Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistleblower

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: December 12, 2016 at 11:12:51 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistleblower
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistleblower
> From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men have some striking differences.
> By Malcolm Gladwell
> Dec 19 2016 Issue
> <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/daniel-ellsberg-edward-snowden-and-the-modern-whistleblower>
>
> In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a 
> secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled 
> forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the 
> Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to 
> finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg.
>
> Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people 
> about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND 
> would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there 
> was a Xerox machine he could use.
>
> “It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today’s standards,” Ellsberg writes in his 2002 
> autobiography, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers”:
>
> It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on 
> the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound 
> with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn’t collate, and the bar had to 
> come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.
>
> Night after night, Ellsberg repeated the process: copying until dawn, rushing home, hiding the pages, grabbing a few 
> hours’ sleep, then stumbling bleary-eyed into the office. Eventually, he gave copies of what came to be known as the 
> Pentagon Papers to the Times and then the Washington Post, and passed into history as the archetypal modern 
> whistleblower.
>
> Ellsberg was handsome and charismatic. He had served in the Marine Corps as a company commander in Korea. He did his 
> undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard, where he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on game theory and collaborated 
> with Thomas Schelling, who went on to win a Nobel Prize. He took a senior post in McNamara’s Defense Department, 
> represented the State Department in Vietnam, and had two stints as a senior intelligence analyst at the RAND 
> Corporation. Ellsberg knew about the Pentagon Papers because he was a member of the select team that wrote them, 
> working on the section dealing with the very early nineteen-sixties. Before he approached the Times, he went to the 
> Senate, where he tried to get someone to release the documents formally and hold public hearings. He walked the halls 
> and dropped in on people he knew. “I had Senator Mathias in mind, and Senator Mike Gravel,” who, he notes, had 
> “written me a letter congratulating me on my New York Review of Books article,” about the bombings in Laos. (It seems 
> safe to say that the subject, verb, and object here—“Senator,” “written,” “New York Review of Books article”—may 
> never again appear together in a sentence.)
>
> In another passage in “Secrets,” Ellsberg relates a conversation he had in 1968 with Henry Kissinger, a Harvard 
> acquaintance. Ellsberg was trying to prepare Kissinger for the White House. For the first time in your life, Ellsberg 
> tells him, you will have a security clearance and gain access to a steady flow of government secrets. He goes on:
>
> You will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions 
> made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and 
> others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess.
>
> That feeling of foolishness, Ellsberg continues, will last two weeks, at which point you will become so enthralled by 
> your access to “whole libraries of hidden information” that
>
> it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be 
> thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the 
> same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so 
> torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. . . . The danger is, you’ll become something 
> like a moron.
>
> Ellsberg says that Kissinger listened carefully, but “I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was 
> saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.”
>
> [snip]
>
>
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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