Whistle Blower vs Leaker

The question is: what is the difference between “whistleblowing” and “leaking”?

The answer, not too surprisingly, depends on one’s political party affiliation. Those on the left, the Democrats, will most often be less prone to fault a leaker than a whistleblower, while those on the right, Republicans, will most often find both to be almost equally unacceptable – particularly if the case can be made that National Security has been seriously compromised.

The distinction is important, since the latter (leaking) is a violation of the law while the latter (whistleblowing) is regarded as a cornerstone of serious investigative journalism.

To date, whistleblowers have been charged under the Espionage Act—a 1917 law put on the books to prevent insubordination during World War I. According to ProPublica, as of 2013, the Espionage Act had been used to prosecute government workers who released classified documents to journalists ten times since 1971—and the Obama administration was behind seven of those prosecutions.

The answer to these two questions was written in a recent article on the Internet: “The government should just stop doing bad stuff. Stop torturing people, stop violating FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], stop holding people indefinitely without trial, stop gathering every single email in the country somewhere in Washington. I mean stop doing all the things that are contrary to our nation's values. If they won't stop doing it, then others have to work to get them to stop.”

Now, you might not agree with this, but that is precisely what the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is presently living overseas in exile, has done.