Whistleblowers from the United States Intelligence Community use a special system to spotlight concerns and seek redress—separate from the legal systems empowering and protecting their colleagues outside the secret sector. Although intelligence workers may have more high-stakes disclosures than their peers across the civil service, they have far fewer rights to raise concerns and remedies to correct retaliation. The public glimpsed some of this reality in 2019 as the intelligence whistleblowing system struggled during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment investigation.
The system protecting intelligence whistleblowers is relatively nascent. Its patchwork of protections began with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (ICWPA), a statute that despite its name set up a system for intelligence workers to make whistleblowing disclosures without providing anti-retaliation protections. President Barack Obama established anti-retaliation protections for this system by issuing Presidential Policy Directive 19 (PPD-19) in 2012, mostly implemented by Intelligence Community Directive 120 (ICD 120). Since then, Congress has codified most of this system and improved it around the margins, as seen in 50 U.S.C. §§ 3234, 3341(j). Despite its relative infancy, security analysts and whistleblower experts have spent the time since its creation both assessing its strengths and weaknesses and thinking through reforms.
This fall, the Senate Select Committee on...
YouTuber Jeon Han-gil, accused of defaming President Lee Jae Myung and Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok by spreading false information, attended a warrant review hearing. Seoul Central District Co...