Don’t Shoot the Messenger
Whistleblowers and the all-too-human conflict between truth and loyalty
This article also appears in the Oct 2017 issue of Hyperlink, a new magazine focused on the intersection of media, technology, commerce, and culture. Hyperlink is published by Winning Edits. To purchase the Oct 2017 issue, go to hyperlinkmag.com.
Scan past the headlines about almost any scandal in recent or not-so-recent history and you’ll likely find the name of a whistleblower. Many of these individuals have become household names — but many more have not. For every Deep Throat — FBI agent Mark Felt, who leaked critical information about the Watergate scandal to Washington Post reporters — there is a Grigory Rodchenkov, former director of Russia’s antidoping lab, who broke the Russian Olympic doping scandal of 2014. For every Edward Snowden — the former CIA employee who leaked classified information about US government surveillance programs and is currently in asylum outside the country — there are many more Anne Mitchells and Vicki Galles, two nurses who submitted an anonymous state medical board complaint in 2009 against a physician at the hospital at which they worked for practicing unsafe care.
Although not every whistleblower gets his or her due, the trope has embedded itself squarely in the popular imagination. More often than not, this person is accorded the status of a martyr or a hero, lauded for acting in service of truth and morality at great personal cost. Above the surface, the figure of the whistleblower is venerated — but does this tell the whole story? A glance below the water line reveals a much murkier, more complex reality, one that casts a stark light on two of our basic human motivations — our sense of right and wrong and our loyalty to the group — and throws into question whether the two can exist in symbiosis.
“The first messenger, that gave notice of Lucullus’ coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes that, he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information. Without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him.” —Plutarch, Lives
The Marlboro man. Steely gaze, wind-beaten face, staring out across an unforgiving landscape. It’s an image on which much of the modern American identity is founded. We are a nation of rugged individualists, ever pioneering, always exceptional. We place prime responsibility for our fate on ourselves and our own actions. In this cultural context, the whistleblower — someone who stands up against corruption and fraud, who takes great personal risk to speak truth to power and threaten the social or bureaucratic order — might be expected to be lauded and celebrated. But on the ground, the romanticism of rugged individualism meets with harsh social reality.
According to Professor Emeritus C. Fred Alford of the University of Maryland College Park, this dichotomy “is what’s unusual about America, I think. That we claim to be a land of individuality and the little man who stands up to the big organization and wins. But in practice, we tend not to like whistleblowers very much. We tend to think of them as disloyal people who are just a little weird and cranky and don’t belong.” In her book The Struggle Against Corruption: A Comparative Study Roberta Ann Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of San Francisco describes “[t]he typical situation in the United States” as one where “when a whistleblower exposes wrongdoing, he or she becomes the focus of attention and is even considered ‘the problem.’”
But why are we this way? Says Alford, “I think it’s because . . . Americans don’t understand the limit or the extent of our subservience and what we’re willing to do to belong to the organization, which is sometimes virtually anything at all. And so, people are conflicted in their attitudes toward whistleblowers.”
Be it Rudy, Rocky, the Karate Kid, or the Tortoise (vis-à-vis the Hare), we love to root for the underdog. But as much as we crave a great come-from-behind, against-the-odds story of redemption, we are also tribal creatures, driven to form and protect social bonds. This impulse predates civilization; it’s our legacy programming, embedded deep within us since our days on the savannah hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago.
Although we may be accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the apex predator, not so long back in our evolutionary history humans were less hunter and more hunted. Big cats, stronger and faster than we were, looked to us for their next meal. What’s more, the rigors of an unforgiving environment — one where food, water, and shelter weren’t always easy to come by — posed another daunting set of threats to our survival.
As a result, we had to tribe up. By working together, we were able to learn from and cooperate with one another in the face of predators and a dangerous environment. In doing so, we developed the ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers — something no other species has been able to accomplish. Some can cooperate in large numbers but not flexibly, such as ants. Others can cooperate flexibly but not in large numbers, such as chimpanzees. Humans are the only ones that have been able to put the two together.
We were able to develop this remarkable ability for flexible cooperation thanks to story. Story has been the binding element for the human species, one that’s allowed us to forge and rally around shared identities, ideas, and beliefs. This legacy — the ability to cooperate through story, myth, and shared experience — is what has allowed us to build things like culture, religion, and civilization.
We’re intensely social animals, and so anything that might upset the integrity of the group, the tribe, or the organization, is seen as a threat. And so whistleblowing presents a critical dilemma to everyone in the whistleblower’s milieu, one that pits two competing motivations: our individual moral compass and our need for social cohesion. In Whistleblowing and Ethics in Health and Social Care, author and social worker Angie Ash writes about the precarious cultural position of, and the conflicting attitudes of others toward whistleblowers in the UK and the West:
“Individual and public reaction to whistleblowing and to the whistleblower are, then, riddled with paradox. These paradoxes conflict us all, whether whistleblower, bystander, or a victim of wrongdoing. Culturally, certainly in the UK and the Western world, the rugged individualist is venerated; but then of course we love the team player. Social pressures to fit in, coexist with those pushing us to stand out. The workplace demands that employees do things right; the public wants people who’ll do the right thing. Whistleblowers maybe the butt of retaliation; yet their retaliators escape scrutiny. News, film, culture, love the lone ranger, yet loathe the oddball who wonders out loud if the emperor really is wearing any clothes. The whistleblower is fêted, yet crushed; held as a hero, punished as a scapegoat.”
How do we resolve or at least come to terms with this conflict — between popular affinity for the underdog and “loathing of the oddball”? Perhaps it’s because it’s easier to cheer for the underdog when we’re outsiders, mere observers taking in a story. As audiences, we’re often drawn to root for the long shot and easily enraptured by the unfolding drama, as long as it’s happening on a stage safely removed from us, one whose fourth wall runs no risk of being pierced. When the unheralded, 11-seeded George Mason men’s basketball team makes an unprecedented run to the Final Four in the 2006 NCAA tournament, most of us can cheer them along their unlikely, awe-inspiring path with no expected downside to us whatever the outcome. Beyond its emotional cogency, their story is unlikely to affect our lives in any significant way, so we can project ourselves onto it with little risk.
But when the underdog is a whistleblower, someone who pulls a thread that’s raveled into the fabric of an entire organization or system — especially one of which we’re a part, such as when the whistleblower is a coworker or a friend — our response to or engagement with that unfolding drama may be vastly different. That’s because the whistleblower is a special kind of underdog, one who does more than tell a story, but threatens the expected order in a way that counts. When both we and the whistleblower are insiders, the whistleblower’s actions come to represent a true threat, not just a nominal one.
And so, where we might find ourselves willing to root for the underdog, we usually only think we want to root for the whistleblower. When push comes to shove, we push them away. Says Alford, “This is the most troubling and surprising thing to many whistleblowers: not that the boss was angry and retaliated but that their friends at work provided no support at all. That they were scared — scared of associating with a whistleblower.”
As much as we might like to think of “snitches” getting their due as the domain of mafiosos and other entities that operate outside the margins of the judicial system, the truth is, as a 2012 sociological study put it, “Nobody likes a rat.” The study looked at the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. It also explored the changes in lying and reporting behavior that resulted from giving individuals a say in who joined their group. What their research found was disconcerting. Although it revealed that enough individuals are typically willing to report the lies of others when they’re all members of a “fixed” group — one in which individuals don’t have a say in who joins — when groups can select their members, individuals who report lies were generally shunned. According to the researchers, this allowed for “the formation of dishonest groups where lying is prevalent and reporting is nonexistent.”
In other words, when a group forms on its own terms, choosing its own members and thereby forging a more intentional tribal identity, lying becomes more acceptable in the name of group cohesion — and group members who report the lying of others risk being given the cold shoulder or worse. The truth holds no particular salvation for the whistleblower, as a 2011 study by the Ethics Resource Center found: “Whistleblowers whose reports are substantiated are as likely to experience retaliation as are those whose claims are not substantiated.”
In Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider’s Account of the Politics of Intelligence, Melvin Goodman writes about how in 1991 he blew the whistle on a number of high-ranking CIA officials, in addition to leading the opposition against the appointment of Robert Gates as director of the agency for what Goodman believed was subversion by Gates and several others of “the process and the ethics of intelligence.” After coming out against Gates’s appointment, Goodman found a wall of silence where his previous institutional support had been:
“Virtually no student, colonels and naval captains, made any comment to me about my testimony. Several faculty members sent quiet notes of support, but didn’t want to be identified openly with my views, although there were exceptions. The only enthusiastic support came from the African Americans serving at the college, primarily in staff positions, who viewed me as not as a whistleblower but as an underdog being mistreated by the Establishment.”
Many whistleblowers who expect to be supported by their managers and teammates for breaking the silence on wrongdoing at work are instead presented with a grim ultimatum. “Play ball or get out,” as one whistleblower in the 2016 Wells Fargo scandal was threatened by his manager after accusing his branch of opening multiple fraudulent accounts on behalf of the bank’s customers.
We need you to be a team player. It’s the kind of rebuff whistleblowers are used to hearing. And when the whistleblower refuses to play along, the organization responds to put them in line. A 2010 study in the New England Journal of Medicine examined the experiences of whistleblowers in fraud litigation against pharmaceutical companies. Whistleblowers reported various forms of pressure placed on them as a result of their actions:
“[N]obody spoke to me. Not one person . . . I was persona non grata.”
“[They said] ‘If you’re not playing along with us the way we play, we’ll throw you under the bus when and if anything ever hits the fan.’”
“Then, after I complained, my territory changed. They started giving me more challenging physicians. Then they started giving me different areas farther out to call on. So it made it difficult to do my job.”
“Then I took a job. Then somehow [company name] called the job. Then I was fired.”
Although this study only looked at the outcomes for whistleblowers in a single industry, these kinds of responses are sadly universal. For many whistleblowers, the costs are great and the consequences life-changing. The retaliation they incur sets up a vicious cycle of stress, expense, and ostracism that causes many to end up losing not just their jobs, but often their health, their families, and other sources of social support. Take the case of Thomas Drake, the National Security Agency (NSA) executive who blew the whistle on secret mass surveillance programs, multibillion-dollar fraud, and intelligence failures from 9/11, and ended up being indicted under the Espionage Act in 2010:
“Years and years of associations, social networks, people I got to know over time — all of that is gone. They’re just gone. I had family questioning me. There were serious reservations from people about who I was. I had one person who I worked with who said, ‘I don’t know you anymore.’ You’re also putting a huge burden on your family. The FBI raided me. I was no longer earning an income, and I went from senior executive to wage grade. I was headed for divorce. All these dynamics were in play.
“There are a lot of prices paid by whistleblowers. I became, essentially, broken and practically bankrupt. The court declared me indigent for two years. I went through all of my liquid assets. I couldn’t pay for my own attorney, and I was appointed public defenders. And I was facing the prospect of going to prison for many decades. So yeah, it’s an extraordinary burden.”
There is a positive element to the whistleblower’s dilemma, and it’s that the law is largely on the whistleblower’s side. The False Claims Act in the US provides incentives in some cases, in the form of a percentage of the money recovered by the government, which can be a huge sum depending on the scale of the fraud. In addition, the False Claims Act, as well as the Dodd-Frank act, which created whistleblower programs at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, also have whistleblower job protection provisions. Some states also have their own versions of the False Claims Act with job protection clauses.
A few lucky whistleblowers end up unscathed, and some even come out ahead, recouping money thanks to the False Claims Act — but they are a small minority. The law provides a decent carrot for whistleblowers, but it hasn’t yet built a good enough stick to prevent organizations from retaliating against whistleblowers. Job protection provisions and monetary rewards can’t usually prevent or offset the retaliation that’s a disheartening fact of life for whistleblowers. The law is simply not enough to truly shield individual whistleblowers from the consequences of piercing the social contract of the organization to which they belong. According to Alford, while the legal strictures and protections meant as a bulwark for whistleblowers are “formally recognized as a political space,” they are also “exactly what organizations, both public and private, detest.”
Alford believes it’s simply too easy “to get rid of whistleblowers in ways that are consonant with the law.” Many whistleblowers are not fired right away because of laws that proscribe that kind of retaliation. Instead, organizations mete out the punishment over a long stretch. Whistleblowers are passed over for promotions. They’re given absurd, unachievable levels of work. Some are even relegated to broom closets for offices. This kind of treatment — all within the bounds of legality — can go on for years until the whistleblower is unable to perform their job adequately and they’re eventually let go for “performance reasons.”
Says Alford, “The average time I found between a person blowing the whistle and getting fired was about two years. And the point of that really was to disconnect the act of retaliation from the act of whistleblowing. This usually involved moving or demoting the whistleblower giving him duties for which he was unprepared, menial duties, things like that. A series of bad performance reports, and he’s out.”
Compounding the ways in which the laws protecting whistleblowers fall short is a lack of awareness of the avenues of support and protection available to whistleblowers. Many are unsure of the path they should take to blow the whistle safely and effectively, and unaware of legal protections that may be available. According to a 2016 white paper by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) about the Dodd-Frank Law’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Whistleblower Awards Program, many whistleblowers “may fail to report to the SEC in a timely manner, because they are unaware of [the Program] or confused about next steps.” And research from the UK shows that as many as 63 percent of potential whistleblowers “said they were not aware of laws protecting whistleblowers from revealing wrongdoing if it’s in the public interest to do so.”
Whistleblowers take on immense risk and burden, but there is a lot they can do to mitigate it, if they know where to start. According to Stephen M. Kohn, an attorney and whistleblower advocate who’s also the executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, “Most whistleblowers initially think they’re going to be thanked — they’re just doing their job, they’re doing the right thing — and they don’t understand that they could face a tremendous backlash.”
As Kohn says, “You have to understand, if you’re going to report wrongdoing . . . You put a lot at risk.”
The next thing Kohn says potential whistleblowers must do is know their rights. As someone who’s been working in whistleblowing protection for over thirty years, he’s seen his fair share of tragic cases. “The worst thing in my life is when someone comes into my office, tells me what they did. They did the right thing, but I hear the mistakes they made, and they have no rights. They’re going to lose their case; they’re going to lose their job or career. But had they made other choices, had they known how to do it, they might be still employed or might even qualify for a financial reward.”
Kohn is the author of The New Whistleblower’s Handbook (previously The Whistleblower’s Handbook), an encyclopedic guide for would-be whistleblowers. A quick glance through the volume and its 500-plus pages suggests it to be a formidable resource in the pocket — okay, the messenger bag — of any would-be fraud-buster. But its sheer tome-liness, its Pynchon-esque girth, also makes clear that the prospect of whistleblowing is not to be taken lightly. To be fair, plowing through the entire manuscript isn’t necessary for every reader with their mind set on blowing the whistle — the book is split up into multiple sections with focuses on whistleblowing in different arenas, such as securities law, pollution, and even wildlife trafficking. But the book’s heft demonstrates that, as Kohn says, whistleblowing is “serious business.”
Whistleblowers, then, shoulder a multilayered burden: the risk of the whistleblowing itself, and the due diligence required just to prevent the worst from happening to them. So what can the rest of us do to make a whistleblower’s life easier? Says Alford, “The best thing people could do is take a whistleblower to lunch, because they really become pariahs. The people who know them, who work with them. Because everyone is so scared to be seen with a whistleblower, or being associated with a whistleblower.”
The law itself could also do more to protect whistleblowers — and the February 2017 ruling by the Supreme Court, which confirmed that some courts had been using too narrow a legal standard when weighing whistleblower suits under the False Claims Act, is a positive step that could open more whistleblowers’ claims for protection under this law in the future. But there is a third leg to this stool. It’s the most wobbly, but also represents the greatest hope for a culture shift in the way whistleblowers are received and treated: the organization, the system of social cooperation, be it private or public, that dictates the rules of engagement for its members. Says Alford, “You shouldn’t have to give up the values of a good citizen in order to be a good member of the organization. Right? But you do. That’s what the organization expects.” But does it have to be this way? If the onus for betterment of the whistleblower’s fate rests on the organization, there might actually be reason to hope.
The 2011 study by the Ethics Resource Center that looked at whistleblower retaliation also suggests ways that organizations can become more whistleblower-friendly and create “nonretaliatory work environments which protect employees.” They outline four factors, including the presence of ethics and compliance programs, strong ethical cultures, high standards of accountability that are consistently applied, and positive management behaviors, as most crucial in reducing the likelihood that a whistleblower within the organization will experience retaliation.
In addition, leaders have a special ability — and responsibility — as whistleblowers and moral guardians within the organization, according to research by David M. Mayer, Maddy Ong, and Scott DeRue of the University of Michigan and Ned Wellman of Arizona State University. They conducted three studies that all examined whether a whistleblower’s level of legitimate power — i.e., whether the person was a formal leader or simply a peer — influenced how others responded to their actions. They found that in all three studies, peers who spoke up were viewed less positively than leaders who blew the whistle.
According to Mayer, the takeaway of this research was clear: “[L]eaders have a critical responsibility both to speak up and to create a culture where employees are accountable to one another and the organization to report any wrongdoing.” Researchers from Boston College and Northwestern University reached a similar conclusion, arguing that “loyalty and group cohesiveness represent core values to employees and individuals,” so in order “[t]o motivate a broader swath of individuals toward whistleblowing, organizations might focus on building the kind of community that values constructive dissent while maintaining group loyalty.”
Even if whistleblowers will never be celebrated in all corners, by intentionally crafting organizational norms that embrace the delicate yin–yang balance of loyalty and constructive dissent, leaders can build organizations that make whistleblowing a safer, more valued action. No easy task, but perhaps no more important one, either.
We are arguably in a new era — the age of transparency. With the means to access and store immense amounts of data at the fingertips of just about everyone, open access to corporate, government, and private information seems more and more like a given. This notion took off after the collapse of Enron, the company built on a house of cards of fraudulent accounting practices that all came toppling down in 2001. But are things really more transparent now, in the post-Enron age? And if they are, do we still need whistleblowers?
So-called transparency may bring unsavory practices into the spotlight, but it doesn’t necessarily curtail them. As the first tumultuous months of the Trump administration have shown us, transparency ultimately cedes to power. Transparency about Trump’s many shortcomings — his misogyny, his questionable financial entanglements, his blatant non-denunciations of hate groups — while setting the course for his downfall in some people’s estimation, has hardly set a short line to such an outcome. Transparency must always be placed in context, and never accepted on its face until it can be discerned as more than a rhetorical distraction. In the fake news era, where one’s clarity is another’s obfuscation, transparency can be less of a lens onto truth than a window into another unverifiable viewpoint among many.
Perhaps no entity represents the so-called age of transparency better than WikiLeaks, the international nonprofit that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media provided by anonymous sources. To some observers, WikiLeaks may appear to have blown the whistleblowing game wide open. Now that WikiLeaks is here, do we even need individual whistleblowers anymore? The answer is complicated.
For starters, WikiLeaks is not a whistleblower. They facilitate the leaking of information, but they fail to satisfy a central condition or characteristic of whistleblowing: a lack of anonymity. Says Alford: “As a rule, data-dumping isn’t whistleblowing. Whistleblowers, to be effective, generally need to have their name, their identity, their personality, sort of behind the act. The further away you are, the more difficult that is to do.” Plus, as Johnson points out in The Struggle Against Corruption, there’s always a power differential at play in whistleblowing, one that makes it “impossible to blow the whistle without turning someone or some practice into one’s superiors or authority.” Anonymous leaks from outside the organization are not whistleblowing.
One result of WikiLeaks’ actions is that we arguably know more about the clandestine activities of governments and individuals than we did before. But is there always value in knowing? Is the revelation of secrets an automatic social good? The actions of WikiLeaks have hardly been without direct negative consequences too; this includes the revelation of regular citizens’ sensitive private data such as social security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers, and even details of suicide attempts.
This kind of sensitive personal information was included in the cache of approximately twenty thousand emails sent from or received by Democratic National Committee (DNC) personnel that were Wiki-leaked in July 2016 during the heat of the presidential electoral race. The DNC leaks marked a turning point for WikiLeaks, one that cemented them as far from neutral. In fact, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made no bones about his distaste for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a February 2016 post on the WikiLeaks website, calling her “a war hawk with bad judgement who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people,” one who “shouldn’t be let near a gun shop, let alone an army. And she certainly should not become president of the United States.”
“We don’t have targets,” Assange told TIME managing editor Richard Stengel in a Skype interview in 2010. In the years that followed, however, WikiLeaks’ pendulum underwent a marked swing. In August 2017, Foreign Policy revealed how, around the same time WikiLeaks was opening the floodgates on emails from the DNC, they had declined to publish at least sixty-eight gigabytes worth of documents originating from the the Russian Interior Ministry — emails purportedly obtained by hackers under the auspices of the Kremlin.
WikiLeaks the organization is also far from transparent. Employees of WikiLeaks are reportedly expected to sign non-disclosure agreements covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with stiff monetary penalties for crossing the line. The only person in the organization with power over disclosure? Julian Assange.
Quite simply, Assange has learned how to wield information as power. In this way, what WikiLeaks does is much further away from whistleblowing than one might be inclined to believe. The whistleblower is archetypally one who relinquishes their own meager power for the greater good, who exerts their individual morality, at great personal cost, to send an arrow into the poisoned heart of the organization, the holder of power. For WikiLeaks, and for Julian Assange in particular, leaking has rather become a means to power. Meanwhile, the organization’s slide into partisanship at Assange’s helm, while not necessarily a natural consequence of that power, serves to heighten the danger represented by that power. An organization with the reach and influence of WikiLeaks is in a position to do a lot of damage if it wants to — and it seems to want to.
In March 2017, former CIA director Michael Hayden told the BBC he believed “millennials” had been behind several recent high-profile leaks of sensitive information — particularly the revelations of Edward Snowden, as well as those of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, the former US Army intelligence analyst who delivered a huge trove of classified information to WikiLeaks in 2010. Said Hayden, “I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than certainly my generation did.”
In Hayden’s defense, a 2013 Pew poll found that 45 percent of millennials were skeptical of government surveillance and intrusions on personal privacy, even if it limited the government’s ability to investigate possible terror threats — more than any other age group. Among those sixty-five years old and older, just 26 percent held that view. But before we dig too much further into the millennials-as-whistleblowers question, let’s go back in time, to 2003.
That year, TIME declared 2002 “The Year of the Whistleblower” and made three whistleblowers its “Person of the Year”: Sherron Watkins, the Enron vice president who warned chairman Kenneth Lay in the summer of 2001 that the company’s accounting methods were improper; Coleen Rowley, the FBI staff attorney who sent a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller about the need to investigate 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; and Cynthia Cooper, who informed the board of WorldCom that the company had covered up $3.8 billion in losses.
In 2013, TIME put three whistleblowers on their cover again. In comparison to the 2002 whistleblowers — Sherron Watkins (born 1959), Coleen Rowley (1954), and Cynthia Cooper (1964) — the 2013 crop was freshly brewed: Edward Snowden (born 1983), Bradley Manning (1987), and Aaron Swartz (1986), the programmer and activist who downloaded and leaked a massive archive of research papers from digital library JSTOR in 2010.
But this time, rather than straightforward defenders of justice and fighters of corruption, the three youths were depicted as representatives of a “hacktivist ethos” that was “growing around the world, driven in large part by young hackers who are increasingly disrupting all manner of institutional power with online protest and Internet theft.” In contrast to the 2003 cover story, the 2013 edition read as more of a boomer backlash to the perceived entitlement and techno savvy of the younger generation, one that’s eager and able to flash a middle finger at the establishment by spilling its secrets.
Are millennials, as Inc.com’s Eric Markovitz claims, characteristically attuned to whistleblowing, being “a complicated, over-educated, narcissistic-yet-altruistic bunch” — a combination of traits that matches them up well with the practice of whistleblowing? Or perhaps this projection is rite of scrutiny every young generation must pass, one that’s persisted surely since at least the Late Pleistocene, and at least as far back as 1695, when Robert Russel wrote, in A Little Book for Children and Youth—
“… I find by sad Experience how the Towns and Streets are filled with lewd wicked Children, and many Children as they have played about the Streets have been heard to curse and swear and call one another Nick-names, and it would grieve ones Heart to hear what bawdy and filthy Communications proceeds from the Mouths of such…”
Blame the youth for their bawdy and filthy communications, but blame the incessant march of technology, too. Technology has undoubtedly made it easier to blow the whistle/leak or dump docs. But it’s a sword that cuts both ways, making it easier to both share and collect data, whether it’s a teenager Snapchatting their antics across the world or a government spying on its own citizens. In an era in which long-term employment is a rapidly fading relic of a bygone age, where the culture of employer–employee loyalty hangs by a thread, when the means to both spread and collect data are widespread, and surveillance is increasingly de rigueur, are we really surprised that our idealistic young might be drawn to whistleblowing?
In 1863, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, the chief sponsor of the Senate bill that would lead to the False Claims Act, explained the proposed law as based “upon the old-fashioned idea of hold out a temptation,” and “setting a rogue to catch a rogue . . . a reward for the informer who comes into court and betrays his co-conspirator . . .” But whistleblowing is rarely about setting a rogue to catch a rogue. This idea frames the act of whistleblowing as a kind of superhero–villain dichotomy, one characterized by isolated actors with individual agency.
To (very coarsely) paraphrase Gertrude Stein, sometimes a rogue is not a rogue is not a rogue. With whistleblowing, the rogues are all insiders, entangled in the organization — the social fabric that dictates both implicitly and explicitly the norms of their engagement. Even if the rogues occupy similar standing in that organization, it scarcely matters. That’s because whistleblowing is more akin to setting David to defeat a nebulous Goliath — but this Goliath is not an actor but a system, a entire group of individuals aligned and interconnected by a powerful set of social operating principles. Rather than take down the giant, the ping of the slingshot is only going to make Goliath angry, to stir the system against David and make David’s life hell along the way.
So here’s to the whistleblowers, the willing martyrs, the insiders who dare to tell the truth, to risk greatly as they, as Alford says, “bring the outside in.”
