Frances Haugen is the former Facebook employee whose 2021 disclosures John Kiriakou declines to classify as whistleblowing, in an argument he makes as part of a broader claim that the term is being deliberately blurred.
The question put to him
Kiriakou was asked whether there is an effort to smudge the definition of a whistleblower, given a run of figures coming forward with disclosures that happened to reinforce the state’s preferred narrative that more censorship was required.[1] He called it “a very important question, actually.”[1]
The test
He began from the statutory ground, noting that many people do not know one exists: whistleblowing is “bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to the public health or public safety.”[1] The fuller treatment is at the legal definition of whistleblowing.
The verdict
Against that test Kiriakou placed Haugen’s motive rather than her documents. “Francis Hagen, in my view, is not only not a whistleblower, she’s just a corporate spokesperson. What was her her motivation for coming forward? Her motivation was to make Facebook a stronger company. Her motivation was to was to improve Facebook’s bottom line. It wasn’t to expose wrongdoing.”[1] (The auto-caption renders her surname as Hagen; the reference is to Frances Haugen.)
He applied the same conclusion to a Twitter figure raised in the same question — a hacker who, in Kiriakou’s account, “was working with officers of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA to squelch free speech on Twitter.”[2]
The missing evidence
The second half of his objection is about proof. Kiriakou said he repeats it “like a mantra”: allegations of wrongdoing arrive without access to the primary source documents.[2] “Well, if you’re going to throw a grenade into the middle of the room, don’t expect people just to nod their heads and thank you for it. I want to see what the evidence is… If you’re going to make an accusation and call yourself a whistleblower, let me decide that. Let me judge you. And that’s just not what we’re seeing.”[3]