, he came
across a classified report that provided
the evidence he’d been looking for.
Snowden has claimed that he alerted
more than ten officials at the N.S.A.
about his discovery and expressed his
alarm. He has provided no support for
this claim. The N.S.A. says he reported
his concerns to no one. “There were other
avenues available for somebody whose
conscience was stirred and thought that
they needed to question government
actions,” Obama said at a press confer-
ence in 2013. The classified documents
Snowden released to the press contained
a good deal more than evidence of the
surveillance of American citizens; they
included, for instance, a 2006 memo de-
tailing the N.S.A.’s monitoring of the
telephone conversations of thirty-five
unnamed world leaders, which led the
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to
charge the Obama Administration with
tapping her phone, causing a diplomatic
uproar. “I think it is fair to say that the
senior leadership of the NSA probably
hate me a little bit,” Snowden told Stan-
ger, as if this were personal.
Snowden writes that, when he reached
the end of his quest, he “felt more adult
than ever, but also cursed with the
knowledge that all of us had been re-
duced to something like children, who’d
be forced to live the rest of our lives“Don’t sit there—it’s wet.”