On Moderate and Radical Government Whistleblowing: Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as Theorists of Whistleblowing Ethics

ABSTRACT Government whistleblowers are those who disclose classified government documents in violation of the law but do so to bring to light serious government wrongdoing. Scholarly debates have identified various procedural requirements for whistleblowing, and this paper expands upon these insights by providing an account of Edward Snowden’s moderate theory and Julian Assange’s radical theory of government whistleblowing ethics. Through the practice of ethical listening, this essay places Snowden and Assange into conversation with academic theories of government whistleblowing. By including the previously neglected voices of real-world government whistleblowers and their publishers, this paper provides a more dynamic understanding of whistleblowing’s procedural requirements, interrogates the ethical paradigms of whistleblowers, and shows that different theories of government whistleblowing depend upon a wide range of assumptions about audience, professionalism, and ultimate aims.