On Whistleblowing in the Modern Era

Whistleblowing is a subject of significant interest in the current global sociopolitical environment. This can be explained by two complementary social changes. First, the sociopolitical environments in liberal democracies have increasingly become divided and partisan. Second, we now have a set of digital technologies that have changed both the content and processes of whistleblowing. On the first point, in the U.S. context, President Trump has brought with him a set of practices that do not comport with standard political norms. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the president, we can all agree that his personal actions and the behaviors of his administration go outside of, and often publicly reject, existing sociopolitical norms and practices. There is significant discontent within many government agencies about how the administration conducts itself. As such there seems to be more at stake, and a larger number of reasons to prompt insiders to blow the whistle. Additionally, given the divisive nature of Trump's presidency, many people are now likely more motivated to blow the whistle than they might have been with past leaders. This is not unique to the United States. As the U.K. struggles with Brexit and European countries deal with increased populism and nationalism, liberal democracies around the world are facing considerable pressure on long-held norms surrounding what is considered acceptable governmental behavior. Whistleblowing is one way of drawing attention to these perceived violations.

In parallel with this growing motivation to disclose information about wrongdoing, governments and institutions are increasingly taking action against whistleblowers. Despite the legal protections and institutional encouragements that exist to protect whistleblowers, as Kenny notes in chapter 6 of her book, organizations frequently take steps to shut down whistleblowers, to punish them, and to warn others against following suit. Kenny's book goes into detail about the significant impediments and costs faced by whistleblowers in the financial sector. This government opposition to whistleblowing is widespread. Barack Obama's administration was known to have significantly increased anti-whistleblowing activities. As Glenn Greenwald saw it: “The Obama administration, which has brought more prosecutions against leakers than all other presidencies combined, has sought to create a climate of fear that would stifle any attempts at whistleblowing.”Footnote ²

One aspect of modern-day whistleblowing that goes underexamined in both books is the way that new technologies both precipitate and help facilitate whistleblowing. For example, technology played a pivotal role in the cases of both Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, whom Ceva and Bocchiola use as paradigmatic examples of whistleblowers (pp. 4–7). Manning's efforts were dependent upon digital technologies and the Internet to publicize U.S. military actions; she used digital technologies to access, copy, and remove information about what the U.S. military had done. She then used the Internet to contact WikiLeaks, and through its online platform, proceeded to publicly disseminate a host of military and diplomatic information, all without the need to rely on traditional media to distribute those leaks to the public. Snowden's whistleblowing was in response to what he saw as unjustified surveillance of people around the world by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the U.K. This surveillance was dependent upon new information technologies that allowed for surveillance at an unprecedented scale. Whistleblowing is thus responsive to the sociopolitical context, driven by and impacted by new technologies. Both books touch on this point indirectly, but given the centrality of new technology to many of the cases under discussion, it warrants further scrutiny.

Another potential problem with Ceva and Bocchiola's argument is that to present Manning and Snowden as whistleblowers is itself controversial. As one commentator wrote at the time, “What troubles me about [Manning and Snowden] is not that they broke the oaths they swore when they took their classified government jobs, the thing that makes them liable to prosecution. … My problem is with the indiscriminate nature of their leaks. These are young people at war with the concept of secrecy itself, which is just foolish.”Footnote ³ This commentator and others saw Manning and Snowden as importantly different from a whistleblower such as Daniel Ellsberg, arguing that they “were not completely aware of all they carried off. It isn't just that they didn't completely understand what they were leaking; they literally did not know what all of it was.”Footnote ⁴ To be clear, my point is not one about the legitimacy of Manning or Snowden as whistleblowers. Rather, it is that using them as case examples is problematic, as they are still highly controversial figures, especially in national security and government circles. Using them as exemplars to demonstrate the accuracy of their account of whistleblowing could make readers far less receptive to Ceva and Bocchiola's overall argument.

Their approach draws heavily from standard analytic philosophical methods. They start by giving a definition of “whistleblowing” as “the practice through which a member of a legitimate organization voluntarily reports some wrongdoing, allegedly occurring within that organization, with the intention that corrective action should be taken to address it” (p. 21). They then go on to advance a notion of whistleblowing as something that is an organizational duty and not a personal or professional duty. They note that “a member of an organization ought to blow the whistle when she has privileged access to information concerning uses of entrusted power within her organization that contradict that power's mandate. She ought to do so in order to restore the logic of public accountability that such an alleged wrongful practice or behaviour has altered” (p. 74). I was broadly convinced by their argument, yet, given that they draw heavily on Manning and Snowden, I wonder how convincing the book would be for those who see these figures as traitors.

Their book is nevertheless sharp and focused. For anyone looking for an incisive analytic approach to whistleblowing, this book is excellent. However, like any piece that is deliberately focused, it left me wondering about a range of issues. For instance, in relation to the ways that technologies change whistleblowing as a practice, I was not sure how their approach would jell with the role played by new distribution mechanisms like WikiLeaks, such as in Manning's efforts to publicize what she saw as problematic behavior of the U.S. military. By their definition, a “whistleblower” must be “a member of the organization in which the reported facts occur” (p. 23). Here, Manning may be a whistleblower, but Julian Assange, who was running WikiLeaks at the time, would not be. Although Assange and his supporters call him a journalist, I am unconvinced of this claim. Their account differentiates between the “agent” who is a member of an organization (p. 23) and the “addressee” (pp. 31–31, 35). However, when listing potential addressees external to an organization, they only offer the police, the media, and the relevant governmental authorities. The question that Ceva and Bocchiola leave unanswered is, If someone like Assange is not a journalist, and he is not the whistleblower, then what is he? I would have been interested in a further discussion of how their account would deal with the rise of actors like Assange, who blur the line between agent and addressee.

One final issue with both books is that they take it as given that whistleblowing is a morally good thing to do. My concern here is how these books will be taken by those unconvinced of this assumption. Kenny, whose book is focused on whistleblowing in the financial sector, begins with the impacts of the global financial crisis and the massive harm caused by corporate wrongdoing. In this context, she questions why whistleblowers, despite doing good, are nonetheless largely pilloried by the societies they seek to protect (pp. 1–12). In a similar vein, Ceva and Bocchiola write that “by bringing a wrongdoing to light, a well-regulated practice of whistleblowing offers an important contribution to the public accountability of an organization” (p. 11). As can be seen by the responses to current whistleblowing on the Trump administration and by the Australian government's efforts to chill whistleblowing, there are many who do not share a positive appraisal of whistleblowing. Moreover, as Kenny's book details, those who do blow the whistle often have their characters attacked as a standard response to their actions, are subjected to censorship and nonphysical violence (chapter 5), and are frequently ignored by the press (chapter 7). These negative responses show that the problem is not just that governments are bothered by whistleblowers but that many simply do not see whistleblowers as good people. Although I am generally convinced of the value of whistleblowing, my concern is not with the arguments for it put forward in both books, but rather that leaving this controversial assumption undefended may undermine what is being said.

Why Would I Blow the Whistle? Organizational Duty

One common understanding of moral reasoning takes it that if something is judged to be good, that is a reason to do the good thing. Moreover, such thinking takes it that acting morally is not simply motivating but should also trump other concerns. As noted by Ceva and Bocchiola, the whistleblower is defined by reference to the fact that he or she is acting to correct some wrongdoing. Whistleblowers see themselves as compelled by the force of moral reason—they act because it is the morally correct thing to do. For many, according to Kenny, “whistleblowers are heroes who stand up for the interests of wider society when these are being compromised by their employing organization” (p. 23).

However, rather than simply arguing that whistleblowers are acting in line with what morality demands, Ceva and Bocchiola take a different approach. They argue that the potential whistleblower has a duty to blow the whistle. This, they argue, is an issue neither of personal morality nor of professional duty. Rather, it is an issue of organizational duty. Their argument begins by challenging the notion of whistleblowing as heroic: “To see whistleblowing as a supererogation has the effect of reducing any such report of organizational wrongdoing to a one-shot game in which an individual sacrifices her life and career for the sake of higher moral ideals and goals” (p. 49). They then put pressure on the idea of whistleblowing as being a matter of personal ethics: “The question of the normative status of this practice would translate into the terms of what is morally permissible to an agent as a question of personal ethics (the set of moral norms and commitments that regulate individual personal behaviour)” (p. 50). In contrast to the personal ethics approach, they offer an organizational approach drawn from political theory and taking its lead from public ethics. It is worth quoting at length:

The argument then moves on to differentiate their organizational approach from whistleblowing as a professional duty. The question is not whether the disclosures of Manning or Snowden

They reject the notion of whistleblowing as simply a professional responsibility, because it narrows the scope of whistleblower to someone who is in a relevant managerial position or has particular professional competencies (pp. 62–63).

What Ceva and Bocchiola offer is an argument that whistleblowing is a duty derived from organizational membership (pp. 69–82). This argument is built on the notion of organizational accountability and presents the conception of an organization as “a system of interdependent embodied rules (the member's functions), governed by public rules to which powers are attached with a specific mandate” (p. 69). The public mandate is essential here, as the organization is only legitimate insofar as it maintains such a mandate. The organization loses its public legitimacy should wrongdoing, even harmless wrongdoing, occur. Interestingly, they argue that “given the interdependence of organizational roles, the primary authorities to whom a justification is owed for the uses one makes of one's entrusted role-associated power are the fellow members of the organization to which one belongs” (p. 71). Thus, although the organization owes its legitimacy, which can be lost through wrongdoing, to its public mandate, the individuals involved in whistleblowing owe justification to the other members of the organization rather than the public at large. Ceva and Bocchiola thus answer the question, why should I be a whistleblower? by arguing that it is a responsibility derived from one's organizational membership.

While the organizational argument was largely convincing, one particular question I had about Ceva and Bocchiola's approach is how they would differentiate personal ethics from public ethics. Moreover, if there is a tension between someone's personal ethics and those derived from membership in a public organization, how ought this tension be resolved? As noted earlier, the book itself is tightly focused, which I think is a considerable strength. But, here again, this tight focus means that the book overlooks a number of areas that could be expanded upon, including a discussion on public ethics.

For their argument to be fully convincing, there also needed to be a clear presentation of where they draw the boundaries of organizational membership, and the resulting whistleblowing duties that come from it. Given that the basis for whistleblowing is derived from the public mandate of the organization and the mutual justifications that members owe one another, the boundaries of the organization are very important. Take, for instance, the following scenario: If I am in one government department and hear of wrongdoing in another department, do I have a duty to blow the whistle? Similarly, what about the duties of those who are members of professional organizations? Or if I am an engineer, and a member of a professional society of engineers, do I have a duty to blow the whistle on the wrongdoing of other engineers, even if I am employed in a different company from where the wrongdoing is occurring? The answers to these questions are not apparent based on Ceva and Bocchiola's text.

Another element that could have strengthened the book's overall argument would be a more comprehensive discussion of the efficacy of whistleblowing. That is, how certain do whistleblowers need to be that their actions will actually bring about the changes that they see as morally necessary? According to the organizational duty approach, the whistleblower is not simply permitted to call out the wrongdoing but is actively required to report on it. However, what ought a person do if he or she knows of wrongdoing in an organization but has good reason to believe that reporting and/or going public will do very little? Kenny's book presents case after case of systemic failures and roadblocks to whistleblowers in the financial industry. My concern here with seeing whistleblowing as an organizational duty is that it may run into a demandingness objection. Why should I blow the whistle if such an action is unlikely to have the desired outcome and when such an action may come at a significant cost to me? Am I sacrificing my own well-being and potentially that of my colleagues, family, and friends for something that is unlikely to have a positive outcome? This brings us back to the tension between personal ethics and public ethics. While Ceva and Bocchiola may be convincing in their claim that there is an organizational duty to blow the whistle, it is unclear how they weigh the public ethics duty against one's personal responsibilities.

Why Wouldn't I Blow the Whistle? Loyalty and Security

The challenge faced by whistleblowers is an old one: Why should I act, even if I acknowledge it is the right thing to do, when doing so is likely to come at serious cost to me? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: because it is the right thing to do. As Kenny explains, “The act of whistleblowing often involves significant risk for the person who speaks out, therefore it is somewhat unintelligible in today's secular culture because it is seen as foolhardy” (p. 26). One of the core tensions in whistleblowing is acting in line with what morality tells one to do vs. acting in ways that are in one's self-interest.

Kenny's book differs significantly from Ceva and Bocchiola's, as she is focused on whistleblowers in the financial sector, with a broad approach that draws from critical organizational studies to explore the experiences of whistleblowers. “Rather than attempting to define who or what a whistleblower is,” she suggests, “this book examines what happens to people when they take on this label, whether by choice or otherwise” (p. 209). Her approach sees whistleblowing not as an individual act but as “an intrinsically collective phenomenon, even when it appears as though only one person is speaking out” (p. 212). It is worth noting that the people featured in her book were not simply whistleblowers but people who were employed in a professional capacity to specifically attend to, and report on, wrongdoing. Kelly notes that “the majority of participants had been employed in watchdog roles; their formal job description involved finding and highlighting incidents of wrongdoing, whether this was as an internal auditor, a risk manager, a compliance officer, or an anti-money laundering officer” (p. 6). This is important as, due to their specific roles, these people could not simply allow the wrongdoing to occur. That is, they would be failing in their assigned professional roles if they did so. In contrast with Ceva and Bocchiola's approach, which explicitly rejects the professional duty model, these people had an express professional responsibility to blow the whistle.

Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory illustrates how hard it is even for professionals specifically employed to attend to and report on wrongdoing to effectively blow the whistle. Chapters 5–7 detail a litany of impediments and repercussions for whistleblowing in the global financial sector, from retaliation (chapter 5), to being shut out of existing institutional oversight mechanisms (chapter 6), to media censorship and silence (chapter 7). A number of the cases that Kenny covers resulted in the whistleblowers facing expensive court cases and even being jailed for whistleblowing (p. 133).

This returns us to the demandingness issue and the tensions between public or professional ethics and personal ethics. While many countries and institutions have laws and policies to encourage and protect whistleblowers, in practice these laws and policies are weak and are often simply ignored. The pattern that emerges in Kenny's book is one where those who are specifically employed to look for and report on institutional wrongdoing are consistently ignored (chapter 6). In these circumstances, given that whistleblowing is unlikely to bring about the changes desired, and that such efforts are not only going to be ignored but bring about retribution, we return to the question of whether a commitment to public or professional ethics necessarily trumps a person's commitment to themselves and their families and friends. Neither book offers a direct answer.

Kenny's book seeks to present a new theory for whistleblowing by exploring the notion of affective recognition. “On this view, our selves are founded on desires to be recognized as valid and legitimate. These desires compel us into complex attachments with dominant discourses in society, in our organizations, and in our institutions” (p. 32). In contrast to Ceva and Bocchiola's conceptually analytic approach, Kenny seeks to understand the psychological experience of whistleblowing by examining the specific individuals in the organizational context in which whistleblowing occurs. In this way, both books see the organizational context as essential to both motivating and understanding whistleblowing. On Kenny's account, the financial sector seemed to engage in particularly problematic and risky behaviors (chapter 3), and, despite establishing a set of rules and oversight bodies, was protected from those who were employed to monitor and report on wrongdoing and risky behaviors. This protection was, in part, because the financial sector was viewed as “too big to fail” (pp. 78–79) and too complex to understand (pp. 81–82).

However, despite their focus on organizations, neither book looks at the role that loyalty plays in stopping people from blowing the whistle. Many whistleblowers are seen as traitors to their institution, leading to exclusion from employment and social activity (pp. 150–55). This loyalty does not necessarily need to be linked specifically to the institution. Similar to Ceva and Bocchiola's focus on what members of an organization owe one another, it is plausible to suggest that a person's desire to not cause harm or damage to colleagues stops him or her from whistleblowing. Similarly, given the significant personal costs that come from blowing the whistle, how do potential whistleblowers weigh their organizational duty against loyalty to family and friends?

Bringing this back to demandingness, if every whistleblowing action was likely to achieve its mission of ending the organizational wrongdoing even at a personal cost, perhaps the public ethics considerations would outweigh those of personal ethics. But given that it is not only uncertain but unlikely that whistleblowing will bring about significant change, I would argue that the loyalty to colleagues, family, and friends plays a significant role in making the decision to blow the whistle.

Organizational context can also change one's responsibilities. For example, we should pay greater attention to the role that the negative impacts of whistleblowing may play in the security sector. I use the term “security sector” quite broadly to include militaries, policing, intelligence agencies, and particular governmental decision-making bodies that relate to national security in a nontrivial manner. Given that Ceva and Bocchiola use Manning and Snowden as paradigmatic examples of whistleblowers, a discussion of whistleblowing in the security-sector context and how that context may or may not impact the duties of the whistleblower is warranted. For instance, while we might agree that there is a general organizational duty to blow the whistle, perhaps the security sector is a context in which that general assumption does not hold or needs to be nuanced. The potential special status of the security sector derives from two interrelated phenomena. First are the oaths of loyalty that those serving in the security sector have sworn. Second is that careless whistleblowing in the security sector can put lives at risk. While there are no formal loyalty oaths in the financial sector, loyalty to colleagues and institutions do play a role, and the latter point about the importance of discretion in the security sector as a means of preserving safety echoes the idea that the financial sector was both too big to fail and too complex to understand. Given that those ideas provided cover for massive wrongdoing in the financial sector, we need to critically assess any similar ideas in the security sector, too.

Loyalty—not to an organization but to one's colleagues—is pertinent to whistleblowing and perhaps especially important in the security context given that one's life may be in the hands of that person's colleagues. Though I find the notion of organizational loyalty of only limited moral importance, the loyalty to colleagues carries more moral weight. Ceva and Bocchiola argue that if an institution is involved in wrongdoing, it can lose its public mandate. However, the important aspect here is that taking such a view assumes that whistleblowing will not only bring about positive changes but also will not bring negative impacts. The worry about whistleblowing in the security sector is that such efforts can put covert operations and colleagues’ lives at significant risk. By going public, the whistleblower is betraying his or her colleagues—a point made a number of times against both Manning and Snowden.

This leads us to the second issue: careless whistleblowing. Here we may see some difference between the means of whistleblowing used by Manning and Snowden. Manning chose to use WikiLeaks and received assurances from the organization that sensitive information would be redacted.Footnote ⁵ However, it turns out that this was something that WikiLeaks effectively lacked the capacity to do,Footnote ⁶ which lead to both the organization and Manning being criticized for putting lives at risk. Snowden, in contrast, took his concerns to a set of reporters who he believed would treat the releases with more care.Footnote ⁷ Though it has been alleged that his revelations have led to losses in intelligence effectiveness,Footnote ⁸ it is important to note that his efforts also prompted significant reforms within the U.S. intelligence community.Footnote ⁹ At the very least, this signals that Snowden took greater care in his efforts than Manning and WikiLeaks did.

This is in no way suggesting that there ought to be no whistleblowing in the security sector. In fact, given its secrecy and the fact that lives are literally at stake, it is an area where whistleblowing is especially necessary. This is where Kenny's book becomes especially pertinent. Given the potential that the internal process will not work, a whistleblower may be forced to use less careful means to go public if the mandated internal processes fail or are not trusted. With technological advancements that grant the capacity for whistleblowers to gather information on wrongdoings and to communicate that information to the public with limited care, there is an increased need for organizations and oversight bodies to take whistleblowers’ concerns seriously. Somewhat counterintuitively, this suggests that the security sector, in particular, should not simply protect whistleblowers but do more to encourage them.

Both books illuminate the important role that organizations play in understanding whistleblowing as a concept and as a practice. Ceva and Bocchiola's approach adds nuance and detail to the conceptual and practical issues raised by whistleblowing. Kenny's book, while I found it looser and less convincing in its arguments than Ceva and Bocchiola's, provides important details on the impediments to, and costs of, whistleblowing in organizations.

As to the question, why would I be a whistleblower? the combination of the two books highlights a perennial concern: what should take precedence in decision-making—moral duty or prudence? On the one hand, Ceva and Bocchiola offer a significant reason for one to blow the whistle when confronted with wrongdoing in his or her organization: duty should guide action. On the other hand, Kenny presents a strong argument that becoming a whistleblower is not likely to have good outcomes and has a good chance of causing significant harm to the whistleblower; even when employed in a role of oversight and reporting on wrongdoing, this act is likely to be imprudent from a personal standpoint. Taken together, the two books suggest that if we actually do want to reduce and prevent organizational wrongdoing, as communities we need to attend to the systems that oversee organizations to ensure that whistleblowing is a viable and prudent course of action.