Whistleblowing

The National-Security Exposé So Secret Even Edward Snowden Didn’t Know About It

...Pentagon Papers proved instructive. “If you’re going to shoot at the King, you have to shoot to kill,” Ellsberg told me in reflecting on Snowden’s achievements. “The media don’t want to risk angering the King if they don’t have documentary proof.” Thus, whistleblowers who leak to the press “have to put out documents, and they have to put out a lot of them if they want to have a big effect.”

Yet even as Snowden put out a lot of documents, he eschewed the WikiLeaks model of releasing all the information at his disposal. He held back certain documents and removed specifics from others, for fear of revealing information that could put US operatives in danger or imperil legitimate security objectives. Snowden argued that democratic governance did not mean the public had to know the names of each NSA surveillance target.