Is Edward Snowden, leaker of the National Security Agency's trove of data-driven secrets, a whistleblower or a traitor? As the debate rages, it is worth taking a look back at the roots of the word "whistleblower."
Commentators on the Snowden saga have often claimed that consumer advocate Ralph Nader coined the term "whistleblower" in the early 1970s. In fact, Mr. Nader put a positive spin on a term that had led a less-than-honorable existence for decades.
When the idiom of "blowing the whistle" emerged in the American vernacular of the early 20th century, it conjured an image of a boxing referee putting an end to a match, or a football official stopping play to announce a penalty on the field. In a 1909 story by Sewell Ford, the earthy protagonist Shorty McCabe cuts off the garrulous Sadie Sullivan by saying, "Blow the whistle on that, can't you?"
By the 1930s, "blowing the whistle" on someone could imply the dramatic revelation of something illicit, and in certain walks of life that meant getting painted as a "rat" or a "snitch." Consider Jacob Pfefer, a Polish immigrant turned professional wrestling promoter who publicly denounced the sport's fakery after his erstwhile partners had shut him out of the "rassling racket." In 1936, the New York sportswriter Jack Miley said of Mr. Pfefer, "Jake is a whistle-blower, which is unforgivable."
And so it went straight through to the '60s, with "whistleblower" getting used to tar someone who breaks a code of silence and squeals to the authorities.
Thus, in 1970, when Mr. Nader began asking for civic-minded "whistleblowers" in corporations and government to step forward and report fraud and other misdeeds, he knew that he was performing a terminological salvage job. The following year, at the Conference on Professional Responsibility that he helped to organize, he acknowledged that "the whistleblower is not liked," adding, "We have invidious terms for him: he is a 'fink' or a 'stool pigeon,' a 'squealer' or an 'informer,' or he 'rats' on his employer."
"Whistleblower" wasn't as blunt as the other slang terms, and was therefore most ripe for rehabilitation. Presciently, Mr. Nader sought whistleblowers among midlevel engineers and technicians processing data for the military-industrial complex. Addressing the annual convention of the Association of Computing Machinery in the fall of 1970, he warned that the collection of "data banks" might prevent people from "speaking out and blowing the whistle against the system." By exposing the large-scale collection of such data by the NSA, Mr. Snowden would seem—at least in some of his actions—to fit Nader's model of the whistleblower.