The people who told: whistleblowers and what happened to them

Series: How minds are moved · Censorship, enforced and invisible · 6 of 7

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg faced charges that added up to 115 years in prison for giving the press a secret history of the Vietnam War. In 2013 Edward Snowden was charged under the same 1917 Espionage Act for revealing a phone-records programme that a US appeals court later found unlawful. In 2024 Julian Assange walked out of a courtroom on a Pacific island after pleading guilty to one count under that same law, having spent more than five years in a British high-security prison.

Seven people, three countries, five decades. This post sets what each of them revealed next to what happened to them, and adds two cases from the East, because the pattern is not only Western.

Contents · 7 sections

TL;DR #

• Ellsberg, Katharine Gun, David Kelly, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Frances Haugen each exposed something the people in charge wanted kept quiet.
• Most of what they revealed was later confirmed by courts, inquiries or official admissions.
• Their outcomes ranged from charges dropped (Ellsberg, Gun) to 35 years (Manning, commuted after about seven), permanent exile (Snowden), a guilty plea for time served (Assange), a contested death (Kelly), and a career in public advocacy (Haugen).
• The same pattern appears in China (Li Wenliang) and Russia (Grigory Rodchenkov).
• The first public question in almost every case was “who leaked it?”, not “is it true?”.

The cases, side by side #

Daniel Ellsberg, 1971: the Pentagon Papers #

A former Marine and Pentagon analyst, Ellsberg copied a 7,000-page top-secret study showing that successive governments privately doubted the Vietnam War could be won while saying the opposite in public. The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government could not stop newspapers from printing it. In May 1973 a judge dismissed every charge against him, because the White House had sent burglars to break into his psychiatrist’s office looking for material to smear him. He spent the rest of his life defending later whistleblowers and died in 2023, aged 92.

Katharine Gun, 2003: the spying email #

Gun was a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency. On 31 January 2003 she read a US National Security Agency email asking for help spying on six UN Security Council members whose votes could approve a war in Iraq. She leaked it; The Observer printed it on 2 March. She confessed, was charged under the Official Secrets Act, and on 25 February 2004 the prosecution dropped the case on the day of trial, offering no evidence. Her defence had asked for the government’s legal advice on whether the war was lawful. The government said the decision to drop the case had been taken before that request. Both statements are on the record. The spying itself was never the subject of an inquiry.

David Kelly, 2003: the dossier #

Kelly, a leading biological-weapons expert at the Ministry of Defence, was the source for a BBC report that the government’s Iraq dossier had been “sexed up”. His name reached the press, he was questioned on live television by MPs on 15 July 2003, and on 18 July, the morning after he went out for a walk, he was found dead near his home. The Hutton Inquiry found he had taken his own life; the Attorney General reviewed the case in 2010 and 2011 and called the evidence “overwhelmingly strong”. A minority, including some doctors and an MP who wrote a book, have disputed it. His family did not support the murder theories. What is not disputed: the weapons in the dossier did not exist.

Chelsea Manning, 2010: the war logs #

As an army intelligence analyst, Manning gave WikiLeaks about 750,000 documents: Iraq and Afghanistan field reports, diplomatic cables and the video of a helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters staff. She was held for nine months at a Marine Corps jail in Quantico in conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, found in 2012 to be at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading. In July 2013 a military court convicted her on 20 of 22 counts, acquitting her of “aiding the enemy”, and sentenced her to 35 years. President Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017. In 2019 she was jailed again for about a year, and fined $256,000, for refusing to testify to a grand jury about WikiLeaks.

Edward Snowden, 2013: the phone records #

In March 2013 the US intelligence chief told a Senate hearing that the NSA did not “wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans. Three months later Snowden, an NSA contractor, gave journalists documents showing that it did, every day, through phone companies. He was charged under the Espionage Act. The US revoked his passport on 22 June 2013, and the next day he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he has lived since; he became a Russian citizen in 2022. In 2015 Congress ended the bulk collection, and in September 2020 a federal appeals court found the programme unlawful. The official who gave the answer was never charged.

His case is the most contested. In my library, his memoir Permanent Record argues he acted for the public. Edward Lucas’s The Snowden Operation, also in my library, argues he took far more than was needed to expose domestic abuses and did serious damage to Western intelligence. Both books are worth reading against each other.

Julian Assange: the publisher #

Assange was not an insider. He published what insiders gave him. He spent nearly seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy and over five in Belmarsh prison while the US sought his extradition: the first time the Espionage Act had been used against a publisher for publishing. On 26 June 2024, in a federal court in Saipan, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose national defence information, was sentenced to the 62 months he had already served, and flew home to Australia the same day. Press-freedom groups welcomed his release and warned about the precedent of the plea. His critics say WikiLeaks endangered people by publishing unredacted names.

Frances Haugen, 2021: the Facebook Files #

Haugen, a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, copied tens of thousands of pages of internal research before leaving. The Wall Street Journal published the “Facebook Files” in September 2021, including research showing the company knew Instagram worsened body-image issues for some teenage girls. Her lawyers filed complaints with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and she testified to the Senate on 5 October 2021, then to the UK and European parliaments. Facebook said the research had been taken out of context. She was not prosecuted or sued, and her testimony was cited in the debates on the EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act. Her case shows what the protected route looks like: lawyers, regulators, legislators, and a press partner.

The same pattern in the East #

• Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, warned colleagues about a SARS-like illness on 30 December 2019. On 3 January 2020 police made him sign a letter admitting to “spreading rumours”. He died of COVID-19 on 7 February. In March 2020 the authorities withdrew the reprimand and apologised to his family.
• Grigory Rodchenkov, former head of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory, described in 2016 how Russia swapped athletes’ urine samples at the Sochi Olympics. The independent McLaren report for the World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed a state-directed scheme. Russia opened a criminal case against him; he lives in the US under protection.

What it feels like from the inside #

Almost all of them first tried the official channels, or believed those channels were pointless. Then came the three-verse response that the book I am writing, SHTF vs STFU, describes in its chapter on whistleblowers: he is a traitor; she is a nobody who did not understand what she saw; there is something wrong with him. Henry Kissinger is widely reported to have called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America”, the phrase that gave a 2009 documentary about him its title. The message is personal before it is legal.

How to notice it #

When someone in your news reveals wrongdoing from inside:

• Note which question comes first. “Who leaked it?” before “Is it true?” is a signal.
• Look for the smear verses. Attacks on character, mental health or motives, rather than on the documents.
• Track the follow-up. Did any court, inquiry or regulator later check the claims? Several above were confirmed years later.
• Compare outcomes. Who was prosecuted: the person who revealed, or the people revealed?
• Check the channel. Did they use a legal route (regulator, inspector, parliament)? It affects their protection, not whether they were right.

Frequently asked questions #

Were they all right? #

On the central facts, mostly yes: the Pentagon Papers, the UN spying request, the phone-records programme, the war logs and Facebook’s internal research are all documented. Specific claims and their methods remain disputed, especially for Snowden and Assange.

Did anyone go to prison for what they exposed? #

As far as the public record shows, no senior official went to prison for the conduct revealed in these cases.

Do whistleblower laws protect people like this? #

They protect people who use the prescribed channels, mainly for fraud and safety issues. National security disclosures are largely excluded in the US and UK, which is why most cases above went through the criminal courts.

Why include Assange if he was not a whistleblower? #

Because his case decided what can happen to a publisher of leaked material, and that affects every journalist who receives documents.

The lesson #

Read across fifty years, the record shows a steady trade: the public learned something true, and the person who told paid for it, through prosecution, exile, a ruined career or worse. The facts were usually confirmed later and elsewhere, by another court, another country or a historian. When the next leak arrives, you can judge it on the documents before anyone tells you what to think of the person who brought them.