Whistleblowing in a time of digital (in)visibility: towards a sociology of ‘grey areas’

ABSTRACT

There are currently no concerted attempts to understand the role of whistleblowers in the new social and political environment created by digital ICTs. Digital ICTs drive an accelerating visibility where elites and citizens constantly acquire new tools to track, surveil, and scrutinize each other. Moreover, these technologies make possible a new kind of invisibility. Increasingly complex modes of digital data production and usage generate grey areas that seem to escape legal jurisdiction and democratic oversight. With their privileged access inside these grey areas, conscientious employees-turned-whistleblowers are likely to become key sources for the disclosure of serious wrongdoing in the coming years. The argument is empirically illustrated through three cases that represent different types of grey areas in advanced democracies: big data surveillance (Edward Snowden), tax havens (Antoine Deltour and the Panama and Paradise Papers), and digital political profiling (Christopher Wylie).

KEYWORDS:

• whistleblowing
• ICTs
• digitalization
• democracy
• big data
• tax havens
• surveillance
• Christopher Wylie
• Edward Snowden
• NSA
• Panama Papers
• Paradise Papers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As is evident from my emphasis on ’privileged access’ and ’insiders’, I focus on a specific subset of whistleblowing behaviour. Dworkin and Baucus (1998) and Miceli et al. (2014) distinguish between internal whistleblowers (individuals employed by an organization and whose disclosures stay within the organization), bell-ringers (individuals who are external to an organization, i.e. not employed by it, but who acquire information about wrongdoing through their capacity as e.g. consultants and lawyers and decide to expose it), and external whistleblowers (individuals employed by an organization who decide to publicly expose perceived wrongdoing). The paper’s theoretical framework is primarily built around this latter category, which combines two core elements from Jubb’s (1999) definition: ‘privileged access’ and disclosure to ‘an external entity’.

2 Journalists should not be confused with bell-ringers (Miceli et al., 2014, p. 78) (see endnote 1). Bell-ringers are individuals who coincidentally encounter wrongdoing through their professional activities. Journalists systematically search for wrongdoing, as reflected in concepts such as watchdog journalism, fourth estate, etc.

3 These resources include the increasing availability of apps and other digital platforms for reporting wrongdoing (e.g. in the context of ISO37001). In light of the paper’s discussion of data profiling, the digitalization of whistleblower information raises new concerns about discretion, anonymity, and surveillance that should be addressed by future research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Olesen

Thomas Olesen is a professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include whistleblowing, political activism, political symbols, and new media.