Michael Kinsley and the New York Times provoked outrage this week through a critical review of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide.

Kinsley raised an important question, made some sound observations, but drew a self-contradictory conclusion. He wrote:

The Snowden leaks were important — a legitimate scoop — and we might never have known about the N.S.A.’s lawbreaking if it hadn’t been for them. Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to have.

Yet he concluded that the final say over the release of government secrets is a decision that “must ultimately be made by the government.”

So, Kinsley is all in favor of “good” leaks but believes that in a democracy these need to be government-approved leaks.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Once government decides to reveal a secret, it’s no longer a secret and there is no leak.

The whole idea of whistleblowing is that it challenges specific government claims that secrecy is serving a public interest.

On one side the government is asserting that the public is being protected by its ignorance, while on the other side the whistleblower is revealing information which he or she believes the public needs to know.

The beauty of this ad hoc mechanism is that we, the public, then get to decide who has made the stronger claim: the government or the whistleblower?

Yet Kinlsey raises an important question: who can be entrusted with the decisions about which secrets should be exposed?

It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences.

Kinsley thinks we should defer to government yet fails to explain how he envisages there will ever be any more good leaks in this scenario. Are we to imagine a government that blows the whistle on itself?

On this much, Kinsley is emphatic: “Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.”

One can view that statement as an expression of antipathy towards Greenwald, yet it is also a response to the fact that when it comes to the Snowden revelations, Greenwald has been the central decision-maker.

His judgement and that of his confidants, has not gone uncontested.

This week we saw what looked suspiciously like a contest for the limelight. Julian Assange challenged The Intercept’s apparent deference to government pressure when it concealed the identity of a whole country whose cellular communications are being recorded by the NSA — “country X” as The Intercept reported, or Afghanistan as Assange claimed.

What neither side did was provide much detailed information about the process through which they had made their determination about what to conceal or reveal. That lack of transparency bore an uncanny resemblance to governments which say, trust us, we know what we’re doing.

For those of us who are not inclined to trust the government, it’s not altogether clear why we should trust the judgement of either Glenn Greenwald or Julian Assange.

In the age of Wikileaks and Snowden and the release of large volumes of classified information, it might look like whistleblowing has become a form of civil disobedience which challenges the very legitimacy of secrecy. Indeed, an argument can be made that the concept of secrecy is quickly becoming an anachronism.

Yet as things stand now, it seems worth trying to answer Kinsley’s question — who decides? — by reviving a more traditional view of the role of the whistleblower, there being no better example than that provided by Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg had no legal authority to release the Pentagon Papers, but he had the moral authority. He decided that these documents must not remain secret and he was willing to face the full consequences of that decision. On June 28, 1971, as he publicly surrendered to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston, Ellsberg said:

I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.

When determining what should remain secret, Ellsberg neither deferred to the government nor entrusted that decision to a journalist.

Invariably, the whistleblower is claiming the authority to make a decision that would preferably never be left to one person. But if such an individual feels unqualified to determine what information should be made public and what should remain secret, there is also reason to question how he is going to make the determination about who instead is capable of making those decisions.

The fact that Snowden lacked the confidence to be a decision-making whistleblower doesn’t mean he should have kept quiet, but what he should have done is spread that responsibility more widely.

Should Glenn Greenwald decide? is a question that should never have needed asking.

Earlier this week, The Intercept reported:

Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance [a voice interception program] in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.

Note that the report while acknowledging that its redaction of “country X” came in response to “credible concerns,” it did not reveal who expressed those concerns.

If a similar report had appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times we would expect slightly more transparency — something along the lines that in response to concerns expressed by administration officials, the publication had agreed to withhold the name of this particular country. And we could also expect that this would be the kind of practice that Glenn Greenwald would characterize as an example of the mainstream media’s subservience to government. When The Intercept operates in a similar way, however, we’re supposed to see this as responsible behavior.

From his perch inside the Ecuador embassy in London, I imagine that Julian Assange has a cynical view of the Greenwald/Omidyar operation. While Assange is paying the price for publishing secret documents, Greenwald is reaping handsome rewards. And as Assange pointed out today, when claiming that “country X” is Afghanistan, the idea that sustaining the secrecy of the NSA’s mass surveillance program there might prevent increased violence, is highly debatable.

We know from previous reporting that the National Security Agency’s mass interception system is a key component in the United States’ drone targeting program. The US drone targeting program has killed thousands of people and hundreds of women and children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia in violation of international law. The censorship of a victim state’s identity directly assists the killing of innocent people.

There’s a bit of a charade going on here with The Intercept guarding a secret and Wikileaks insisting that the truth must come out, because assuming that Afghanistan is indeed “country X” it’s very hard to imagine that many people there will be surprised to learn about the existence of this NSA program, least of all will it come as a surprise to many of the individuals whose activities and locations are of greatest interest to the NSA.

As The Intercept reported in February:

[T]argets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.

Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”

The real story here is not about the NSA surveillance program in Afghanistan; it’s about the internal workings of The Intercept.

Suppose Greenwald is having some discreet conversations with NSA officials about what The Intercept will or won’t publish. No doubt that would cause some anguish across Greenwald’s fan base and it would undermine the adversarial image that he strives to sustain. But it would also demonstrate a capacity to operate as an adult who is not so preoccupied about his image.

Journalists shouldn’t make themselves subservient to government officials but neither should they be afraid of revealing that their work often demands that they communicate with officialdom. Talking doesn’t necessitate kowtowing.

The headline comes from a comment that appears under an article by Chris Floyd that appears on his site, Empire Burlesque.

Floyd writes that while he lived in Russia in the mid-1990s:

…the general public had already come to regard “demokratsia” as a dirty word, synonymous with the endemic corruption, ruin and violence that the Western-backed elites had visited upon the country. This cynicism was confirmed by the election of 1996 — my last hurrah in Moscow — when a half-dead Yeltsin, supported vigorously by the West, miraculously overcame a 2 percent popularity rating to win “re-election.” The price of this pyrrhic victory was the final surrender of the state to the oligarchs and security apparatchiks who, along with their American campaign operatives, had engineered the outcome. Flush with victory, they proceeded to push the country into yet another major crash in 1998, when life expectancy rates plummeted to the lowest levels since the famine years of the 1930s.

This is the rotten foundation upon which the increasingly ugly regime of Vladimir Putin is built. A culture, a country, a people savaged over and over through a century of unprecedented upheaval and violence were once again subjected to a firestorm of chaos that killed 3 million innocent people and left millions more stripped of hope, of opportunity, of meaning. Now Putin, who emerged from the dark nexus of power blocs that saved Yeltsin, fills this moonscape with empty symbols that play upon the fears and resentments of a battered people: hysterical nationalism, cartoon history, blustering machismo, fake religiosity, and “traditional values” more aligned with American Tea Party tropes than anything that has actually existed in Russian culture. He rails against the West but he rules a mirror image of it: a violent, militarized crony-capitalist pigsty that degrades and deceives its own people while directing their anger and confusion toward outsiders. In many ways, it’s the American Cold Warriors’ dream come true: we have finally turned the Russians into us.

The conflict in Ukraine has many causes — not least the meddling of American apparatchiks and oligarchs to engineer the overthrow of the elected government and destabilize the region. But if Western governments find themselves puzzled by the motives and moves of the Russian regime that now vexes them, they need only look in the mirror, and it will all become clear.

So there you have it: Post-Soviet Russia is a Frankenstein’s monster created by the West and thus for whatever Putin does, he bears little responsibility. The West, with its imposition of a brutal capitalist agenda combined with NATO’s relentless eastward expansion makes Russia a victim and like all cornered victims, it must do whatever it needs to survive.

Within this perspective there is some wistfulness — a hint that the collapse of the Soviet Union might not have been such a good thing after all.

What is missing is any recognition that what Russia has become is just as much a product of what the Soviet Union was — that people who wield totalitarian power will always look for new ways to exploit that power even as many of the structures once provided by the state are modified.

A totalitarian system is inherently corrupt and corruption is endlessly adaptive and thoroughly pragmatic.

Those in the West who ostensibly believe in social justice and yet also find the forces of oppression in Russia, or Syria, or China, or Iran, somehow excusable — excusable because the oppressive nature of the governments in each of these countries is eclipsed by the rapacious demands of their overbearing adversary: Western capitalism — are effectively saying that the political freedoms which exist in Western democracies have little intrinsic value. Free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly — none of those freedoms apparently mean very much. They are perhaps nothing more than baubles which serve to distract a suitably docile citizenry with an illusion of freedom.

Ultimately, this perspective strikes me as nihilistic and self-serving. It conjures an image of a world in which we are all powerless individuals who can do no more than quixotically rail against malevolent forces utterly beyond our control. We can wallow in our self-righteous indignation, comforted by the thought that what might look like inertia is simply realism.

When opposition becomes a way of life and a relentless focus on the things you stand against overshadows a clear sense of what you believe in and what you affirm, then paradoxically a nominal allegiance to justice can gently glide towards the accommodation of tyranny.

Two days after 16 Sherpas lost their lives in the service of a party of Everest-climbing tourists, Jon Reiter, one of the climbers, wrote on his blog:

This is a tough time for everyone here on the mountain but accidents, and even death, are part of the deal. If climbing Everest were easy and risk free, I suspect we’d all take a hike to the top of the world. The price that has been paid over the last 24 hours is a large price indeed. I guess the climbing Sherpa as well as all of us western climbers need a few moments or days to re-evaluate what’s worth what in this life.

Early this morning I read a comment written about me where the author said, “I hope he finds what he’s looking for up there.” I appreciated that notion because it got me to thinking about what am I looking for, and I think I have found it whether I see the summit of Everest or not. I’m looking for an adventurous life. I want to see the whole world and all of its people. I want to lay in my death bed and know that I did and saw all that I wanted to in the time I spent spinning through space on this ball of mud. I want to know that I lived fully! So far in this life the things that I regret the most are the things I didn’t do; the things I didn’t have time for; the situations that scared me to much. I want to push myself to do and see until I can’t anymore. I want to inspire my two boys to aim high, to take from this world and give to mankind more than they can imagine now. I hope I have a lot of life left to live and I hope I keep finding what I’m looking for. I’m glad my friend brought this topic up because I needed to remember today just why I’m here.

I’m so flattered that so many of you are following this adventure. It’s awesome that I get to follow my dreams and I remember everyday that all of this would be hollow and meaningless without all of you being part of my life.

Please send positive thoughts or prayers to the families of our fallen Sherpa brothers.

Reiter might be an experienced climber, yet like his companions who had paid $48,500 each to be guided up the world’s tallest mountain, he approached this adventure with the mindset of a tourist.

“We were moving up to Camp 1 just after dawn when we heard that ‘crack,’” said Reiter, 49. “I thought ‘wow, that’s a big one.’ My first thought was to film it, and I reached for my camera. But the Sherpa yelled to get down.”

Freddie Wilkinson describes how almost a century ago the first fatalities occurred on Everest:

On a bright afternoon in June of 1922, the Mount Everest pioneer George Mallory was leading a group of 17 men tied together in three separate rope teams toward the North Col of the mountain when he heard an ominous sound, and turned to see an avalanche fracturing the steep slope above them.

Mallory and his rope mates were spared the brunt force of the slide, but the two teams following them — comprising 14 porters from Darjeeling, India — were swept down the mountain. Seven died. Mount Everest had claimed its first known victims.

One of Mallory’s companions, Howard Somervell, would later write, “I would gladly at that moment have been lying there dead in the snow, if only to give those fine chaps who had survived the feeling that we had shared their loss….”

On Friday, about 6:30 in the morning, another avalanche rumbled down Everest. This one caught a group of 25 climbers at 19,000 feet near the top of the notorious Khumbu Icefall, a frightful jumble of seracs and crevasses, killing at least 12 as of Friday in the worst reported disaster in the mountain’s history.

Although commercially organized groups make up the overwhelming majority of Everest expeditions today, not a single international client or guide was caught in the avalanche. The victims were Nepalese. They were carrying supplies to aid their employer’s clients, who pay commercial outfitters tens of thousands of dollars to get to the top of the world’s tallest mountain.

Today, as was the case in Mallory’s day, it is these professional climbing Sherpas who bear a disproportionate amount of the risk of Himalayan climbing. In fact, the odds may be worse for them than they were in the days of those grand British expeditions.

Mallory was racked with guilt over the 1922 tragedy and resolved never to let a team of porters climb without a British mountaineer sharing the same rope. Eric Shipton, another legendary British alpinist whose 1951 reconnaissance pioneered the route through the icefall, paving the way for the first ascent of the mountain two years later, found it ethically questionable to ask the climbing Sherpas to venture into the icefall to help Westerners make it to the top.

At least when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first two men to reach the summit in 1953, Hillary was gracious enough to immortalize that moment in history with a photograph of Tenzing rather than himself.

But implicit in the very idea that this could be viewed as a human accomplishment is the suggestion that it would never have happened without the adventurous spirit of Western pioneers — men such as Hillary who would proclaim afterwards, “we knocked the bastard off,” another of nature’s challenges having been duly conquered.

What was one to infer about the fact that the people who had lived at the foot of the mountain for centuries, had not on their own initiative taken on the venture of its ascent?

Certainly, neither Hillary nor any other foreign mountaineer has been able to climb Everest without relying on the courage, perseverance, and strength of Sherpas.

Was the only thing the Sherpas lacked, equipment?

Maybe.

But maybe they didn’t lack anything at all.

Maybe the Sherpas possessed something that the Westerners lacked: a sense that Everest could be appreciated as much, or even more, from below rather then above — that the mountain called for reverence rather than conquest.

After all, what kind of man would pretend he is greater than a mountain?

Update: Ed Marzec, 67, a retired lawyer from Los Angeles who is currently at base camp, writes:

The Sherpas have voted to cancel all summit attempts of Everest this year as a memorial to the worst Everest disaster yet. I, along with many other climbers, believe this to be a proper memorial even though I have been working on this summit for 2 years, I am willing to abide by their decision since I am only a guest here. However, although the big American commercial tour operators have agreed to follow the vote of the Sherpas, they are working everyday to change the vote and wait until they think the Sherpas will get over it…..sounds so familiar. I am shamed by our greed and embarrassed by our lack of compassion.