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Why Would I Be a Whistleblower?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2020

Adam Henschke
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Abstract

The ethics of whistleblowing are complex and challenging. On the one hand, there are a strong set of moral reasons why someone ought to blow the whistle when he or she learns of wrongdoing. On the other hand, such actions typically come at a significant cost to the whistleblower and may not bring about any significant change. Both aspects prompt us to ask, why would I be a whistleblower? Emanuela Ceva and Michele Bocchiola's Is Whistleblowing a Duty? answers that question by arguing that one has an organizational duty to blow the whistle. Kate Kenny's Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory reframes the question, showing how hard it has been for members of the international financial industry to blow the whistle and bring about any effective change to that industry. In this review essay, I suggest that analyses of whistleblowing need to take into account evolving technologies, the importance of loyalty, and special contexts such as whistleblowing in the national security sector.

Keywords

whistleblowingethics of organizationsdutyprudenceWikiLeaksManningSnowden
Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 97 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2020

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References

NOTES

1 Andrew Prokop, “The Trump-Ukraine Whistleblower Complaint, Explained,” Vox, September 26, 2019.

2 Greenwald, Glenn, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), pp. 252–53Google Scholar.

3 Mark Bowden, “What Snowden and Manning Don't Understand about Secrecy: Government Often Finds Bad Reasons to Keep Information Hidden, But the Recent Indiscriminate Links Are Foolish,” Atlantic, August 23, 2013 www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/what-snowden-and-manning-dont-understand-about-secrecy/278973/.

4 Ibid.

5 Harding, Luke, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), p. 150Google Scholar.

6 Domscheit-Berg, Daniel, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (Melbourne: Scribe, 2011), pp. 181–84Google Scholar.

7 Harding, Snowden Files, p. 126; and Greenwald, No Place to Hide, p. 53.

8 Nick Simeone, “Clapper: Snowden Caused ‘Massive, Historic’ Security Damage,” U.S. Department of Defense, “DoD News,” January 29, 2014, archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121564.

9 Timothy H. Edgar, “Why the NSA Should Thank Edward Snowden,” Fortune, October 3, 2017, fortune.com/2017/10/03/edward-snowden-nsa-fisa-section-702/.