15 - Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience

Summary

From Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, to the anonymous intelligence official whose revelations about President Trump’s illegal campaign activities in Ukraine helped lead to his impeachment by the House of Representatives, whistleblowers have captivated public attention in the US and elsewhere. Christopher Wylie “blew the whistle” on UK-based Cambridge Analytica, revealing in March 2018 that his former employer had mined Facebook data to manipulate voters. Recent EU-wide attempts to regulate offshore finance have been motivated by the so-called Panama Papers (2015) and Paradise Papers (2017).¹ Candice Delmas may be exaggerating somewhat when claiming that “[i]f the twentieth century was the age of civil disobedience, the twenty-first century is shaping up to be the age of whistleblowing.”² Yet Delmas is right to highlight whistleblowing’s (henceforth, WB) massive global political impact, and the ways in which it increasingly performs functions long standardly associated with civil disobedience (henceforth, CD).