Hope and its Absence

Hope and its Absence

The time required to resolve whistleblower complaints calls not only for perseverance but for a facility with hope and hopelessness in the situation.  An expectation of success is often an important motivator for the potential whistleblower[1], but success is rarely achieved[2].  As we proceed through our whistleblowing projects, we must anticipate that we will fail to achieve our objectives.

I identified HomeFirst’s violations of “master lease” requirements in three government contracts – two with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and one with Santa Clara County – during my routine compliance reviews in October and November 2013.  In the contracts, HomeFirst provided financial assistance to clients who were leasing apartments.  In 2013, the contracts changed from those in prior years by requiring that the leases be in HomeFirst’s name, not the clients’.  Only these “master leases” would generate eligible leasing expenses that HomeFirst could charge to HUD or the County.  In my review I found that very few of the leases were master leases.  As a consequence, we had violated the contracts by charging HUD and the County for ineligible expenses.

The HomeFirst CEO asked the Program Officer to contact HUD in San Francisco and get a waiver for the violation.  Months passed, and no waiver came; HUD was working on it, the CEO said.  As CFO, I included ineligible expenses in our invoices to HUD and the County while informing them how much we were overbilling them.  Then in June 2014, I was fired.

During my time at HomeFirst, I made no external complaint about the violations because I hoped that management would fix the problem.  I hoped that HUD would agree to waive the violations.

For the first several months after being fired, I worked on my other complaints and with my attorney on a response to my termination.  We had overbilled the County more than $200,000 and HUD by over $100,000, but I did not gather documents to support my complaint before I left.  As a result, I lacked specifics about the violations, such as the names of clients without master leases and the amounts billed to HUD and the County for those clients.

By early 2015, the HUD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) had apparently ignored my three complaints about the $1.2 million that HomeFirst overbilled HUD in 2003-2006, and my two appeals to Senator Feinstein on the matter had come to nothing.  I did not bother with the master lease violations, thinking it unlikely that anything could be done about them.  A year later, the State investigator of my whistleblower complaint showed little interest in the master lease violations because I had no evidence of reporting them to authorities while I worked for HomeFirst. 

In 2016, my requests for public documents from the County, the City of San Jose and HUD about other complaints began to yield information that revealed the slow enforcement process years working after the initial whistleblowing.

In September 2016, I asked the County for HomeFirst’s master lease contract billing information that I thought would reveal the 2014 charges for ineligible expenses.  The 266 pages of County documents included a letter from the HomeFirst CEO which admitted to charging the County $263,162 for ineligible expenses.  The documents also suggested, without proving conclusively, that the County had charged HUD for those same ineligible expenses.  Excited at finding probable evidence, at least in my mind, of the County’s seemingly fraudulent billing of HUD, I registered my complaint on the County’s whistleblower website.  A week later, after receiving no response from the County, I filed a similar complaint with the OIG.

Also in September I made a Freedom of Information Act request to HUD for documents relating to its three contracts with the County and HomeFirst.  HUD agreed to provide the material if I paid them $546 for 10.5 hours of their time spent complying with my request.  The City of San Jose, the County, and HUD itself had not charged me for my earlier FOIA requests.  Since I had received from the County what I needed concerning their contracts, I revised my request asking only about the HomeFirst contracts.  HUD revised its invoice to $126.  [I subsequently asked them to waive the fee in the public interest.]

My reluctance to pay even the lower amount may reflect my lack of commitment to this whistleblowing venture.  Or it may measure my optimism that the blowing a whistle on this would do any good.  HomeFirst has changed its management and probably its procedures in the past three years.  Based on how it handled the $1.2 million overbilling, the OIG will probably refer my complaint to the San Francisco office, and the $300,000 to $400,000 of overbillings on the three contracts may be within the authority of the San Francisco office to forgive.

Even though I do not have all the specifics, I will file my complaint with the OIG on HomeFirst’s violations, as I did my complaint about the County.  I will point out that, combined with the earlier overbilling, HomeFirst-related violations amount to over $1.5 million.  But I don’t expect that anyone will care really.  Hope is not the issue for me.

Nor was hope an important factor for me in most of the whistleblowing I did while still employed at HomeFirst.  By the time of my first external complaint, I was pretty sure that HomeFirst would not correct itself.  I soon decided that the authorities would stand by HomeFirst, not me.  With each complaint I thought there might be a chance that a wrong would be fixed, but mostly I was fed up with the situation and with standing by idly watching it continue.

I am now years removed from my initial whistleblowing, and I was not harmed as much as others whose stories I have read.  I would like to achieve some good with my whistleblowing.  But I have always been more concerned with what will happen to me if I do not act – who I will be if I do not add my small efforts to the fight.

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[1] For example, Duska, Ronald, Brenda Shay Duska and Julia Regatz. Accounting Ethics. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011; Moberg, Daniel J. “The Organizational Context of Moral Courage: Creating Environments That Account for Dual-Processing Models of Courageous Behavior.” In Moral Courage in Organizations: Doing the Right Thing at Work. Debra R. Comer and Gina Vega (eds.) Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. 2011. 188-208

[2] For example, Moberly, Richard.  “Unfulfilled Expectations: An Empirical Analysis of Why Sarbanes-Oxley Whistleblowers Rarely Win.” 49 William & Mary law Review (2007): 65-155; Devine, Tom and Tarek F. Maassarani. The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2011; Modesitt, Nancy M.  “Why Whistleblowers Lose: An Empirical and Qualitative Analysis of State Court Cases.”  62 Kansas Law Review (2013): 165-194

Perseverance

Perseverance

When we begin our whistleblowing projects, we see the wrong and ask for correction.  We usually think the matter is pretty simple.  We learn that time works against us as management drags its feet in addressing the problem.  Then come the retaliations.  If we pursue lawsuits in response to retaliation, that process, too, can demand years of fighting that we had not anticipated.

The reports that make their way into public media often refer to the whistleblower’s fight against retaliation, but they seldom refer to the time and effort spent before the wrongdoer finally corrects the offending behavior.  For seventeen years after a former employee blew the whistle on for-profit ITT Educational Services, the company fought lawsuits before finally declaring bankruptcy.  Early Wells Fargo whistleblowers had to wait for 11 years before the public expressed outrage.  Even as it settled with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, Wells Fargo refused to admit any guilt in the matter.  The bank has reported making some internal changes, but whistleblowers may have to wait still longer before they see the hoped for changes.

Of the violations I alleged HomeFirst had committed, half were dismissed or simply ignored by the authorities charged with investigating them.  Into the Failed Complaints bucket went the site licensing and the food handler card violations when authorities were satisfied by HomeFirst’s operational adjustments that might avoid future problems.  The EHAP loan violation complaint was ignored, or misplaced, by the State of California, and I abandoned it.  The City of San Jose advance that HomeFirst misused was eventually forgiven by the City as part an effort to shore up HomeFirst’s financial position.  The payroll tax issue was ignored by the agencies to whom I complained, and I dropped it in favor of the related but more significant minimum wage issue.

Keeping my other reports from becoming Failed Complaints required persistent follow-up and inventive approaches.  When the State of California ignored my complaint that HomeFirst violated the minimum wage requirement, even after my follow-ups calls and visits and an appeal to my State Senate representative, I approached the U.S. Department of Labor.  After the DOL said it would not act, I turned to the City of San Jose with complaints to the relevant department and the City’s whistleblower hotline.  My 20 follow-up emails and requests for public documents to the City have not moved the matter to a conclusion.  But on more than one occasion, the follow-ups succeeded in prodding the responsible City manager to continue his investigation.

You can never be sure what new approach will work.  Shortly after I was fired I pitched the minimum wage issue to two class action attorneys without effect.  In the summer of 2015, I sent letters to pro bono law offices to see if they would take up the case, but they had no interest.  A year later, I tried three different offices associated with local universities, but they also were unmoved.  Without great optimism, I floated a complaint by the HUD Office of the Inspector General.  We will see what, if anything, works.

In response to HomeFirst’s contention to the City of San Jose that the clients involved did not deserve to be paid a minimum wage, I argued that the individuals were indeed HomeFirst’s employees.  I sent my rebuttal to the City Attorney’s Office, which has seemed to me more supportive of HomeFirst in the past.  Anticipating the City Attorney’s resistance to my argument, I will try again with the federal DOL, which has argued against HomeFirst’s position in past cases. 

My other still-open complaints – the HUD overbilling, the County overbilling, and the master lease violations – require the same sort of tenacity.  I’ve filed my complaints with the agencies themselves and with oversight groups; I’ve appealed to my local, State, and federal representatives.  I’ve approached news media and attorneys.  I’ve made public records requests, and I’ve sent follow-up messages to people whose email addresses I’ve snagged.  Each month I initiate a half dozen or more communications, and this has been going on for almost two and a half years.

Still, I am not sure if I will keep them all, or any of them, from being tossed into the Failed Complaints bucket.  I do know that HomeFirst did not want these complaints pursued when I worked there, that the settlement it proposed two years ago hoped to silence my complaining through non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses, and that its threatening letter last year intended to quash my communications.  All that is, of course, familiar to other whistleblowers.

Before it is an ethical battle, whistleblowing is a defense of agency, the threatened loss of which first sparked the whistleblowing act.  Courage is demanded of one who elects to stand up against a more powerful organization.  And after that flush of courage, dogged yet creative perseverance is necessary if one hopes for a chance at success.

Wells Fargo and Whistleblowing

Wells Fargo and Whistleblowing

The basics of Wells Fargo’s history of opening unauthorized customer accounts is now well reported.  Beginning in 2005 Wells Fargo employees complained internally about fraudulent account activity.  In 2009, six employees were fired after complaining about unethical practices; they sued and their cases were settled in 2011.  In 2010 two more employees were fired and sued the bank alleging retaliation for their complaints about fraudulent and illegal activities.  In 2011, a branch manager reported falsified account documents to her district manager and was fired for inappropriate conduct. 

In December 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported, based on interviews with 35 current and former bank employees in nine states, that duplicate and unauthorized customer accounts were being opened so that employees could meet their sales quotas.  In July 2014, another employee filed a complaint that she suffered retaliation because she resisted opening unauthorized accounts.  In December 2014, the SEC began questioning the bank’s cross-selling practices.  In May 2015, a class action suit against Wells Fargo by a bank customer claimed that bank employees across the country had for years opened multiple accounts without customer authorization in order to meet sales goals.

In September 2016, Wells Fargo CEO Stumpf testified before Congress that about 1.5 million bank accounts – 2% of the accounts reviewed– and 565,000 credit card accounts may have been illegitimately opened.  About 115,000 of those accounts generated $2.6 million in fees for the bank.  He claimed that 5,300 bank employees – about 2% of the total – had been fired for “improper sales tactics” during the preceding five years.

That same month, the bank was fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).  In addition, the bank paid $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and $50 million to the City and County of Los Angeles.  The bank’s Board took back $41 million in unvested stock options previously given to Stumpf and stopped his salary while they conducted an investigation.  Then, a month after selling $41 million of bank stock, Stumpf resigned as CEO, removing the sting from his sacrifice of stock options and salary.  The bank’s stock price dropped 18% from its May 2015 level, cutting its market capitalization by $50 billion.

In Senate testimony, Stumpf averred that the bank never directed its employees to open unauthorized accounts.  It did, however, emphasize the importance of encouraging customers to have, on average, eight accounts with the bank – memorialized in the bank’s slogan “Eight Is Great.”  Accounts would include checking, savings, CDs, funds, credit cards, lines of credit, mortgages, and online banking services, in individual or joint names.  Wells Fargo’s high-pressure sales culture was designed to convert that slogan into action and revenue.  But most people, especially those with limited funds, do not need eight accounts.  Personal bankers employed creativity and techniques learned from their peers to create job-saving accounts, leaving Stumpf and senior management to bask in plausible deniability.

Whistleblower lawsuits, such as those by Shankar, Tishkoff, Guitron, and Bado, describe individuals who resisted pressures to meet aggressive sales goals and were fired, not for objecting to illegal directives, but for unsatisfactory job performance.  Converting a whistleblower’s objection to wrongdoing into the basis for a termination for cause is commonly employed by companies in dealing with their whistleblowers.  And it was used by HomeFirst against me.

Dozens of the bank’s personal bankers and related managers became small-time whistleblowers who contributed to uproar, news articles, investigations, and lawsuits over the bank’s practices.  Still, thousands more have remained silent.  The bank’s employees had reasons not to blow the whistle that were similar to those that discourage other whistleblowers.  First, intent to commit wrong is difficult to prove in white-collar crimes like Wells Fargo’s.  When Stumpf proclaimed that “Eight Is Great,” he did not plan for his employees to violate customer expectations even if, under circumstances that he determined, that was the likely consequence.  Setting aggressive goals is arguably important to success, and Wells Fargo had been successful, even if it had to cut corners at times.

The primary intent of most organizational wrongdoers is not to break laws.  Not just rationalizing action after the fact, wrongdoers probably really do hope to benefit the company, they think their acts are actually quite innocent, or they believe they are (just barely) on the right side of the law.  The violations I alleged at HomeFirst all benefited the company, and the CEO’s reluctance to investigate them was based on a desire to help the company survive difficult times.  When I described to the HomeFirst Board how those violations were intentional, I could only rely on implication.  The Board members were not convinced and fired me a month and a half later.

Those reported problems to Wells Fargo’s HR department or via the bank’s ethics hotline often found themselves suffering retaliation shortly afterward.  Their complaints were seen as the frivolous claims of disgruntled employees who lacked the work ethic or skills needed in the bank.  Even federal agencies dismissed their complaints.

Then, Wells Fargo had special leverage over complainers: the form U5, a searchable database of reports on employees in banking where a “failure to perform duties” evaluation – a common company complaint about whistleblowers – can effectively kill other job prospects in the industry. 

Finally, there was little reason to expect the bank to change its practices in response to complaints.  CFO Sloan, who would become president in November 2015, told the LA Times in December 2013 that he was unaware of a problematic sales culture.  In its 2016 settlement with the CFPB, the bank avoided admitting any stated facts and accepting any legal guilt.  Through it all the bank voiced its commitment to accountability and customer service.

We whistleblowers are reluctant to call out our colleagues who most directly violate laws and contracts.  We go instead after managers who create the circumstances that drive employees to break the law.  But going after management may not solve anything: Stumpf resigned as Wells Fargo CEO, but he was replaced by Sloane who was even more directly responsible for policies that led to the offensive actions.

We also hesitate to take the most obvious step to address our personal situations: quit working for the wrongdoer.  It is pretty clear that Wells Fargo’s personal bankers were crazy to work there, whether or not they decided to become whistleblowers. 

For my part, I should have gathered evidence on what I thought were HomeFirst’s wrongdoings, blown the various whistles, and quit.  I had good reason to expect that HomeFirst would not change and it would eventually retaliate.  But I stayed, as did many of Wells Fargo’s personal bankers, hoping that I could squeeze a few more months or years from the job.  With or without justification, we fear that we cannot live as well as we’d like without our jobs.  If our employers are unethical, we think that we can benefit from that lack of scruples without being harmed ourselves.

Anger and Whistleblowing

Anger and Whistleblowing

Some researchers[1] have concluded that anger is a useful, and in some cases necessary, impetus to whistleblowing.  Others have pointed to the dangers and destructive consequences of anger in the workplace[2].  I suggest that anger is not a significant factor in the decision process of most whistleblowers.

Martha Nussbaum[3] refers to Aristotle in identifying several elements involved in anger:

1.       Slighting or down-ranking

2.       Of the self or people close to the self

3.       Wrongfully or inappropriately done

4.       Accompanied by pain and

5.       Involving a desire for retribution

Nussbaum provides the example of a woman whose friend is raped.  The woman’s anger, Nussbaum contends, can follow the road of status, viewing the rape victim as humiliated and then calling for the humiliation of the perpetrator, perhaps by ostracizing him and requiring him to register as a sexual offender.  Alternatively, the woman may take the road of payback, demanding retribution via prison and fines for the perpetrator.  Finally, the woman may experience what Nussbaum calls Transition-Anger, which looks for steps that might diminish or prevent similar acts in the future.

It is easy to see how retaliation against the whistleblower can generate anger, but how the act on which the whistle is blown might generate anger in Nussbaum’s terms is less clear.  The cases of Sandra Black and Anthony Tenny, for example, involved workplaces that endangered the eventual whistleblowers and their colleagues.  Black and Tenny might understandably have been angered when management did not remove the dangerous conditions.  But the majority of whistleblower cases that find their way into public knowledge – and certainly the incidents that I disclosed at HomeFirst – are not of that sort.  Most whistleblower complaints relate to white-collar crimes; even those that involve public safety seldom relate specifically to “people close to the self.”

My journal entries during my whistleblowing days at HomeFirst do not indicate a lot of anger or desire for retribution in response to the wrongs that I alleged were done.  They expressed frustration at being ineffective in changing some company decisions, amazement that the CEO remained in control given the company’s poor performance, and trepidation about retaliation as I prepared to make my disclosures.  But not anger exactly.

My newest whistleblowing project about the violation of master lease requirements on three contracts has little to do with anger as far as I can tell.  My decision to gather documentation in preparation for a complaint had more to do with completing what I had begun two years earlier.  It was excitement, not anger, that I felt when I reviewed the County of Santa Clara documents I obtained: they showed that the County had obtained reimbursement from HUD for $263,162 of “leasing” expenditures that were really “rental assistance” payments, which were ineligible for reimbursement, despite being warned of their ineligibility by HomeFirst’s CEO.  At work I always enjoyed financial analysis that came together in a tidy package, and now here was another.

While some whistleblower stories involve teams that investigate the wrongdoing[4], most tell of individuals who work alone, just doing their jobs.  Nearly all who blow the whistle on organizational wrongdoing first discuss the issue internally with supervisors or through other reporting systems[5].  Most whistleblowers expect something to be done to correct the wrong, and they report matters externally only when internal powers resist action.

What motivates whistleblowers, I suggest, is less high-blown ethics, although ethical justifications can certainly be found, than simply being fed up with organizational resistance or inaction.  They answer the organization with what Nussman describes as Transition-Anger – a demand that things simply must change.  The whistleblower reacts, primarily, to the practical problem of fixing something that is not right and of dealing effectively with an economic power that would rather protect its position than correct what is, in most cases, illegal or violation of contract.

Because whistleblowing is a practical response to organizational dysfunction, those who argue for moral constraints on whistleblowing activity – normally based on loyalty or the need to protect confidentiality – play into the hands of organizational wrongdoers.  Whistleblowers should concern themselves instead with the practical constraints on their actions – likely acts of retaliation by the wrongdoers, their own compliance with laws, and what is necessary to obtain legal protection for their actions.

While public admiration for the moral heroism of the whistleblower is appealing, social energies would be better spent in reducing the practical impediments to whistleblowing.  For example, the protections of confidentiality should be reconsidered, legal requirements that individuals must be correct in their allegations or they must report problems internally first in order to obtain protection should be eliminated, and adequate resources should be provided to investigate whistleblower complaints.

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[1] For example, Edwards, Marissa S., Neal M. Ashkanasy and John Gardner. “Deciding to Speak Up or to Remain Silent Following Observed Wrongdoing: The Role of Discrete Emotions and Climate of Silence.” In Voice and Silence in Organizations. Greenberg, J. and Edwards, M. (eds.).  Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing  2009: 83-109:  Gundlach, Michael J., Mark J. Martinko, Scott C. Douglas. “A new approach to examining whistle-blowing: the influence of cognitions and anger.” SAM Advanced Management Journal.  73.477 (Autumn, 2008): 40-50; Henik, Erika Gail. “Mad as Hell or Scared Stiff? The Effects of Value Conflict and Emotions on Potential Whistle-Blowers.” Journal of Business Ethics.  80 (2008): 111-119; Hollings, James. “Let the Story Go:  The Role of Emotion in the Decision-Making Process of the Reluctant, Vulnerable Witness or Whistleblower.”  Journal of Business Ethics. 114 (2013): 501-512; and Lindebaum, Dirk, and Deanna Geddes.  “The Place and Role of (Moral) Anger in Organizational Behavior Studies.”  Journal of Organizational Behavior 37 (2016): 738-757

[2] Lindebaum & Geddes.

[3] Nussbaum, Martha C.  Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice.  New York: Oxford University Press.  2016.

[4] For example, Cooper, Cynthia. Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons. 2008; Joy, Amy Block.  Whistleblower.  Point Richmond, California: Bay Tree Publishing, LLC.  2010; Ellsberg, Daniel.  Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.  New York: Viking.  2002; and Schwartz, Mimi with Sherron Watkins. Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.  New York: Doubleday.  2003.

[5] Ethics Resource Center. National Business Ethics Survey of the U.S. Workforce. (2014)

Congressional Report on the Snowden Disclosures

Congressional Report on the Snowden Disclosures

On September 15, 2016, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released its summary report on the disclosures of Edward Snowden.  The report attempts to discredit Snowden in several ways that are familiar to many whistleblowers, by saying:

-          He was not a real whistleblower because he did not present his complaints using the official procedures available to him. 

-          He had no reason to fear retribution for making the proper disclosures because laws were available to protect him. 

-          He used illegitimate means to gather much of the evidence he disclosed.

-          He began mass downloads of classified documents in response to being reprimanded for his workplace behavior, not due to high ethical or legal concerns.

-          He is a serial exaggerator and fabricator, whose official employment records revealed intentional lying.

Although not a whistleblower of Snowden’s stature, I found that many of my complaints were lost or claimed not to have been filed properly.  Many whistleblowers, particularly those in the government intelligence business, soon discover that protections are far less effective than promised.  Many recent whistleblowers have been accused of getting their proof of wrongdoing through unfair means, and my attorney advised not introducing evidence, which he thought was acquired illegitimately, because it might make an “unclean hands” defense available to HomeFirst.  Most companies, including HomeFirst, claim that their whistleblowers were impolite, insubordinate, incompetent, or otherwise unsuited for their position.  In summary, Snowden was no whistleblowing angel, but, as he tweeted, Congress took two years to come up with a pretty paltry list of criticisms. 

Whether the whistleblower or the organization is the better truth-teller is key to deciding how to address the whistleblower’s complaints.  The Committee report contends that Snowden’s disclosures damaged U.S. national security and that most of his disclosures related to critical international military and intelligence programs, not domestic individual privacy interests.  Snowden contends that the positive value of his disclosures far outweighs any possible negative security consequences.  As in any whistleblower-organization conflict, including my own with HomeFirst, it is difficult for an outsider to know who is telling the truth.

It seems plausible that some of the 1.5 million Snowden documents were not pertinent to the law-breaking that he aimed to expose.  Based on my experience on having relatively miniscule secret computer access at HomeFirst, I can imagine the temptation to gather more and more surprising, titillating, and embarrassing documents once one has begun to look around. 

Chelsea Manning’s disclosures, for example, included Ellsberg-like revelations that addressed the conduct of the U.S. war in Iraq to which he objected, but they also included cables that did little more than reveal the embarrassing opinions of some U.S. diplomats.  It is sometimes difficult even for the whistleblower to know when her case is made and data collection should stop.

It is probably safe to say, given their scope and the public response, that many of Snowden’s disclosures had legitimate public value even though some in power would still object.  His revelations of those matters provided a public service, as many, including Eric Holder, now admit.  They were illegal, but their public benefit may reasonably merit Snowden a presidential pardon.

At the same time, it is likely that some of Snowden’s disclosures were not so legitimate.  In those cases, his critics may be correct in saying that he damaged our national security.  It is even possible that his motives were, at least in part, dishonorable because they sought – intentionally or not – to embarrass or otherwise harm U.S. or international intelligence agencies.  Unless mitigated by the rewards for his public service, these disclosures may justify his punishment or make pardon impossible.

Almost every whistleblower’s situation involves ambiguities similar to those in Snowden’s case, albeit on a smaller scale.  Most of us say and do things that merit criticism although we find justifications.  Most of us plan our collection of evidence and the way we will disclose the wrongdoing, although few to the degree that Snowden did, using secure communications with selected journalists and concocting plans to escape to foreign countries.

Like Snowden, each of us chooses our course for good or faulty reasons.  Many suffer as a result of those choices.  Some probably could have reduced our suffering by approaching our projects differently.  Snowden reduced his pain by leaving the country before making his disclosures.  I suffered relatively little: I experienced some emotional stress and lost some income, but my prior years’ earnings and my wife’s support mean that I am comfortable enough.  No one promised me great wealth.

I know almost nothing of Snowden’s living conditions in Russia, but he seems to have his following (at least 2.4 million on Twitter) and supporters.  He may be stuck in Russia for a long time, but many others are too.  Life goes on.

What matters, it seems to me, is not the whistleblower – whether she is exceptional, moral, courageous, correct in all her allegations, or properly valued and rewarded in the end.  Our peers are for the most part no more exceptional than we are; we all fail often in our morality, our courage, and our wisdom; and life promised none of us an easy time.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, our task is always to investigate, understand, and try to improve the world in whatever ways we can.  And to be persistent.  Luck, inherent capabilities, personality, and experience threw Snowden into a highly unusual situation, and he performed well although the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was not pleased.