Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam. The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to […]
President Richard Nixon: ‘Just because someone wants to become a martyr does not mean that we can allow this kind of large-scale theft or else it will happen in all spheres of government. We have to keep an eye on the main target. The main target is Ellsberg. We have to catch this son of a bitch.‘ Here at BSNews […]
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Hacking and “leaking” have become major news items. Are the leaks good or bad? The answer depends on the nature of the leak. Are the leaks exposing crimes or covering them up? Are they for or against the public good?
Following are some famous leaks or disclosures that have done good.
Watergate is the quintessential conspiracy, one that went all the way to the White House and took down a presidency. But it is a story that is almost always provided without context, and with no mention of certain key facts. J Edgar Hoover died only a couple of months before the Watergate break-in, so the FBI was in the midst of a succession crisis when they were hit with the most controversial investigation in their history. Did this lead their deputy director Mark Felt, passed over by Nixon for promotion, to leak the story to Bob Woodward under the guise of Deep Throat?
In 1971 DOD analyst and RAND Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers - the DOD's Top Secret history of the Vietnam War. This is one of the biggest and most famous leaks in history, but there remain huge questions about why this happened. Was Ellsberg a genuine whistleblower? Or were the Pentagon Papers leaked as part of a distraction and disinformation campaign?
