‘Reality’, the true story of an American whistleblower, highlights Australia’s own crisis

The Australian release of the film Reality — based on the true story of American whistleblower Reality Winner (yes, that is her real name) — interestingly coincides with our nation grappling with how to deal with its own whistleblowers.

The film’s title is a nod to not only Winner but director Tina Satter’s approach to the story, with the film’s dialogue lifted verbatim from a recording of an FBI raid of Winner’s home in 2017 and court transcripts relating to the investigation. It is “reality” in its starkest form.

Winner was a translator and intelligence agent working for a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor when she sent a classified document she found on an internal NSA website to an online news service, The Intercept. Winner and others later criticised the website’s mishandling of the document — after a reporter took it to the NSA for comment, they inadvertently exposed evidence divulging her as the source.

The NSA document in question revealed evidence that Russia had indeed tried to hack the United States 2016 elections and bend them towards Donald Trump. What incensed Winner was how the report directly contradicted the loud assertions of the president, who claimed no such thing had happened.

Winner was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and in a plea deal was ordered to serve five years in prison, the longest sentence handed down by a federal court for leaking classified information to the media.

Winner’s story highlights the contradictions inherent when the security of a nation’s leaders and institutions is conflated with the security of the state. Remember, a democracy’s highest function is to serve the interests of the people — you and me, in other words. Secrecy is a necessary part of security, but only to the extent that helps shore up our safety. But what happens when the security agencies wind up shielding those same leaders from legitimate accountability?

In the theatre, watching Reality as FBI agents question a panicked Winner, it was hard not to think about whistleblowers in Australia facing a similar fate. David McBride, for example, who gave the ABC evidence of alleged war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan. Or Richard Boyle, who exposed unethical debt-collecting practices of the Australian Tax Office.

Like Winner, both McBride and Boyle found evidence of gross abuses of power by people inside their respective agencies. Both tried to raise the issues internally, and when it became obvious that the internal mechanisms were also failing, they went to the whistle of last resort: the media.

Their leaks prompted deep soul-searching and significant changes within the Australian military and the ATO, and there has been no evidence that anyone’s security was compromised. Yet both are still due in court, and if convicted face years behind bars.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is leading widespread reform of Commonwealth whistleblower protections, and that is a good thing. But it is hard to take those reforms seriously while McBride and Boyle continue to face charges. Dreyfus has the authority to end their misery now, just as he did last year for the lawyer Bernard Collaery when he too was facing trial. Yet to anyone contemplating similar leaks, those prosecutions and years of endured suffering send a much more powerful message than any reforms.

Writing in the Harvard Law & Policy Review, American scholar Yochai Benkler said: “Unless one believes that the national security establishment has a magical exemption from the dynamics that lead all other large-scale organisations to error, then whistleblowing must be available as a critical arrow in the quiver of any democracy that seeks to contain the tragic consequences that follow when national security organisations make significant errors or engage in illegality or systemic abuse. Aggressive prosecution of national security whistleblowers and accountability leaks threatens to undermine the checking function that whistleblowing provides.”

The fact that Donald Trump is now being charged for his own mishandling of classified information is not likely to be much comfort for Winner.

After Winner was freed last year at the end of her sentence, her attorney Alison Grinter Allen told Democracy Now: “Reality released a document that gave us information that we needed to know at a time that we absolutely needed to know it. And she was in prison not because the information was a danger or put anyone in danger; she was in prison to salve the insecurities of one man who was concerned about the validity of his election win.”

Keep that in mind when you watch this extraordinary film.