The psychology of the whistleblower is fascinating. They are anomalies: choosing the hard path, valuing transparency over loyalty to an institution they are supposed to serve. A study into their motivations described whistleblowing as an “ethicist’s version of [an] optical illusion”: from one perspective, it is setting right an injustice; from another, it is “an act of betrayal”.
This reflects the division in opinion on the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning: is she a hero, a villain or somewhere in between?
Manning’s forceful but sometimes gruelling memoir opens with the leak that made her famous. Her job in the US army was to decipher the “impact military decisions and personnel movements were having on this bloody war on terror”. In 2010 — then