Whistleblower Protection and the Truth: Linked intimately | Tom Michael Devine | TEDxWilmingtonSalon

July 30, 1778 the continent America July 30, 2016 we are here celebrating national

whistleblower

day who are these

whistleblower

s are people who use freedom of expression to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust now if they are isolated the Government Accountability Project where I work we call a complaint of professional suicide, but with solidarity they personify why it is a cop-out to say that you can't fight the city council or big companies, they personified that we have not lost control of our lives and we still can " Making a difference, well, they need solidarity in a number of areas, first they need solidarity to defend them against retaliation and that means everything from informal investigations to days in court to the Supreme Court's review of the laws that protect them.

No, and it's curious that more and more." When we understand it, the Supreme Court supposedly cannot agree on anything, but in every major whistleblowing case since 2000 and the Supreme Court overwhelmingly supports the whistleblowers, then there is solidarity from other witnesses and it is essential that the starting stone of the

truth

comes to light. it becomes a landslide that cannot be denied that you cannot cover up the

truth

is to cover up the cover up and the gap we do investigations to help expand the circle of witnesses and when that happens then public solidarity is needed and where I work we play to information matchmakers with that evidence that are not just legal cases, we make those with their legal campaigns for the truth, well, we unite the isolated whistleblower with everyone who should benefit from that is to dissent from their knowledge and instead of a corrupt bureaucracy .

By surrounding the whistleblower and isolating that person, we spread the word to the media, to politicians, to law enforcement, to the communities that have been affected, to the groups of citizens who have a lifetime of trying to fight against these abuses of power, to the people's competitors. who are abusing their power, everyone who should benefit from that knowledge when that happens, instead of a corrupt bureaucracy that surrounds the isolated whistleblower, it is the society that surrounds that corrupt bureaucracy, in truth, has become power, well, they need solidarity, a third way of the law and you. I know you're getting it when I first came to Gap, we had a Gras week for government whistleblowers and just a couple of lawyers for the private sector, now we have 59 whistleblowers in Blois covering our society and when I first came to Gap in 1979. there was only one country in the world with a whistleblowing law, the United States, now there are 30 nations with whistleblowing laws, free speech rights have spread from the local level in Washington DC to the federal level and the United Nations, the World Bank countries around the world. world Serbia most recent in 2012 well even Albania a few weeks ago whistleblowing is the most dynamic area of ​​international law that exists but you can't have this solidarity without education and that means we have to train government officials on how work with whistleblowers leadership training organization that should be your best resource instead of turning them into enemies we have to train our students in education and classes we have to share our lessons learned in books like our book the Survival Guide for Corporate Whistleblowers a manual for committing the truth, the first 30 years of lessons learned let you know that as long as we have had organized society, powers have been abused and sooner or later someone said enough is enough, he was the pioneer in challenging that abuse and you know, I think Jesus as a whistleblower against corrupt religious organizations.

I believe Martin Luther was a whistleblower against the Catholic Church, but the sailors of the American Revolution who provoked our first intelligence, blew the whistle, denounced a corrupt Navy commander. Lincoln replaced the Civil War whistleblowers can file citizen whistleblowing lawsuits. It has become the most effective anti-corruption law in the United States, but no, no, they are what we call them. I am reporting irregularities. There is nothing special about the name. There is nothing magical about that. Yes, in the Netherlands. called bell ringers of the people who climb the church tower and ring the bells to warn the people of danger in some countries there they are called lighthouse keepers for those who made the lights shine and the rocks that were hidden but with the ships sunk in Africa are They are called public sentinels because they defend the people, but no matter what we call them, reporting is freedom of expression when it counts most.

It is easy to have freedom of speech at a sporting event where the referee calls a foul on the wrong athlete and 40 or 50 thousand people are free to call that referee whatever they want, while it is difficult to retaliate against forty or fifty thousand people and not It was a secret that the mistake was probably televised and everyone could see it well, it is a very different matter if you are thinking of speaking out, there may only be a few people who know the truth and whoever is abusing the power is desperate to make sure that No one else finds out and since he couldn't continue then, he does this.

There is a lot at stake and very, very dangerous, well, whistleblowers, years, freedom of expression in different ways, the most we tend to think about is the freedom to protest, that is a very significant type of stereotype, whether demonstrating in the streets or appearing on a television show. exposing corruption or testifying in Congress or even witnessing a guy rush a trial. Whistleblowers are the agents of accountability. You can't enforce the law this way, you can't correct problems without people witnessing and testifying, but I think there is an even more significant use of freedom of expression by whistleblowers is the freedom to warn to prevent avoidable disasters before it's too late for anything other than damage control, picking up the pieces, or pointing fingers at who's fault when they're important but they're not. much comfort to the families of victims of tragedies that should never have happened if we had only listened, you know, this doesn't just apply to the general public, to organizational leaders as well.

We are always advising organizational leaders that whistleblowers should be their eyes and listen to their best resources because the problems have been hidden from them in the midst of bureaucracy and they may not know about them until they are blamed and held accountable because accountability It's up to them. Whistleblowers can make a difference if we listen. to them I say to the organization, to the leaders, look, you know it's bad business to silence or kill the messenger, well, you know we have all these different lessons learned and ideas, but why do whistleblowers do it? What makes them exposed to retaliation?

At a crossroads in life, nothing will ever be the same after this decision and it is a crossroads where you have to choose between valid but contradictory values ​​that we all grew up with there, for example, we don't like naysayers, troublemakers and cynical people. We like team players, but on the other hand we don't like bureaucratic sheep and value rugged individualists. We don't like gossip, thoughts and rats, but on the other hand we don't have much respect for people who look the same. Otherwise, I don't want to get involved, it remains America's national disgrace that sixty years ago a woman, Kitty Genevieve, was murdered and raped on the streets of New York and everyone closed the curtains.

I didn't want to get involved, you know, and look. don't hear evil don't speak evil don't think about it like monkeys not like human beings whistleblowers have to choose or what about the right to privacy versus the public's right to know or to loyalty you know we've all been raised so that our first loyalty should be to support our families and complaints, you could lose your job and not be able to support them, that's why you don't bite the hand that feeds you, but what about loyalty to the law and loyalty to our country? patriotism well these are difficult decisions so in my experience working with 7,000 whistleblowers there is a common reason why they act on what they have learned because they have to be true to themselves one of them told me I have to keep looking at myself in the mirror. and sometimes their motives are noble, sometimes they can be selfish, but if they don't act on their knowledge for the rest of their lives, they will wonder that things could have been different if I hadn't been part of the cover.

You know one of my first clients, mentors and teachers, a gentleman named Ernie Fitzgerald, Pentagon whistleblower, exposed the most expensive nuts in the world, both coffee, coffee parts, toilet seats, spending hundreds of times more for taxpayers than they would charge us if we just went. I went to the hardware store and Ernie told me that reporting is committing the truth because they treat you as if you had committed a crime and it is not so ironic that whistleblowers are the human factor, they are the Achilles heel of bureaucratic corruption and the most corrupt. bureaucracies that produced the most heroic whistleblowers these are people who make a difference, well you know what I'm giving you is a great sales pitch and one of the things I think you have an obligation to do is give us some evidence.

To back up these claims, one of the first people who really impressed me was an FDA scientist named Dr. David Graham, who claimed that Vioxx wax was a super painkiller, it was like aspirin on steroids, only it turned out to be a killer painkiller. which had killed nearly 50,000 Americans from unnecessary heart attacks. All this for a drug that our government had officially decreed it to be. safe from so many people who died in the Vietnam war thanks to dr. Graham's public health was protected and that stopped within a month of his testimony in the Senate, the company withdrew VAX from the market even though it was making almost a billion dollars a year in profits and what was the reason why it had 400 billion dollars in lawsuits, the truth makes a difference or let's go to threats to freedom from our own government there were half a dozen whistleblowers starting with the telephone companies to the Department of Justice, the NSA and culminating with mr.

Snowden, who taught us his older brother, has moved into the homes of every American family that uses electronic communications well. Thanks to his bravery, we got the USA Freedom Act and there are some controls on the type of surveillance of him. Now consider that counterterrorist Robert McLane was a In the Federal Air Marshal Service he prevented the government from going AWOL during a more ambitious repeat of 9/11 in 2003. Saudi intelligence and US counterintelligence had confirmed that al Qaeda this time planned not to attack only New York City in Washington DC those cities plus cities along the west coast European capitals Rome London Paris even the capital of Australia Canberra was going to be the grand finale of Terrorism in our department of homeland security he took out all the air marshals when the attack occurred and when the attack was going to take place thanks to mr.

MacLaine's revelation in 24 hours the government said: Oh, it's all a mistake, they corrected the mistake, the kidnapping was prevented, these people changed the course of history or casualties in the water. France, now the chief scientific advisor to the Marines, learned that 90% of our deaths in 60% of our casualties in Iraq because for a year and a half we had not delivered vehicles that would actually protect our troops against landmines and they were using vehicles that weren't even designed for that purpose, thanks to him blowing the EM whistle. Casualties from landmines of the representatives as they are called increased from 60% to 10%.

What about human rights about 15 years ago and the situation in our country was that people arriving from other nations to the airports or African American women coming? through our airports they were regularly detained accused of drug smuggling without any evidence sometimes it was sexual harassment sometimes they just wanted overtime, nothing to do with the authorities, although if they couldn't find any drugs in their luggage they would do searches of body cavities inside. and outside if they still couldn't find any drugs they take them to a hospital they have up to four days of laboratory tests during their time they couldn't contact their family they couldn't talk to a lawyer but they had disappeared in their The bodies were property of the government of the USA.

Well, thanks to Kathy Harris, an African-American customs inspector in Atlanta, the truth came to light. The government could not defend itself in four days. They were reduced to two hours before they had the rights of citizenship. Well, let's consider. the environment about 20 years ago in theHanford nuclear waste landfill, which is where we store all the radioactive waste in the United States, plutonium, the most dangerous substance on the planet or if you touch it in less than 240,000 years it kills you and about 20 years ago the contractor there held a conference of press and I said well we have lost track of 5,000 gallons of radioactive waste, we are telling you this because we are honest and don't worry I can't access the water supply or anything thanks to a whistleblower who used in his books we learned that the figure real was not 5,000 gallons four hundred and forty billion gallons of unaccounted-for radioactive waste we sent divers to the Columbia River, the water supply for the Pacific Northwest, there are already traces of radiation in the water thanks to a whistleblower A whistleblower began much more ambitious cleanup effort to plug the leaks and we don't have the wrong kind of hot water in the Pacific Northwest today.

You know, I could go on for quite some time, but I think the points that the whistleblowers have made changed the course of history by making more difference today than ever in the course of history and you know, it's funny that our government leaders often say well , if we want to be sure it is very expensive. and it's going to cost a lot of money tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars to keep you safe and we don't really have the luxury of all this freedom, we're going to have to cut back on freedom if you want Be safe, but it doesn't cost anything to listen and whistleblowers make us safer by strengthening our freedom instead of canceling it.

You know, the founding fathers were right that freedom of speech should be the First Amendment to our bill of rights. The good news is that if solidarity is the magic word for whistleblowers to make a difference and get their way, they are receiving more solidarity than ever in history, when I first arrived, now they are considered crazy, traitors or crazy . Featured in the press, unprecedented public support is why Congress, which can't get itself to agree on anything, has unanimously passed 15 laws for strong whistleblower

protection

since 2000, although the Supreme Court judge once said that if corruption is a social disease, sunlight is the best. disinfectant and the reason is quite obvious to me.

In a free society there is nothing more powerful than the truth.