Case Study 2: Whistleblowing as Epistemic Justice

Snowden, Manning, and the Ethics of Leaking True Information

Introduction

The standard framework for evaluating misinformation focuses on the spread of false information: people believe things that are not true, and this harms them and damages the epistemic commons. But a distinct category of ethically significant information behavior involves the disclosure of true information in ways that cause harm. The concept of malinformation — true information disclosed with the intent or effect of causing harm — was introduced in the information disorder literature by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan in 2017. Malinformation sits at the opposite end of the truth spectrum from misinformation: it is accurate, but its disclosure serves harmful purposes.

Whistleblowing presents the most philosophically complex version of the malinformation problem. When an employee of a government agency or corporation discloses confidential true information to the public or to journalists, they are sharing accurate facts — which, on the standard account, should be epistemically valuable. But the disclosure may: expose individuals who did not consent to exposure; compromise operations that serve genuine security interests; violate contractual obligations; and be done with political motives as much as epistemic ones.

This case study examines two canonical whistleblowing cases — Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA surveillance programs and Chelsea Manning's disclosure of diplomatic cables and military logs — as vehicles for thinking through the ethics of true but harmful disclosure. The central question: when does sharing true information serve the public epistemic interest, and when does it constitute malinformation whose harms outweigh its benefits?

Section 1: The Concept of Malinformation

Wardle and Derakhshan's information disorder framework distinguishes three categories:

Misinformation: False content shared without intent to harm (sharing false information in good faith).
Disinformation: False content shared with intent to harm.
Malinformation: True content shared with intent to harm.

Malinformation examples they cite include: targeted harassment using true personal information about a private individual (sharing someone's true home address to enable stalking), the disclosure of true but embarrassing information about individuals by political opponents in ways designed to damage rather than inform, and state-sponsored leaking of true information about adversaries to manipulate geopolitical outcomes.

The concept of malinformation has been contested by some media scholars, who worry that it pathologizes the disclosure of true information and could be used by governments and corporations to delegitimize inconvenient disclosures. This concern has direct force in the whistleblowing context: many genuine public interest disclosures have been characterized by the exposed parties as "harmful" to the national interest, public safety, or institutional reputation.

The ethical analysis of malinformation must therefore proceed carefully, distinguishing between:

Disclosure of true information primarily to harm specific individuals without significant public interest benefit.
Disclosure of true information that causes collateral harm to some individuals or institutions in the course of serving genuine public interest purposes.
Disclosure of true information that is framed or weaponized in ways that maximize harm beyond what the public interest disclosure would require.

These categories are not always clearly separable, and the most difficult whistleblowing cases involve genuine uncertainty about which category applies.

Section 2: The Snowden Disclosures

What Was Disclosed

In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor working for the National Security Agency, transmitted a massive trove of classified documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The documents revealed that the NSA was conducting large-scale surveillance programs that collected telephone metadata from millions of ordinary Americans, accessed data from major technology companies under a program called PRISM, and intercepted communications of foreign leaders including allies.

The disclosures were published serially by The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel, among others. They generated immediate global debate about government surveillance, privacy rights, the legal boundaries of intelligence programs, and the complicity of major technology companies in government surveillance.

The Government's Response

The U.S. government charged Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917. Officials argued that the disclosures had caused severe damage to national security by revealing sources and methods to adversaries, compromising ongoing intelligence operations, and damaging relationships with foreign intelligence partners. Snowden fled to Russia, where he remains. He was offered asylum by Russia in 2013 and has lived there since.

The Public Interest Assessment

The Snowden disclosures produced measurable public interest outcomes:

Congressional response: In 2015, the U.S. Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which ended the bulk collection of telephone metadata program revealed by Snowden, and implemented new oversight requirements for intelligence collection.

Judicial response: Federal courts found, in ACLU v. Clapper (2d Cir. 2015), that the bulk telephone metadata collection program was illegal under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act — a ruling that directly relied on information disclosed by Snowden.

Public discourse: The disclosures fundamentally changed global public understanding of digital surveillance, contributing to the widespread adoption of encryption, significant policy changes at major technology companies, and sustained legislative debates in multiple democracies about the appropriate scope of surveillance.

Documented harms: U.S. officials asserted that the disclosures caused specific intelligence failures, but few have been documented publicly in ways that allow independent assessment. A comprehensive review by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found no specific intelligence damage claims it could verify.

The Ethical Framework

Several philosophical frameworks bear on the ethics of the Snowden disclosures:

The truth-telling framework: Snowden disclosed true information about programs that he believed were illegal and violated the constitutional rights of millions of people. From the perspective of truth-telling as an epistemic virtue, the disclosures provided accurate information to citizens about the activities of their government on matters of direct relevance to their constitutional rights. Williams's virtue of accuracy — taking care to ensure one's beliefs are true before asserting them — would seem to support disclosure of factually accurate information about government conduct.

The consequentialist framework: The ethical analysis must weigh the concrete public interest benefits (ending an illegal program, enabling judicial review, informing public debate, prompting protective legal reform) against the concrete harms (risk to intelligence personnel and sources, diplomatic damage, potential operational failures). The difficulty is that harm claims were made by the government — which had strong institutional interests in discrediting the disclosure — and could not be independently verified. The documented benefits are more verifiable than the asserted harms.

The epistemic justice framework: The surveillance programs disclosed by Snowden were conducted without the knowledge of the citizens subjected to them. This created a massive information asymmetry between the government and the governed — the government knew it was surveilling citizens in ways citizens did not know and had not consented to. From the perspective of epistemic justice, this asymmetry itself constitutes an epistemic wrong: citizens were denied the information necessary to exercise informed democratic judgment about government activities affecting their constitutional rights. Disclosure corrected an epistemic injustice, albeit by creating other harms.

The harm principle: Mill's harm principle holds that interference with liberty requires harm to others as justification. The surveillance programs revealed by Snowden arguably caused harm to citizens (by subjecting them to surveillance without legal authority or consent). If so, disclosure of those programs is justified by the harm principle — it is the disclosure that enables citizens and courts to address the harm being done to them.

Whistleblowing and Democratic Theory

A distinctive argument for whistleblowing in the national security context draws on democratic theory. Democracy requires that citizens be able to oversee and hold accountable their government's activities. When government activities are conducted in secret, this democratic oversight is impossible. If the secret activities are themselves violations of citizens' rights, the secrecy compounds the wrong by preventing the very mechanism — democratic accountability — by which the wrong could be addressed.

On this view, whistleblowing that reveals illegal government activities is not merely epistemically valuable; it is democratically necessary. A government that can conceal its activities from citizens can conduct those activities without accountability — which is antithetical to democratic governance. The whistleblower serves the democratic function of epistemic oversight.

This argument has limits: not all government secrecy is antidemocratic. Genuine operational security — protecting the identities of covert operatives, for example, or concealing the technical means of intelligence collection — may be consistent with democratic governance when it is subject to independent oversight (by cleared congressional members, inspector generals, or courts). The issue arises when secrecy is used not to protect legitimate operational security but to conceal illegal activities from democratic oversight.

Section 3: Chelsea Manning and the War Logs

What Was Disclosed

Chelsea Manning, then serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, transmitted a massive collection of classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. The disclosures included:

The "Collateral Murder" video, showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists and several other individuals, with audio of crew members discussing the attack.
The Iraq War Logs: nearly 400,000 field reports from the Iraq War documenting civilian casualties not previously acknowledged by the U.S. government.
The Afghan War Diary: 90,000 military reports from Afghanistan documenting the war, including records of civilian casualties.
250,000 State Department diplomatic cables revealing candid assessments by U.S. diplomats of foreign leaders and governments.

Manning was court-martialed, convicted of multiple charges under the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Obama commuted the sentence in 2017 after Manning had served seven years.

The "Collateral Murder" Video

The "Collateral Murder" video — so named by WikiLeaks, which made the editorial decision to publish it under that title — provides a particularly complex ethical case study within the larger disclosure.

The video showed a real event — an attack by U.S. forces on individuals in Baghdad. The event was factually documented: the Reuters journalists were killed, the other individuals were killed or wounded, and the military had declined to release the footage despite Freedom of Information requests from Reuters.

WikiLeaks' decision to publish the video with the title "Collateral Murder" and with editorial framing that characterized the incident as a "war crime" exemplifies what we might call editorially framed disclosure: the information is true, but it is presented in a context and with framing that goes beyond factual disclosure to advocate a particular interpretation.

Was this ethical? Several considerations:

The underlying facts — that a U.S. helicopter crew attacked and killed civilians and journalists — were true and had been concealed from public view. The public interest in knowing what its government's military forces were doing in an active war zone was substantial and legitimate.

The characterization of the incident as a "war crime" was an interpretation disputed by military and legal authorities. By embedding that interpretation in the name and framing of the disclosure, WikiLeaks went beyond epistemic disclosure into advocacy — arguably distorting the epistemic character of the disclosure from "true information that allows citizens to judge" to "true information packaged to produce a predetermined judgment."

This illustrates a crucial distinction within the whistleblowing/disclosure category: between disclosure that enables citizens to form their own judgments based on accurate information, and disclosure that packages accurate information in ways designed to produce specific judgments. The former serves epistemic autonomy; the latter partially subverts it.

The Diplomatic Cables: Malinformation Risk

The diplomatic cables presented a more direct malinformation concern. The cables included candid assessments by U.S. diplomats of foreign leaders — assessments that are standard in diplomatic practice but that were never intended for public disclosure. Publishing these assessments caused direct, documented harm:

Informants who had spoken to U.S. embassies were identified and faced risk of retaliation by their governments.
Diplomatic relationships were damaged by the disclosure of candid private assessments that differed from official public positions.
Several governments expelled U.S. diplomatic personnel following the disclosures.

The cables themselves were true; the disclosure caused genuine harm to identifiable individuals (informants whose safety was compromised) and to U.S. diplomatic relationships. WikiLeaks' decision to publish the cables without adequate redaction of names — despite pressure from news organizations that collaborated on the publication to redact identifying information — resulted in specific, preventable harms that went beyond any plausible public interest justification.

This aspect of the Manning/WikiLeaks disclosure most clearly fits the malinformation category: true information disclosed in a manner that maximized harm beyond what the public interest purpose required.

Section 4: Comparing the Cases — An Ethical Analysis

Public Interest Threshold

A common framework in whistleblowing ethics holds that disclosure of confidential true information is ethically justified when:

The disclosed information reveals significant wrongdoing or matters of substantial public concern.
The wrongdoing could not reasonably be addressed through internal channels.
The disclosure is limited to what is necessary to achieve the legitimate public interest purpose.
The harm to identified individuals or institutions is proportionate to the public interest served.
The whistleblower acts from primarily public interest motives rather than primarily personal grievances.

Applying this framework to the Snowden and Manning cases reveals significant differences:

Public interest significance: Both disclosures revealed significant matters — illegal surveillance of millions of Americans (Snowden), unreported civilian casualties and concealed information about the conduct of wars (Manning). Both clear the first criterion.

Internal channels: Both Snowden and Manning subsequently argued that internal channels were unavailable or would have been ineffective. Snowden has pointed to the treatment of prior NSA whistleblowers (like Thomas Drake, who faced prosecution after attempting to work through internal channels) as evidence that internal channels were foreclosed. Manning's circumstances — a young, junior enlisted analyst with limited institutional standing — made meaningful access to effective internal channels implausible.

Minimum necessary disclosure: This criterion reveals a significant difference. Snowden worked with journalists who made editorial judgments about what to publish and withheld or redacted documents that could cause direct harm to individuals — the collaborative publication model with The Guardian and Washington Post involved significant editorial restraint. Manning's transmission of hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, without pre-screening or redaction capacity, resulted in the disclosure of a much larger volume of material than was necessary for the public interest purpose, including material that caused demonstrable harm to identified individuals.

Proportionality: The proportionality assessment depends on factual questions about which harms actually resulted — questions that remain partially contested. The Snowden disclosure's proportionality case is stronger because documented benefits (legislative and judicial reform) are clearer, and asserted harms are less independently verified.

Motives: The motive question is philosophically complex. Whistleblowers characteristically present their motives in public-interest terms; critics characterize them as acting from personal grievance, ideological commitment, or fame-seeking. Assessing motives is epistemically difficult and may be less important than assessing the actual public interest effects of the disclosure.

Section 5: Epistemic Justice and the Whistleblower

Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice provides an important lens through which to evaluate whistleblowing. In both the Snowden and Manning cases, the government's secret activities created asymmetric information environments in which:

Citizens lacked information necessary to evaluate their government's conduct on matters directly affecting their constitutional rights (surveillance) and involving their nation's use of lethal force (war logs).
This information asymmetry prevented meaningful democratic oversight.
The epistemic injustice was compounded by the Espionage Act's treatment of disclosure as criminal rather than as protected whistleblowing.

From the epistemic justice perspective, whistleblowing that corrects massive government-created information asymmetries on matters of direct democratic concern is not merely legally tolerated dissent — it is a form of epistemic justice, correcting a wrong done to citizens as knowers.

However, this analysis must be tempered by the recognition that the correction of epistemic injustice through disclosure can itself create new epistemic harms — to the individuals identified in diplomatic cables, to the intelligence personnel whose methods are revealed, and to the cooperative relationships that enable future intelligence operations. The ethical analysis cannot simply balance the government's wrongdoing against the public interest disclosure; it must also account for the individuals who bear the costs of correction without having been party to the original wrong.

Section 6: The Role of Journalistic Mediation

A crucial variable in both cases is the role of journalistic mediation between the discloser and the public. Snowden chose to work with experienced journalists who made editorial judgments about publication. Manning worked primarily with WikiLeaks, which initially declined to redact names and made editorial decisions that maximized impact and visibility over epistemic responsibility.

This difference illuminates a general principle for the ethics of disclosure: journalistic mediation serves important epistemic and ethical functions that a direct disclosure to the public cannot provide. Experienced journalists assess what information genuinely serves the public interest, redact or withhold information that would cause disproportionate harm, provide context that enables appropriate interpretation, and take legal and ethical responsibility for publication decisions.

Disclosures that bypass journalistic mediation — by directly releasing unredacted documents to the internet, for example — forfeit these epistemic quality controls. The result may be a larger volume of information available to the public but also greater risk of epistemic harm: more material that serves no legitimate public interest purpose, less context for appropriate interpretation, and more exposure of individuals whose identification serves no public interest.

Section 7: Comparative Legal Frameworks

United States

The Espionage Act of 1917, under which both Snowden and Manning were charged, does not recognize a public interest defense. An accused cannot argue that disclosure was justified because the information served the public interest; the law only asks whether the person knew they were disclosing national defense information to someone not authorized to receive it.

This legal framework has been widely criticized as inadequate for the complex ethical landscape of modern whistleblowing. It treats all disclosures of classified information as equivalent, regardless of the nature of the information, the public interest served, or the harm caused. Whistleblowing reform advocates have argued for a genuine public interest defense.

United Kingdom

The UK's Official Secrets Act is similarly structured, without a public interest defense. However, the UK has separate whistleblowing legislation (the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998) that protects some categories of disclosure by workers, though it does not extend to national security whistleblowing.

International Human Rights Framework

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression has argued that international human rights law supports protection for national security whistleblowers who disclose information about human rights violations or serious illegalities, provided the disclosure is proportionate and the whistleblower first exhausted available internal channels. This framework directly addresses the gap in domestic legislation.

Discussion Questions

Apply the five-criterion public interest framework to the Snowden and Manning cases. Does the framework yield different verdicts for the two cases? If so, what specific factors drive the difference?
The chapter introduces the concept of malinformation — true information disclosed to harm. Is it possible for the same disclosure to be both a legitimate public interest whistleblowing act and a form of malinformation? How should we assess disclosures that serve some legitimate purposes while causing gratuitous harm in other respects?
Manning's disclosures were transmitted to WikiLeaks, which made editorial decisions about publication without the involvement of the original discloser. Who bears moral responsibility for the harms caused by WikiLeaks' publication decisions — Manning, who transmitted the information, or WikiLeaks, which made the publication choices?
Should the United States adopt a public interest defense to the Espionage Act for national security whistleblowers? What criteria would you include in such a defense? How would you prevent such a defense from being used to justify harmful disclosures that do not genuinely serve the public interest?
The Snowden disclosures enabled both the legislative and judicial branches to address illegal surveillance programs. Does this democratic accountability function provide a stronger justification for disclosure than purely epistemic arguments about citizens' right to know?
Critics of the Snowden disclosures have argued that even if the NSA programs were illegal, Snowden should have used official internal channels or sought asylum in a country with a more transparent political system (rather than Russia). Evaluate this criticism. Does it affect the ethical assessment of the disclosure itself?
How does the concept of "editorially framed disclosure" apply to contemporary data journalism? When news organizations publish large datasets with interpretive framing — as has occurred with the Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers, and leaked military documents — what epistemic responsibilities do they bear?
Extending Fricker's epistemic justice framework: Can whistleblowers themselves be victims of testimonial injustice — having their testimony about wrongdoing discounted because of their status as accused criminals or traitors? How does the legal and political response to whistleblowers affect the epistemic processing of their disclosures?

Conclusion

Whistleblowing represents the most philosophically challenging category of the malinformation problem because it involves the disclosure of genuine truths about genuine wrongs, in circumstances where disclosure itself causes genuine harm.

The ethics of whistleblowing cannot be resolved by appeal to simple rules: "always disclose government wrongdoing" ignores the real harms that disclosure can cause to individuals who did not perpetrate the wrongs; "always protect national security information" ignores the role of secrecy in enabling and concealing those wrongs.

The most defensible framework requires case-by-case analysis against criteria that take seriously both the epistemic justice case for disclosure (citizens' right to know what their government does in their name) and the genuine harms that disclosure can cause to identified individuals. That analysis must also assess the role of journalistic mediation, the proportionality of the disclosure, and the good faith of the discloser.

What both the Snowden and Manning cases make clear is that the ethics of disclosure in democratic societies cannot be left entirely to legal frameworks that were designed without adequate attention to the epistemic rights of citizens or the epistemic justice dimensions of government secrecy. Building better legal and institutional frameworks for evaluating whistleblowing — frameworks that take the public interest seriously without ignoring genuine harm — is an urgent task for democratic societies that value both security and the epistemic commons.

Related Sections: Chapter 41, Sections 41.3 (The Right to Know), 41.4 (Epistemic Injustice Revisited), 41.9 (Epistemic Responsibility)

Related Case Study: Case Study 1 — The Ethics of Satire