Whistleblowers vs National Security

The argument is that purported whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning have harmed national security.  They may have.  But by punishing them as traitors, we have harmed the country worse.

We need whistleblowers.  People with power tend to do things to enhance their power, to maintain their power, to take advantage of their power.  Some of these things are inevitable and unavoidable, but many of these things are bad, and need to be stopped.  Fear and self-interest are the root of nearly all evil and when given the privacy of national security, those that would take advantage of the darkness can hide with impunity.   There's a tradeoff: some secrecy is necessary.  Some people get involved in the security business specifically so they can steal secrets for profit or to give the advantage to our enemies, and these people need to be punished.  But we need to recognize when the secrets are hiding wrongdoing of people that purport to be on our side.  Mostly this is handled by the management of the security organization itself.  But when those in power become abusers themselves, the only mechanism we have is the whistleblower.

As has been pointed out frequently, there's a tradeoff between privacy, freedom and safety.  Safety without freedom is not worth much.  If a cop is allowed to beat up or even kill people who are innocent or have committed minor, non-threatening infractions, if a helicopter gunship is allowed to mow down cameramen and rescue workers with impunity, if anyone is allowed to listen to our phone and internet conversations without a warrant, then we have left privacy and freedom behind and are into the realm of the tyrant.  The whistleblower is our primary window into the national security machine. We need to protect whistleblowers, even when, especially when, they are threatening the powerful.  This is so important that I think it's acceptable to slightly reduce national security in return.

What I've seen of the releases of Snowden and Manning do not credibly harm national security at all.  The reporters that they are working with have shown exceptional restraint.  What they harm is a few individuals who did embarrassing and occasionally criminal things.  Perhaps the worst is a few foreign dignitaries who were so embarrassed by the exposure of their misbehavior that it harms the diplomatic relationship. It's unfortunate, but they really did do the embarrassing thing.  If knowledge of the mass collection of phone records is a surprise to any would-be terrorist, they apparently don't quite understand how their phone bill works.

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Chinese sources have been claiming that Snowden said he took the Booz-Allen-Hamilton job for the specific purpose of collecting NSA secrets so he could leak them.  This doesn't fit his previous behavior very well, including 5 years working directly for NSA and CIA, but it does make him seem more like a spy, which they may have thought would give them an advantage over him.  Snowden and Manning were clearly a little naive about the very powerful dragon they'd poked, and that dragon bit them hard.