The law is clear. If you mishandle, distribute or disclose classified information you can get in big trouble. In the worst cases, as with Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who has been accused of divulging top secret national security documents, you can be arrested, charged under the Espionage Act and, if convicted, sent to prison.
But in the court of public opinion the calculation is often less cut and dried.
Out in the real world, people who divulge government secrets are sometimes viewed as traitors or spies, but at other times, they're hailed as heroes, regardless of their legal culpability. Still other times, they fall somewhere in between.
Consider Daniel Ellsberg, Aldrich Ames, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and now, allegedly, Teixeira.
In each case, context matters: what information was released, how it was released, to whom it was released and why it was released. That may not be so germane to a judge or jury charged with determining what laws were broken, but before I pass my own judgment I want to know whether a leaker was a whistleblower or a money grabber or a malevolent traitor or a publicity seeker or an ideologue. And I want to know what good or harm was caused.
Ellsberg, now 92 and ailing with pancreatic cancer, became famous in 1971 for leaking to the press copies of the so-called Pentagon Papers, a classified 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War that revealed that successive governments had lied to Americans about the progress of the war. Ellsberg, a Rand Corp. analyst, risked his career and his freedom not for money but on principle. The Pentagon Papers are widely credited with helping end a misbegotten war.
Yet Ellsberg might well have been convicted of espionage had a mistrial not been declared after the Nixon administration engaged in "gross misconduct," including burglarizing the office of his psychiatrist.
Of course there were complexities and nuances to the Pentagon Papers leak. Any act of conscience that involves breaking the law can be second-guessed. But on balance, Ellsberg deserves our thanks for enlightening Americans about facts they should have been told. History has shown his judgment to have been the right one.
Aldrich Ames, a three-decade CIA employee, falls at the other end of the spectrum. He passed highly classified information to the KGB at "dead drop" hiding places scattered around Washington, D.C., in the 1980s and 1990s in exchange for millions of dollars. He divulged the names of CIA and FBI sources; some were subsequently executed by the Russians.
That's an easy one. Ames was a traitor who does not deserve our sympathy. He is serving a sentence of life without parole.
Then there's Edward Snowden, the intelligence contractor who leaked thousands of National Security Agency documents in 2013 about the American government's surveillance of its own citizens. The files showed that the government was collecting data from Americans' phone calls, emails and other internet activity, and that it was eavesdropping on foreign leaders.
Unlike Ellsberg, Snowden didn't release historical documents — he leaked up-to-date operational information about ongoing programs — and he didn't limit himself to divulging information about privacy violations. U.S. officials insist that he did "tremendous damage," but most people believe his motivation was to reveal government misbehavior and overreach.
The moral ambiguity was immediately clear: On the one hand, Snowden broke the law. On the other hand, he performed a significant service to his country by revealing the shocking breadth of secret U.S. surveillance activities.
Of course, Snowden's actions (and Ellsberg's) raise the very real question of how a government can operate if every 30-year-old contractor makes their own decisions about which secrets should remain secret and which shouldn't. But that's the conundrum of whistleblowing. Sometimes an individual has to go it alone and wait for history to judge.
Julian Assange, the founder of the website Wikileaks, didn't leak secrets himself; he acted more like a journalist when he posted classified documents and videos in 2010 that he had received from Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst. For that, he deserves some legal protection.
But beyond that, I have little sympathy for him because he was so indiscriminate. Wikileaks dumped millions of secret documents from Manning onto the internet with no particular purpose — just a gut belief that government shouldn't have secrets, and that if they can be obtained, they should be divulged. That's simplistic and reckless.
In Teixeira's case, we don't know enough yet to pass final judgment. The Washington Post suggested he may have hoped to impress his online buddies by allegedly sharing top secret documents, including some that detailed Russian war plans and gaps in Ukrainian air defenses. One columnist called him a "doofus."
I've yet to see evidence that the leaks were a matter of conscience or divulged much in the way of injustice or wrongdoing.
Sometimes, but only sometimes, people are justified in breaking the law to reveal secrets. Here are some things (and I'm cribbing partly from the work of actual ethicists) that ought to be seriously considered before we offer our support to leakers:
Are they seeking to expose or prevent a serious wrong or an illegal act or a damaging lie? Did they try reporting it to proper authorities first, if that was an option?
If the material is classified, did the leaker seriously weigh the harm that could result from disclosure?
Was the disclosure made for personal benefit, financial or otherwise?
Was the leak narrowly tailored to disclose real wrongdoing or was it a mass dump of information?
It's sad but true that governments often need to keep secrets in our flawed world. But even democratic governments sometimes lie and deceive, often to cover up mistakes. In those cases, leaking secrets can be a form of civil disobedience in which a solitary individual courageously stands up to power to reveal an ugly truth.
So far, that doesn't seem to describe Jack Teixeira.
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