Whistleblowing Now and Then: USA: Secrecy Superpower
This podcast features Government Accountability Project’s Legal Director, Tom Devine, and was originally published here.
Welcome to a special series of the Whistleblowing Now and Then podcast, called:
The Public Interest and National Security Whistleblowing: Looking Back, Thinking Forward.
This 3-part series is a collaboration between Whistleblowing International Network and Kaeten Mistry, Associate Professor of History at the University of East Anglia, and co-author of the book Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and Cult of State Secrecy.
This week’s episode looks at the United States. A nation founded on the principles of free speech and open government, is today home to the largest state secrecy regime in human history. A country that does not permit national security officials making public interest disclosures, has nonetheless produced some of the most famous cases of national security whistleblowing that have made history such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Daniel Ellsberg.
Such cases have generated widespread debate about security and liberty, secrecy, and transparency, in the U.S. and internationally. Yet while public interest disclosures are commonly seen as whistleblowing in the public sphere, they are deemed to be “unauthorized disclosures” by the US government.
To unpack this, we sit down with two leading experts of whistleblowing and secrecy in the United States. Tom Devine, Legal Director at the Government Accountability Project and Sam Lebovic, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University, author of the prize-winning book Free Speech and Unfree News.