1. Introduction

The last decade was challenging for national intelligence agencies. The cases of leaking classified information made headlines all over the globe. The most famous names that captured media attention and became well-known overnight as public figures are Edward Snowden, Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, and Reality Winner. Those were portrayed in media as "heroes" or "traitors" (Madison, 2014; Marangione, 2018). Persons that disclose classified information or report in-group wrongdoings to an external agency are called "whistleblowers" (Anvari et al., 2019). An act of "whistleblowing" can profoundly impact organizations and societies, while often including high personal costs. The rational cost-benefit equation does not help us understand the motivation of whistleblowers.

In the preface to his autobiography, Edward Snowden wrote: "They didn't hesitate for a moment to call me a Chinese double agent, a Russian triple agent, and worse – a Millennial" (Snowden, 2020, p. 14). To comprehend his decision, or to do harm to his personality, the term "Millennial" was used. The term was introduced by sociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss in their book "Generations" (Strauss & Howe, 1991). According to PEW Research Center, Millennials are a generation of young adults born from 1981 to 1996 (Dimock, 2019). Headliners in all three cases are members of the millennial generation. Millennials have officially surpassed Baby Boomers in the population (PEW, 2014) and become present on a larger scale in labour force.

In this paper, we seek to explore whether there is something inherent to Millennials that makes them prone to "blow the whistle". Is the approach that treats the whole generation as a potential "insider threat" to national security justified or would some other approach be more appropriate? What are the consequences of "leaking" on the society as a whole and how do the society and/or organizations react to whistleblowers? These are some of the questions we aim to cover in this paper.

2. Privacy vs. Security / Traitors vs. Heroes

A deeper understanding of cases of leaking classified information first of all demands explaining the socio-political context in terms of "privacy" and "security". The way in which privacy and security are presented in the heading of the chapter might lead readers to consider them absolute categories, but it would be more appropriate to consider them relative ones. One does not completely exclude the other. After the terrorist attack of 11 September, a big shift was made from privacy toward security. The rapid development of information technologies introduces more complications related to the old dilemma of security versus privacy (Lieber, 2014).

The response of the National Security Agency (NSA) to terrorist attacks was "Section 215 of the US Patriot Act of 20011" which refers to "collecting and holding meta-data of Americans' phone calls" (Patel, 2015). The Latin phrase Necessitas frangit legem2 might be used to illustrate the agenda implemented by NSA in fighting terrorism Atkins (2014) points out that NSA's practice of surveillance violates privacy guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment. Besides critics on violation of civil rights, there are also critics directed at the effectiveness of measures depicted in "Section 215" (Mann, 2014; Patel, 2015).

A series of terrorist attacks that took place in the capital of France on 13 November 2015, in which members of the Islamic State were directly involved, according to a report by Europol (2016), gave a good reason to NSA to "upgrade" counter-terroristic measures in terms of enhanced surveillance. The next step was "Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act3", which provides the basis for programs like "PRISM4" and "Upstream5" (Patel, 2015). The fear of terrorism was used as justification for massive surveillance programs orchestrated by the NSA in cooperation with intelligence agencies from other countries e.g., the United Kingdom (Hopkins, 2013) and Australia (Dorling, 2013) in the case of PRISM.

In an interview with the BBC6, Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA director claimed: "I don't mean to judge them all, but this group of Millennials… simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than my generation did" (Corera, 2017). Hayden's statement referred to whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who were involved in the biggest cases of leaking classified information in modern American history.

The first major leak in recent history happened in June 2013, when Edward Snowden, a former CIA technical assistant disclosed classified information. Snowden revealed details about the massive surveillance program to the public while he was employed as a subcontractor for NSA. Before he decided to leak classified information to the Washington Post and the Guardian, he had allegedly expressed his concerns to co-workers and supervisors, but did not get appropriate feedback from them (Gaudet, 2016; Peterson, 2014). Snowden's "revelation" did not affect only NSA, but also touched on intelligence services that are part of the so-called the "Five Eyes" network (the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) and European intelligence agencies7 (Pohle & Van Audenhove, 2017).

Another leak occurred on August 21, 2013, when the Washington Post published that Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst, had been dishonourably discharged and sentenced to 35 years8 due to leaking hundreds of thousands of confidential documents about military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks (Tate, 2013).

The last major recorded case of leaking classified information is related to the name of Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence analyst9 who disclosed Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential elections to the news website The Intercept. Reality Winner was sentenced to five years and three months under the Espionage Act in 2018, being the most severe punishment for unauthorized release of government information to the public (Philipps, 2018).

Main actors in all three cases were paradoxically presented in the media as either "traitors" or "heroes. " All of them, according to what they stated in the media, were motivated to inform the public about what was happening behind the curtain. They were either idealized or demonized in the public sphere. In an interview for the Guardian, Snowden10 said "I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me" (Greenwald et al., 2013).

Putting the question of heroes or villains aside, we aim to understand the attitudes of Millennials towards "whistleblowers. " That sort of information may reveal to what extent Millennials are familiar and prone to identify with them – approve of their actions, even though we should be careful in drawing conclusions based on such information. Attitudes do not directly predict behaviour or action to which they refer (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005). Some studies that reveal Millennials' attitudes toward security and privacy will be presented in the next chapter, after we point out the context Millennials were born into, and generational specificities usually related to tendencies towards whistleblowing.

3. Psychology of Millennials

German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1969) was the first who problematized the concept of generation in social sciences. A generation is a group of people who were born within the same historical period and share a socio-cultural context. Members of the same generation are exposed to similar influences during their formative years. There are tendencies among social scientists to simplify Mannheim's concept of generation, overlooking that Mannheim himself was very cautious about the concept. The generation is not a monolithic group of people. On the contrary, "thus within a generation, there exist many differentiated, antagonistic generation-units" (McCourt, 2012). The generation unit represents a much more concrete bond in contrast to the concept of generation. Generation units within the same generation might appropriate "cultural material" or understand and react to historical events in a different way.

Every generation experienced a "cultural trauma" that leaves an indelible mark on the group's identity (Arnett, 2013). The "cultural trauma" for American millennials is the terrorist attack that happened on September 11^th 2001. That tragic event left a "permanent mark" on their "collective memory". Millennials are under influence of quickly advancing information technology and social media. Their environment consists of technological devices such as cell phones, personal computers, electronic gadgets, etc. (Yadin, 2012). To describe Millennials further, the term "digital natives" was introduced by Marc Prensky (2001). It refers to one of the main features of the Millennials' identity. Constant interaction ("always connected generation") within digital environments and simultaneous existence in numerous virtual worlds through social media profiles has influenced their work habits, preferences, lifestyles. This provokes more stress for Millennials, due to multitasking related to online activity (Mark et al., 2014). The symbiosis with digital environments is another arena for a formative experience that shapes values, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour of Millennials. Apart from the availability of Internet at an early age, Millennials grew up in an economic instability – financial crisis (2007–2009) (Kurz et al., 2019) and testify to political instability and warfare all over the globe.

Jean Twenge and Stacy Campbell (2012) show that "many books, press accounts, and consultants have rushed to fill the information gap" in the body of knowledge about Millennials by concluding that they have certain traits and attitudes often without appropriate empirical support for their speculations (Twenge & Campbell, 2012). They refer to an article published in the Wall Street Journal written by Sarah E. Needleman (2008), in which she explained actions within companies based on prejudice about Millennials. In her article, Needleman notes that many companies (among them is pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc.) offer programs that pay employees to volunteer – corporate volunteerism, based on the idea that Millennials are more prone to pro-social behaviour than previous generations, and have a greater desire to contribute to the society.

The studies with a focus on cross-generational changes in the psychological characteristics provide empirical support that Millennials are different from other generations regarding some dimensions of personality. Of course, we have no intention to cover all the research pointing to generational differences (it is not the purpose of the paper), but just to select those that reflect some psychological characteristics possibly related to whistleblowing.

These studies show that Millennials have greater scores on scales that measure narcissistic traits than other generations (Stewart & Bernhardt, 2010; Trzesniewski et al., 2008; Twenge & Foster, 2010). The popular view of Millennials as more caring, community-oriented and politically engaged than previous generations is incorrect according to the research conducted by Twenge et al. (2012). The aforementioned research reflects the culture change. We can assume that Millennials are born into the "culture of narcissism" (Lasch, 2018), equipped with all kinds of gadgets that provide an opportunity for "mirroring" (Kohut, 1971;2013). in virtual reality, which in return reinforce their narcissist tendencies.

"Understanding what drives Millennials and how they feel about transparency, loyalty and information sharing, as well as their opinion on these prominent cases of leaking" (Marangione, 2019). This perspective can reveal much more about their "psychology" and tendencies towards whistleblowing than employing some existing outdated models, based on psychological profiling of spies, from the epochs before the appearance of Internet. According to Marangione (2019), it seems that intelligence analysts tend to uncritically apply "old knowledge" to "new actors. " That practice shows its weakness in identifying potential threats and preventing damage made by whistleblowers to intelligence services and governments.

In the National Survey of Americans conducted by RAND11, the results show generational differences in attitudes towards security. Millennials reported being more worried about economic security and less worried about national security than older Americans (Posard et al., 2018). They also reported being less concerned than their elders about protecting the United States against terrorist attacks. The results obtained in the studies conducted by the Pew Research Center show that young adults (18–29 years) are significantly more supportive than their elders of Edward Snowden (PEW, 2014). The statistics in this study show that 57% of young adults i.e., Millennials consider that leaks of classified documents have served rather than harmed the public interest. Additionally, older generations showed a higher level of disapproval of what Snowden did, and consider his action harmful to national security. It is interesting to note that, regarding the question about privacy and security, the results show that all age groups agree that "Americans shouldn't have to give up privacy and freedom to be safe from terrorism". Finally, those under 50 were significantly more supportive of that position than the older individuals (PEW, 2014). An international survey conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, 2015) has found that members of the millennial generation in other countries mostly have positive opinions of Edward Snowden, as depicted in Chart 1.

Chart 1. Positive opinion of the millennial generation about Edward Snowden
Графикон 1. Позитивно мишљење о Едварду Сноудену генерације миленијалаца (ACLU, 2015)

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Besides the aforementioned personality traits presented in the context of cross-generational change, there are other personality traits that could provide useful insights related to whistleblowing propensity. In their study conducted on 3000 military and civilian air force employees, Miceli and associates pointed out some of those specific personality features. Namely, those who have more proactive personality are prone to react to perceived wrongdoing (Miceli et al., 2001). Additionally, those who have higher scores on self-efficacy and perceived organizational support are prone to whistleblowing (Miceli et al., 2001). The research conducted by Curtis and Taylor (2009) points out that personal characteristics such as locus of control and ethical style are significant predictors of whistleblowing intentions. Those who perceive greater control over events are more likely to whistleblow than those who perceive less personal control (Curtis and Taylor, 2009). The respondents with judging ethical styles were more likely to report wrongdoings than those with caring ethical styles (Curtis and Taylor, 2009).

A study focusing on one specific trait – Machiavellianism – shows that Machiavellianism is negatively related to whistle-blowing (Dalton and Radtke, 2013). Furthermore, these authors find that Machiavellianism has an indirect effect on whistle-blowing through perceived benefits and perceived responsibility (Dalton and Radtke, 2013). It means that the outcome in terms of whistleblowing in this case strongly depends on the interaction between Machiavellianism and other contextual variables. Understanding the underlying factors that influence whistleblowing in terms of individual differences sheds light on one aspect of the phenomenon. In order to avoid a reductionist perspective in explaining whistleblowing, in the next chapter we will explain the importance of including the social dimension for comprehending whistleblowing.

4. The truth is somewhere in between

We recognize two main tendencies in comprehending the described cases of leaking classified information. The first one relates to generational characteristics such as prevalence of narcissist traits, need for transparency and individualism, used to explain incidence of whistleblowing in the digital age (Brinksman et al., 2019, Gaudet, 2016; Marangione, 2019). It means that cultural factors favour psychological traits that can serve as a basis for whistleblowing. Following that line of reasoning, we can expect "digital natives" to value privacy, transparency, loyalty in the manner that does not correspond with those of previous generations. This discourse is present in the statements of former CIA and NSA director, Michael Hayden, in his interview for the BBC (Corera, 2017).

This viewpoint tends to overlook individual differences and depict Millennials uniformly as a threat for national security. Another approach primarily tends to narrow the focus more on personality level, not taking cultural context into account. The second approach uses a clinical method that sees whistleblowing as a result of the interaction of a specific constellation of psychological traits (on one side) and situational (precipitating life crisis) factors, on the other side (Wilder, 2017). This approach often presumes psychopathology (i.e. malignant narcissism, psychopathy, and immaturity) as the determining factor of leaking classified information. The clinical approach provides us with plenty of useful information of great practical importance, especially for those who work in the national security. Both models lack the social dimension. Some social psychologists address "lacunae" in existing psychological models of whistleblowing (Anvari et al., 2019) and rely on the social identity theory (Tajfel, 2010) to comprehend the whistleblowers.

Besides these two, there is another approach to whistleblowing we want to accentuate. That perspective at whistleblowers includes a sociological and socio-psychological dimension. It is true that existing explanations tend to overemphasize cultural factors, hiding behind the concept of generation, and comprehending the whistleblowing as a solitary act, without a social component in it. A more appropriate look at whistleblowers is not at someone who is inherently predetermined to leak information because he or she is mentally unstable (as often portrayed by the media)12, but to realize who are "imagined others" he or she identifies with. The concepts such as "imagined community" (Anderson, 1983) or Mead's "generalized other" (Dodds et al., 1997) serve to remind us that self does not exist without real and imagined relations with others. The individual is constituted through the web of identification (Faris, 1937). Identification with "imagined others" provides an individual with a set of normative principles as a landmark in the social world and can be a source of moral courage for those who decide to leak classified information (Press, 2018). Manheim's concept of generation units can be understood as a group of individuals who are born within the same generation, but identify with different "imagined others" and consequently have different reactions under the same social circumstances. Hypothetically, the whole generation of Millennials had an experience of the Internet in early formative years, but any individual is free to choose to which imagined/virtual community he or she is going to belong. Being part of an imagined community leads to internalization of a particular worldview. It should be clear by now that being a member of some imagined community has to do more with mental than physical space.

Press (2018) interpreted Snowden's disclosure of classified information not as an act of a "solitary leaker", but as a social act. A similar interpretation, as a starting point, can be extrapolated on Manning's and Winner's cases as well. Snowden did it because of his strong connection with the imagined community – the open source community, which fought for the free Internet and transparency of information and knowledge. In order to resolve a cognitive dissonance after having found out about massive surveillance of the ordinary citizens, he had to decide between two different sets of values. His bond to the imagined community was stronger than the bond to the organization he worked for, so his moral actions were guided by the principles of the imagined community he belonged to.

5. Conclusion

After the cases of leaking classified information in the decade behind us, the generation of Millennials is considered as a potential threat inside intelligence and corporate circles. We challenge this viewpoint and point out that it is more appropriate to analyze these cases from the meso-level. A shift from the cultural to socio-psychological approaches with respect to both cultural and individual characteristics of whistleblowers can reveal much more additional insights into the dynamics that precedes the mere act of whistleblowing. Labelling the whole generation of Millennials as a potential insider threat has more in common with sensational headlines than with scientific truth. We can expect Millennials to have a different understanding of concepts such as privacy, security, transparency, and to have some traits, such as narcissism, more evident than in previous generations, but it is still not enough to make any general conclusions about a direct link between these characteristics of Millennials and whistleblowing.

Does whistleblowing i.e., leaking classified information have some impact on the society as a whole? It certainly does. Whistleblowers from the described cases did harm to intelligence services by revealing the classified information to the public. Their actions affect military missions, counterterrorism measures, diplomatic relations, etc. It is possible to imagine that their actions will also influence the political climate and geopolitics. Probably there are social consequences that can hardly be noticed outside of the intelligence community, but we should not lose sight of how society responds to whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are often victims of retaliation due to what they did. The act of whistleblowing entails a high personal cost that includes ostracism from an organization or a company, leading to financial loss and reduced opportunity for getting a new job, possible threats towards physical integrity and compromised mental health13, and so on.

We agree with Press's insisting on "social-psychology of conscience" (Press, 2018) and we propose an approach that analyzes imagined communities that whistleblowers identify with. What are implicit and explicit sets of values those imagined communities have? When do the organization's values come into collision with those of an imagined community? When does an individual decide to blow the whistle on perceived wrongdoings within an organization or a company? These are just some of the questions that should be considered in future research from the socio-psychological perspective.

Since millennials have been growing up under the influence of similar media content and Internet culture in a global interconnected world, we can state that the outcomes of current review can be applicable to Serbia.

The paper did not cover legal aspects related to cases of whistleblowing, which are also relevant. These aspects should be covered in future research.

Dodatak

Project

This paper was realized with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, according to the Agreement on the Implementation and Funding of Scientific Research.