Daniel Ellsberg's Denunciation of Attempts to Use Him as a Positive Foil Against Snowden, Manning, Assange, and Other Modern Whistleblowers

Daniel Ellsberg's Previously Unpublished Critiques of Malcolm Gladwell's 2016 New Yorker Article "Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whisle-Blower."

Below is a letter to the editor Daniel Ellsberg wrote to the New Yorker on 12/21/16 in response to Malcolm Gladwell’s 12/11/16 piece, “Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower.” (The letter was not published.)

Below that are previously-unpublished notes Daniel wrote one day after Gladwell’s article came out, on 12/12/16. (As was his custom, Daniel wrote up these notes by copying and pasting the original text into a Word document and then commenting in-line in brackets in bold, exactly as presented below.)

In the section with Daniel’s notes, plain text is Gladwell’s, from the article. Bold text is Daniel’s. (For decorum, I have “bleeped” out a few [expletives] in brackets. As you will see, Daniel was very passionate in his contempt for this article.)

Also, out of respect for copyright, I have cut all text from Gladwell’s original article that Daniel did not comment on directly; cuts are indicated by ellipses. (This may lead to a disjointed feel to the notes below, but you can refer to the original article for additional context.) The text from Gladwell’s article is reproduced in the absolute minimum amount necessary to show Daniel’s response to it, under non-commercial Fair Use for criticism.

—Michael Ellsberg

#####

To the editors:

The sub-heading to Malcolm Gladwell’s laudatory account of me as a whistleblower, contrasting me with Edward Snowden, asserts: “From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men have some striking differences.” 

Differences in backgrounds, yes.  Striking differences in motivation?  From my perspective, none. I couldn’t disagree more with Gladwell’s overall account.

Each of us, having earned privileged access to secret information, saw unconstitutional, dangerously wrong policies ongoing by our government. (In Snowden’s case, he discovered blatantly criminal violations of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, on a scale that threatens our democracy.)  We found our superiors, up to the presidents, were deeply complicit and clearly unwilling either to expose, reform or end the wrongdoing.

Each of us chose to sacrifice careers, and possibly a lifetime’s freedom, to reveal to the public, Congress and the courts what had long been going on in secret from them.  We hoped, each with some success, to allow our democratic system to bring about desperately needed change.

The truth is there are no whistleblowers, in fact no one on earth, with whom I identify more closely than with Edward Snowden.

Here is one difference between us that is deeply real to me: Edward Snowden, when he was thirty years old, did what I could and should have done--what I profoundly wish I had done--when I was his age, instead of ten years later.

It is his patriotic example, I would hope, that disillusioned and anguished government employees would consider following if they have privileged knowledge--right now, or in the months and years ahead—of planned or ongoing actions by presidents or their subordinates that violate their shared oaths to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. 

—Daniel Ellsberg, 12/21/16

Daniel’s Ellsberg’s Notes (in Bold) on Malcolm Gladwell’s 12/11/16 New Yorker Article:

From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men [Ellsberg and Snowden] have some striking differences. [Backgrounds, yes, as with Chelsea Manning. Motivations? Not in the slightest.]

…. Only a handful [dozen] of copies [of the Pentagon Papers] were made

…. He had served in the Marine Corps as a company commander in Korea [NO: Camp Lejeune. This is a brand new error; no source for it over the last 40 years. You shouldn’t rely on Wikipedia for facts, but should you introduce errors that Wikipedia doesn’t make, nor anyone else? See below, e.g.: Ph.D. in “political science.”]

…. He did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard, where he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on game theory [No, decision theory].… 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 [never intelligence analyst; systems analyst, or strategic analyst] at the RAND Corporation.

…. 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 [NO: SCI, special clearances higher than Top Secret; I knew he’d long had TS clearance] and gain access to a steady flow of government secrets [higher than Top Secret.]

…. [Snowden] enlisted in the Army Reserves, and washed out [NO! discharged for physical reasons- broken legs] after twenty weeks. . . . He learned about the innermost secrets of American intelligence-gathering and policy not because he was personally involved with that intelligence-gathering or policymaking but because he was a technician who helped service [!! Manage! “A genius among geniuses”: colleague] the computer systems that managed these things. . . . Had Snowden been a whistle-blower in 1967, at the launch of the Pentagon Papers, he would have blown the whistle on Daniel Ellsberg. [No more than I would; perhaps as much. We were both, initially, contemptuous of whistle-blowers.] The whistle-blower as insider has become the whistle-blower as outsider. [Snowden was in no way an “outsider”… he was an insider; he DID “have the clearances”]

…. Strict laws prohibit government officials from disclosing secrets, [No, we have no Official Secrets Act, like Britain and most countries, thanks to our First Amendment. We have administrative regulations; and since Nixon, we’ve had an unconstitutional application of Espionage Act, first against me.] yet leaking has been a constant feature of American political life. Since the passage of the Espionage Act, in 1917, the federal government has prosecuted only about a dozen cases concerning media leaks of state secrets. [Yes: three before Obama, starting with me; nine under Obama!]

[MG never makes the simple distinction between leaks of unclassified information (from all departments) and leaks of classified information: most of the latter being, in reality, authorized by an agency official, though against classification regulations, “plants” (not only from the White House) to serve agency or White House/administration or individual interests. Nor does he distinguish between leaks in general—which can have many motives, both supportive of agency or administration interests or be career-serving or serve a sense of self-importance—and “whistle-blowing,” which he never mentions, though it actually is what Snowden and I shared doing, an intention to serve a public interest by disclosing official wrong-doing (not necessarily illegal).]

…. Even the recent uptick [see above: three times more than all previous presidents together; MG never mentions this] in leak prosecutions during the Obama Administration, Pozen argues, does not alter the fundamental pattern. [M.E. note: referring to Columbia law professor David Pozen, author of the 2013 Harvard Law Review article “The Leaky Leviathan”]

…. The first order of business was typically to call the leaker and complain that he or she was playing favorites. [That’s not classified info; with that, a journalist or insider could guess what agency was the source (by the content, drift of it) but not who did it; and even if they could, in an unusual case, I’d bet they NEVER called up to complain.]

…. A plant like that, Pozen writes, “keeps the American people minimally informed of its pursuits, characterizes them in a manner designed to build support, and signals its respect for international law.” [What [BS]! “informing” the public is NO part of the motives of plants, other than to TAKE CREDIT; respect for law is exhibited only in not taking credit in a public, accountable way, since they wish to pretend it’s criminal, a violation of “law,”  not merely against regulations.]

But if you want to reserve your right to plant an authorized leak, Pozen argues, you have to allow unauthorized leaks as well: [Again, [BS]. BHO didn’t “allow” leaks that he didn’t like. Earlier presidents were restrained from prosecuting because they recognized that they didn’t have a clearly constitutional law to do so.]

…. The practice of planting requires some amount of constructive ambiguity as to its prevalence and operation. [Most planting is not done by the White House! It’s done by agencies—in line with interests and/or approval of the agency head—often to pressure the White House or even oppose it. But in safety for the leaker.]

…. [Pozen] continues, “It is loosely analogous to what a game theorist would call mixed-strategy equilibrium: an approach that generates sufficient randomness (or apparent randomness) across government sources as to degrade the ability of outsiders to predict the nature and origin of any given disclosure.”  [Oh, [BS]. I.e., “White House likes there to be a optimum amount of real “leaking,” against their interests, so as to conceal their hand? Concealing their hand is rarely a weighty consideration. They HATE leaks that are embarrassing, that truly go against their interests. Pozen just dreamed this up.]

…“A mechanism that never made the President look bad would quickly lose its capacity to signal credibility; the whole point is that the power-enhancing second- and third-order effects of these arrangements ultimately come to swamp the power-reducing first-order effects,” Pozen writes. “No pain, no gain.”  [All, dream-work. No relation to bureaucratic reality.]

…. Governments may make a fuss about how much leaks are harming them. But they need leaks [They need “good leaks,” their leaks, for lots of reasons: they want NO “bad leaks” like mine, ES, CM, Sterling, Drake, Kiriakou] as much as the press does. The legitimacy of government requires sunshine, and the practice of governance sometimes requires darkness—and, in the face of that contradiction, leaks are a kind of informal workaround. [NO.]

…. You need to have laws against leaking—and occasionally enforce them [no mention of the pre-Obama vs. Obama discrepancy]—so that leakers think twice about what they’re leaking. You can’t over-enforce those laws, though, because then you’ve killed planting. [This is all just a theory, a hypothesis, to explain certain puzzles (who some prosecutions, why so few?), with some plausibility and certainly, originality; it just happens to have no reality.] . . . . [I]f you discredit the institution of leaking, by airing disclosures too damaging to the national interest, [which would those be? How about, disinformation about cylinders and WMD?  Too damaging to the newspapers’ relationship with the government, rather.] you’ll make it much more difficult for the next leaker to come forward. Leaking is not a mechanical exchange of information. It is a ritual that obliges its participants to play by certain rules.

…. To recap: a studious political-science Ph.D. [No, economics, as Wikipedia and everything else makes clear; never a political science course.] wishes to instruct the upper echelon of American leadership in the benefits of reading several thousand pages of history, and, after his initial efforts prove unavailing, assigns a carefully curated [NO: four volumes withheld; not a line out of the rest, 44] set of course materials to the most august institution in American journalism. This isn’t the behavior of a dissident. It’s the behavior of a graduate student, who realizes, with great disappointment, that his thesis adviser has not kept up with the literature. [[Expletive] So the graduate student does something that will put him in prison for life.  (What would that be?)]

Ellsberg’s behavior brings to mind what the sociologist Beryl Bellman refers to as “the paradox of secrecy.” When a secret is disclosed, Bellman observes, the holders of secrets say “Don’t tell anyone” even as they are, of course, telling someone: “The respondent is instructed to disregard the telling as an exposing and to treat the occasion as an exception [Not at all; this is a highly-briefed and, in its own sphere, routine, procedure] to the rule of not talking secrets.” [Not at all.  We’re talking here about classified secrets, which exist within a formal, highly organized secrecy SYSTEM.  You’re told, “Don’t tell anyone who doesn’t have a proper clearance, like your own (make sure you find that out) AND a “need to know”. There’s no “exception” or “paradox” here.]

…. The same logic applies to leaks. Leaks differ from secrets only in the specifics of their operating instructions: “Don’t tell anyone” becomes “Don’t tell anyone I told you.” [I did NOT demand that: don’t tell if you don’t “have” to, if you don’t have a good reason. Other leakers, different. AND ES and I both intended to reveal ourselves, and did so.] Leaks do not invalidate government secrecy; they depend [This relates to “planted” leaks, truly “authorized” leaks; they are popular with journalists because they’re “exclusive,” being kept secret from other journalists] upon it.

…. Johnson, Ellsberg writes, feared “that if [Johnson] didn’t meet their requests, [generals] would leak their demands to hawks in Congress and cause him domestic trouble.” So Ellsberg resolved to strike back: “What I had in mind was very simple: a leak a day of a closely held secret, something that showed high-level access. The content was much less important than the leak itself.” The real message would be clear to the President: the next time he decided to grant the military’s request, it would become known—and receive the public scrutiny and resistance it deserved. [That was prior to the Pentagon Papers, a year and a half earlier, in 1968.  It’s true that the PP had this effect on Nixon, but I don’t expect or plan on that!]

Ellsberg’s best answer to a governmental entity using leaks to push the White House in a given direction was to counter with a leak designed to push the White House in the opposite direction. When he says that “the content was much less important than the leak itself,” [that was true for the 1968 case, NOT, in my mind, the Pentagon papers. Ironically, it worked that way for the PP, but I can’t claim credit for foreseeing that or intending it. I wanted people to draw realistic inferences—about Nixon—from the content of the Papers: that failed!] he is making Bellman’s point.

…. (“There is an endless amount of garbage in there, but nothing really important,” Ellsberg’s RAND colleague Konrad Kellen once said. “It was impossible to read them because they were so long.”) [WRONG, wrong, wrong, Konrad! Did you really read them? yes, lots of garbage, but endless documentation of presidential and SecDef LIES!] If governments need leaks to validate their secrecy, leakers need secrecy to validate their leaks.  [You mean, the PP COULD have been declassified, in the first place?! Insane—precisely because there were so many dark diamonds amidst that garbage! The documentation of lies was secret, not to attract attention when it was leaked!]

Even the farcical dénouement of the Ellsberg case [???!!!]  upholds the Pozenian principle that the good leak is the leak that perpetuates the practice of leaking. [I wish! I hoped that the reaction to the content—including, eventually, Nixon’s—would encourage a few people to accept that downside of facing 115 years in prison. And after forty years, someone did: Chelsea Manning. Then Snowden, three years later.] The first thought of some Washington insiders was that the leak must have come from the Nixon White House. [Really? That’s news, after forty years. I’ve never heard of ONE person who had that thought, then or in all these years!] After all, the study stopped at the end of the Johnson Administration. It discredited the previous generation of Democratic Presidents. That sounds like a plant, doesn’t it? [Again, MG is assuming a certain kind of rationality to the White House, wrongly; actually, it WOULD have made sense to release it earlier, either by Nixon or by Laird, when Laird was asked for it by Fulbright. But they didn’t give that a thought. Perhaps, too much risk that it would discredit the war, which Nixon was continuing. My intuition is that that was simply unthinkable for them, to disclose so many secrets, even though it made the Democrats look bad. (I WISH each new administration would expose the secrets of the preceding one!) Though once it was out, HAK and Nixon both saw advantages.]

Kissinger, who knew a thing or two about game theory, [NOT REALLY] called Nixon delightedly the day the story broke. . . . Since they were under the protective umbrella of mixed-strategy equilibrium, [No, that’s [BS] in game theory, and has no real role in the secrecy system] why not join in? “Stuff on Kennedy I’m gonna leak,” Nixon responded. “We’ll just leak it out. . . . Now that it’s being leaked, we’ll leak out the parts we want.” The leak that looked like a plant [No it didn’t, at all. It just reminded them that the content of the PP had the EFFECT of a plant, since it exposed mainly Democrats. Releasing more stuff from it—the Diem assassination—was worth planting,  a routine role for the whole secrecy system] opened the door for a plant that would look like a leak. The Nixon Administration then tried to prosecute Ellsberg, only to have the case thrown out because Nixon’s operatives broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist looking for Ellsberg’s patient records. And why did they want the records? To leak them, of course. [NO [expletive]. It was to THREATEN me with leaking them—as I made clear in Secrets—so as to keep me silent about documents I might have about NIXON’s aims and plans for continuing the war indefinitely (but without US ground troops, only air). But MG doesn’t have any curiosity or concern about why I really did it, or why, above all, Nixon did what he did, or what was the strategy he was trying to protect FROM EXPOSURE, from my further leaks.]

…. [In Gladwell’s thought experiment about a hypothetical character named “Daniel Snowberg”:] They [at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, responding to “Snowberg’s” leak to them] set up a meeting with Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Wyden, too, is troubled. He encourages them to leak it to the Washington Post. [Yeah, he just might do that. Not. He’s not going to be caught encouraging them to commit a crime, a clearcut violation of 18 U.S.C. 798 (even though it exposes criminality). No, he’ll raise it with Feinstein. Nothing will happen.] And they do. That is the leaker as insider. [“They” are not insiders! They’re like the AIPAC pair that GWB indicted! And if the insider, Snowberg, does the leaking (an insider) he’d get indicted for sure, just like Snowden.]

…. Snowberg would have stood as someone who restored the legitimacy of the national-intelligence apparatus: who, in the spirit of Pozen’s notion of self-binding, embarrassed the executive branch in the short term in order to preserve the prerogatives of the executive branch in the long term. [And with 100% certainty, he would have been indicted, prosecuted, and convicted, even though he might not have earned the criticism of people like MG.]

…. Edward Jay Epstein’s upcoming book, “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,” presents the hard-line intelligence community’s case against Snowden, and what is remarkable about it [That’s not in the slightest remarkable! It’s exactly what is to be expected from a hatchet job, from someone who identifies with the intelligence community not one member of which has expressed regret or apology for his and their criminal acts, let alone having been prosecuted for them.] is how little time Epstein spends on the propriety of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance. Instead, he dwells on everything else that Snowden took from the N.S.A. files: details of N.S.A. methodologies, overseas operations, foreign sources—revelations that, national-security officials maintain, gravely compromised our foreign intelligence-gathering. [Does he, by the way, for the first time present one specific, actual case of “harm” to our national security?  (As distinct from inconvenience, or possible, hypothetical harm?)]

In light of the sensitivity of this other material, Epstein makes the claim that Snowden, now living under asylum in Russia, may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service. [who manipulated him exactly how? As to what he took or revealed? Does he have the slightest evidence that ANYONE communicated with or influenced ES on those matters?]

…. So why didn’t Snowden release just the FISC order? Because he’s not fundamentally a leaker. He’s a hacker. [False.] Leakers are concerned with Bellman’s operating instructions and Pozen’s mixed-strategy equilibrium, [That’s absurd; he’s not describing whistle-blowers, as a sub-category of leakers, to which I and ES and CM and Drake below, a category he never mentions; and although WBs, through their own experience, are not against all governmental secrecy—which is approximately true for “hackers” and even Assange, and not remotely true for ES or me—they are “trying to preserve it by pursuing their leaks, their mixed strategy; they do NOT choose their leaks at all “randomly” (nor did ES)] because they are interested in using and exploiting secrecy: they believe that secrecy, by its preservation and strategic violation, serves an essential purpose. The hacker, on the other hand, is a skeptic of secrecy. [Whistleblowers have commonly become “skeptical” of secrecy, and would like to make others share that critical perspective, which they’ve gained by experience; but that doesn’t mean they believe there should be NO secrecy, or even “almost none” (except statistically! Is 5% “almost none”? It’s a lot more than Assange would allow.] The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has described hacking as the “aesthetic disposition” of craftiness and guile. “When lecturing to my class one security researcher described the mentality: ‘You have to, like, have an innate understanding that [a security measure is] arbitrary, it’s an arbitrary mechanism that does something that’s unnatural and therefore can be circumvented in all likelihood,’ ” she writes.

That’s Snowden. [Totally false. Not far from Assange. Nothing to do with Snowden or me.] . . . . He “touched” those 1.7 million files to show that he could: that the N.S.A.’s pretensions to secrecy were an arbitrary mechanism doing something unnatural [What could be more natural than to try to keep secret, as much as possible, criminal actions, violations of the Constitution, or, OK, intelligence operations?] and therefore could be circumvented. [If that was an ES motive, I’ve never heard a hint of it.] Snowden says that he left a digital trail, designed to show the N.S.A. what he had and hadn’t taken, [When did he say that? I’ve never seen it.]  but that the agency’s auditors missed the signs.

…. The hacker’s world view is centered on technological systems, and radicalized hackers like Snowden usefully remind us how vulnerable we are to the digitized state. Snowden spoke eloquently of this threat during a live-stream interview at Fusion’s recent Real Future Fair, in Oakland: “If you want to build a better future, you are going to have to do it yourself. Politics will only take us so far. And if history is any guide they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change that we really want to see.” That means getting our technological systems in order, so that we can enforce “a digital right to privacy.” He went on: [In other words, he wants secrecy, privacy, for private communications (and he never said he wanted to deny it entirely to the government; he opposes, openly, “their knowing everything about us and our knowing nothing about them.” AND he does oppose the NSA invading the privacy, indiscriminately, of virtually everyone on earth: not, e.g., Merkel (!) but “all Germans”: even if that is NOT illegal or unconstitutional under US law; it’s anti-democratic (globally) and wrong.]

…. The irony of Snowden’s position, however, ought not to escape notice. He challenged the N.S.A. because it reduced a complicated social question (what is the role of surveillance in a democratic society?) to a technical one: how much data can we acquire and analyze? [This “technical” aim WAS a political decision, an “answer” to a “complicated social question” that Michael Hayden, after 9-11 (or perhaps before it) didn’t have the slightest concern about!] Yet Snowden himself reduced the complicated social question of when and how the disclosure of sensitive information strengthens democratic government to a technical one: how many classified files can I touch with my Web crawler? [Not at all!] Snowden did not repudiate the N.S.A.’s error. He replicated it. [As he has repeatedly said, he did NOT copy, take with him, or release more than a small fraction of the files he “touched”!  He did not “dump” everything he had access to! Very far from it!]

…. Surely one obvious lesson of the Snowden affair is that Whistle-blower 2.0 does not really belong in the same room as Whistle-blower 1.0.  [expletive]

Ellsberg says to Snowden, “You’ve seen ‘Dr. Strangelove’?” The leaker tries, as best he can, to find common cultural ground with the hacker. [NO problem: I’ve never met anyone—not having met Chelsea face-to-face—with whom I identified so closely.  Different generation, yes.]

This article appears in other versions of the December 19 & 26, 2016, issue, with the headline “The Outside Man.”

[This thesis, that Snowden was an “outsider,” unlike me, is totally without reality.  His article is totally without merit.]