Mother Jones
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After Edward Snowden went public as the man who leaked the NSA’s secret surveillance system to the country via a 12 minute video interview with the Guardian, questions immediately sprang up around his motivation for whistleblowing, his personal life, and whether his background is what he claims it to be.
Why is suspicion and distrust the natural reaction? Because a lot rests on whether Snowden is telling the truth, yes, but also because most of us (perhaps nearly everyone but whistleblowers themselves) have trouble understanding exactly what motivates a whistleblower. As University of Maryland political psychology professor C. Frederick Alford notes, humans are tribal beings, and even though society considers whistleblowers brave in theory, in practice there tends to be a sense of discomfort with those who break from the tribe.
Alford has spent over a decade asking why some people reveal government secrets in the name of public good, while most don’t; asking what makes Edward Snowden Edward Snowden, and not one of the many other Booz Allen analysts who presumably saw the same information that Snowden did but kept quiet about it. Alford’s 2001 book, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, examines the psychology of whistleblowing based on the extensive time he spent with people who’ve done it—some to much fanfare, others to very little. He says he’s received a phone call or an email from a whistleblower about every month since the book came out 12 years ago, and in many cases has kept up with those who reach out for years. He spoke with Mother Jones about the Edward Snowden-Daniel Ellsberg parallel, why whistleblowers tend to have big egos, and what Snowden might face in the coming weeks and months.
Mother Jones: Based on what we know about Edward Snowden so far, does he remind you of other whistleblowers you’ve spent time with or studied over the years?
C. Frederick Alford: Daniel Ellsberg, overwhelmingly. I don’t think Bradley Manning: Bradley Manning committed a data dump. He just released tons of information and I don’t think he understood all the information he was releasing. I don’t think anyone could have understood it all.
Ellsberg, who worked at the RAND Corporation at the time and had this contract to analyze the Vietnam War, but realized at a point long before the war had ended that the government knew they were never going to win it, and realized that this information should be part of the public debate, and decided in a very self-conscious way to make this information part of the public debate. Snowden reminded me so much of Ellsberg. Not in his personality, but in the reflective way he decided to be.
If we take the Guardian at its word, and we take Snowden at his word, he released information that would not endanger active agents or reveal the location of CIA stations. So I think Ellsberg is an obvious comparison. And I think the significance of all this is going to end up being comparable to the significance of the Pentagon papers.
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