The importance of whistleblowing

Again, I haven't written in a while…

Shortly before leaving office, Barack Obama announced that Chelsea Manning would be released from jail after three and a half years (though realistically quite a bit longer than that if we're including the amount of time she spent in detention leading up to and during the trial). For those who don't know, Manning released the very disturbing Collateral Murder video, as well as numerous other classified military documents, to Wikileaks, exposing some quite significant material concerning airstrikes in the Iraq War. She was recently described by President Trump as an 'ungrateful traitor' who should 'never have been released' in the wake of the announcement of her commute. She will be released from jail in May.

Since I started blogging in 2010, I have written quite a lot about Manning, and ordinarily the announcement of her release would have prompted me to write a full blog, but so much else was happening at the time that this had to be put on the sidelines a little. Manning's situation to me underlines a really important thing within our society; the concept of whistleblowing. A whistleblower is defined as 'a person who informs on someone engaged in an illicit activity'. It is something that has become increasingly significant within the world over the last few years, notably due to the widespread use of social media. Besides Manning, the most infamous whistleblower is probably Edward Snowden, who in 2013 copied and leaked information from the National Security Agency revealing numerous global surveillance programmes around the world, including within the UK. As an activist, I tend to believe that as little information as possible should be kept from the public, as I think that the proper way to run a community is through openness, honesty and transparency. I will accept that there are certain areas in which it is appropriate for exceptions to be made to these principles, but they should be exceptions and not the rule. In short, I believe that if something that a Government or a corporation does is scandalous enough for someone to blow the whistle, this is something that should be taken extremely seriously, and the consequences should be felt by the initial perpetrator, not by the person who exposed it.

This last thing is something which I feel we all seem to have lost sight of. If we are to live in a society that is accountable to its citizens, the ability to air the establishment's dirty laundry is public is surely essential for our political health. For the most part, whistleblowing is not only a good thing, but a necessary thing. Yet it seems that action taken by the establishment to address instances of whistleblowing focus more on the problem of the whistle having been blown than on actually sorting out anything that has been exposed. For example, after Snowden's exposures of the UK's illegal surveillance programmes, the then Home Secretary Theresa May introduced the Investigatory Powers Bill (commonly known as the Snoopers' Charter) which passed into law shortly after her ascension to Downing Street in 2016. I shall say that one more time to make sure we are completely clear - after revelations that the Government was spying on its citizens illegally, the immediate reaction from the Government was to pass legislation to make such spying legal and official Government policy. This seems to me duplicitous and underhand, to be pursuing the ability to continue such tactics after their existence has been exposed, rather than tightening reins and examining the reasons why such tactics were illegal in the first place.

I first became aware of the term 'whistleblowing' in a documentary that I saw as a teenager in 2007 concerning reporters going undercover within supermarkets to expose public health risks such as faked expiry dates on food products. This struck me as being a public service, and as it is we have a Public Interest Disclosure Act in order to protect whistleblowers in such circumstances. What concerns me at the moment is the draft recommendations for the new Espionage Act, which is all part of the review of the Official Secrets Act. This Act would effectively criminalise all means of releasing sensitive Government information to the public, and a defence of 'public interest' would not be submissible. The Law Commission recommends up to 14 years in prison. Most disturbing of all, whilst the Official Secrets Act currently applies only to UK citizens, the recommendations extend beyond the whistleblower themselves to journalists or anyone else who received the information, anywhere in the world.

Take a moment to digest this. There are a great number of negotiations and discussions going on right now, in the UK and in the world at large, which potentially could fall under the banner of 'sensitive information'. Theresa May's plans for Brexit, for example. The details of the trade deals she is attempting with various world leaders (which in many cases seem to equate mostly to agreeing to whatever dodgy deals the UK is given). Potential cases of fraud in elections, which is still something which has not reached a conclusion where the present Government is concerned. Our involvement in wars in the middle-east. The list goes on. We live in very divided and turbulent times - no one, on any part of the political spectrum, would deny that. And in such times, it is vital for journalists, and indeed anyone else, to be able to report on the truth of what is going on behind closed doors, and to be able to prove that information. Enacting legislation that criminalises not the people who are actually breaking the law, but the people who expose that information, is more than merely protecting national security; it simply screams of not having the honesty and integrity to be able to justify our own position in the world.  'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear': that is a tedious phrase which we all hear very frequently, and I normally scoff at it because it is merely a cover-up for unnecessary and unethical surveillance of each one of us. I find it incredibly ironic that such an establishment would go to such extreme lengths to cover up its own doing. After all, 'nothing to hide', right?

The Espionage Act is still at the consultation stage, so please feel free to contact the Law Commission and let it know what you think of the proposals.