Billionaire Whistleblower

Billionaire Whistleblower

Whistleblowers are generally underdogs, not top dogs.  They speak truth to power.  They don’t usually have power.  With the democratization of whistleblowing, though, standards have shifted.  The richest man in the world is now a whistleblower.

This month, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and owner of The Washington Post, went public in a blog post.  The National Enquirer had revealed Bezos sent intimate texts to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.  Bezos didn’t like having his privacy violated and began investigating who leaked the material.  This apparently upset the paper’s publisher, David Pecker. 

Officials from AMI, which owns the Enquirer, got involved.  They told Bezos that more photos would be published if he didn’t stop his investigation.  They also wanted him to say there was nothing political in the Enquirer’s reporting.  Pecker, you see, has close connections with Trump, and Trump has attacked Amazon and The Post, which has published reports critical of the President.

Bezos responded as a whistleblower might:  If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?  As happened in the #MeToo movement on a much larger scale, others also stepped forward talking about AMI’s threats to them.  Ronan Farrow was one, and Huffington Post named others.

Now federal investigators are reported to be looking into AMI’s and the Enquirer’s possible extortion.  The stakes for Pecker and AMI are high.   Acts of extortion could violate the company’s immunity agreement over hush money paid to AMI by Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen.

Like other whistleblowers, Bezos is principled.  He defends his privacy, and he stands up to scumbags.  Unlike the rest of us, he has a lot of money to devote to his project.  He asked three attorneys to review his blog post.  He engaged bodyguard-to-the-stars Gavin de Becker to help him.  Also unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t have a big piece of his wealth at stake in the fight.

It’s puzzling why anyone blows the whistle on what we think is wrongdoing.  Especially a guy who has $112 billion to play with.

Maybe something like an existential crisis is in play.  Challenges to the essential roles we play set us off.  You can see hints of that in my case.  At HomeFirst Services, I was increasingly critical of its CEO Jenny Niklaus’s leadership.  The company was on a downward financial slide, and as CFO I was responsible.  You might read it in stories of other whistleblowers.  Environmental scientist Joel Clement couldn’t work for the Trump administration after it called climate change a hoax.  It was impossible for elementary school principal Sarah Lynch to do her job when district spending provided inadequate safety staffing for her school. 

In these cases, the company, government, or school district want to go their ways and not the ones we propose.  Rather than simply yield, we resist.

In Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground[1], the narrator describes an officer who regularly strides down Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg.  Imperious, he expects others to move from his path.  Having always to back down angered our narrator.  What rule says this officer must always get to humiliate the others, he asked.  Why must I always be the martyr?  The officer never even notices me as I step aside.

Our hero made plans.  He took an advance on his salary to buy fancy new clothes.  He will be impressive.  Walking along Nevsky, he will be powerful.  This time he will not step aside.  The officer approaches.  Our hero stands his ground.  But the officer knocks him away like a ball and continues down the avenue.

But Bezos is no sniveling runt.  He is an officer used to having his way.  He is used to receiving breaks, not giving them.

In this light, the National Enquirer is the whistleblower.  The Enquirer is the one who disclosed wrongdoing – the extramarital kind.  Like whistleblowers everywhere, it exercised its right of free speech.  Standing up to Bezos’ screed, it fervently defended its lawful disclosure of the texts.

Still. raising a sleazy, supermarket tabloid to whistleblower status seems wrong, too.  The Enquirer is no Washington Post.  Unless you buy that free speech means more to it than business craft.

Likewise, Bezos’ defense of privacy rights could be just a maneuver.  Whatever the game, he expects to have his way no less than Dostoyevsky’s officer.

Our claim to being whistleblowers is always contested.  Despite my many complaints, HomeFirst denied I was one and the State agreed.  Even we can find our ventures hard to justify after the sacrifices we make.  While I'm sure the organizations that treat us roughly are scumbags, I admit the underground narrator is a little crazy.

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[1] See also Very Bad Wizards

Whistleblowing and the Justifications

Whistleblowing and the Justifications

One of the awkward truths of whistleblowing is that both sides think they are doing the right thing.  We whistleblowers believe that we are disclosing a misdeed by our employer.  Our employers are jerks that think they did nothing wrong and firing us was a great idea.

In “Ruthlessness in Public Life” Thomas Nagel observes that the great modern crimes are committed by officials in political, military, and business organizations[1].  As group members, they can do far greater harm than as private individuals.  They can oppress, murder, and steal far more than imaginable by most individuals.

Nagel wrote not long after the U.S. arguably committed war crimes in southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of more than one million people.  And not long after fraud by Enron executives destroyed $11 billion in shareholder value.  Most of us small time whistleblowers are not involved in such grand misdoings, although stakes can still get pretty big.

A couple of whistleblowers found problems at venerable Walgreens.  S. Christopher Schulte, a Walgreens pharmacist, and Adam Rahimi, a pharmacist formerly employed by Walgreens, brought a false claims lawsuit against the company.  They charged Walgreens intentionally overfilled prescriptions for insulin injection pens.  If a customer required 7 pens, Walgreens would dispense 2 boxes of 5 and then remind the customer to refill the prescription after 7 were used.  The result was that Medicare was overbilled millions of dollars.  Walgreens admitted its misbehavior and agreed to pay $209 million to settle the claims.

Recently Walgreens settled a false claims suit brought by Marc Baker.  Baker saw Walgreens encourage its Medicare customers to sign-up for its Prescriptions Savings Club so they’d renew prescriptions at its pharmacies.  But instead of charging Medicare discounted prices, it used its regular list prices.  Walgreens again admitted its wrongdoing and agreed to pay a settlement, this time $60 million.

Even a man as prominent as Stefano Pessina, Walgreens’ CEO, might have trouble stealing $269 million from taxpayers on his own.  But with the help of the world’s largest pharmacy company, the task was easier.

On a much smaller scale, Jenny Niklaus, CEO of HomeFirst Services during part of my time there, could not have stolen large sums as an individual.  As CEO, though, she employed HomeFirst to grab $130,000 from Santa Clara County and $138,000 from the City of San Jose.  Unlike Walgreens, though, HomeFirst never returned the money or admitted guilt.

For Nagel, these seemingly frequent bursts of immoral action derive not just from the capacity of officials to do more wrong than private citizens.  It comes as a by-product of their duties.

The actions of an official or an organization can appear brutal but still be proper, Nagel says.  Take taxation, for example.  It can be seen as little different from highway robbery: the theft of wages or wealth.  But the morality of the taxing agency – judged by the equity of its actions and its use of money for the common good – can justify the taxation.  When those principles are violated – if taxes are unfairly drawn or the money is wasted – then the ruthlessness can lose its right.

An organizational leader – in the U.S. military, Walgreens, or even HomeFirst – must submit to constraints on her behavior.  She should put the organization’s interests above outsiders’.  She must not use her position to enrich herself unduly.  She is bound to treat members of the organization equitably. 

Nagel writes that an official can sometimes forget the limits on her actions.  She might decide that all those restrictions on her behavior give her the moral cushion to commit unethical acts.  She might decide that she has no obligation to consider anything other than the interest of her group.  Or she might be confronted by such a complex array of interests and responsibilities that she fails to weigh the consequences of her actions appropriately,

Nagel’s list of ethical lapses seems plausible.  Niklaus objected to my concern about HomeFirst’s possible violation of licensing regulations.  She argued that the good done in the company’s homeless shelter should not be lost to petty rules.  She and HomeFirst’s Board discussed how to deal with me for telling authorities about possible legal violations.  Their attorney advised firing me right away because of damage I might do with my complaints.  Niklaus saw the danger but chose to defer action just a little.  She recommended to the Board that HomeFirst should not be constrained by laws protecting whistleblowers.

Nagel’s list has been confirmed and expanded by psychologists, including Dan Ariely, Max Bazerman, Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, and Ann Tenbrunsel.  But outside of research studies, it can be difficult to get into the minds of organizational leaders.  Although I thought I had proof of HomeFirst’s illegal intent, the Department of Justice and the State of California were not interested.

Unlike Walgreens, most companies and officials deny wrongdoing even after they are caught.  Sunoco recently agreed to pay $5 million to settle a lawsuit over 5,000 barrels of crude oil that spilled from its pipelines and to spend money to avoid future spills.  Still, it refused to admit having done anything wrong.  Paying the $5 million was just expedient.

Officials regularly come up with justifications that fit into Nagel’s list of moral failures.  In 1995 José Arias was hired by Angelo Dairy in Acampo, California.  A couple of years later he told Luis Angelo he was leaving for a job at another farm.  Angelo got upset and threatened to tell immigration the dairy hired undocumented workers if he left.  So Arias stayed on. 

In 2006 Arias sued Angelo Dairy for failing to provide overtime pay and rest and meal breaks.  Just before the trial in 2011, the company’s lawyer Anthony Raimondo alerted ICE that Arias might not be properly documented.  Spooked, Arias settled.  Then he filed a new suit charging retaliation by Raimondo.  That case dragged on for 6 more years until a federal appeals court ruled in his favor and he settled for $1 million.

Raimondo, though, denies any wrongdoing.  He claims he took the same approach for many of his clients and it was legal until 2013.  He said, “All I ever did was tell the truth to law enforcement.  Is that illegal?”  With this, Raimondo sounds like a whistleblower.  He wanted to make sure taxpayer money wasn’t used improperly defending illegals.  He’s a moralist.  He’s the only one in the case who didn’t break the law, he claims.

There are at least two sides to every whistleblowing case.  Each takes the high moral ground.  One may eventually be declared victor.  But that is a matter of convenience, not probity.  The judgment will not settle the matter in the minds of all parties.  Indeed, there may be no entirely convincing way to determine which is right, or even more right than the other.  In the end, the competing players may remain standing angry at the edges of the field[2].

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[1] Also listen to Very Bad Wizards on the topic.

[2] Cf. Tessman, Lisa.  Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  2015.  Especially her discussion of Bernard Williams’ “moral remainder.”

Whistleblower Complaints and the Brautigan Library

Whistleblower Complaints and the Brautigan Library

Richard Brautigan’s novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 features a special library near the Presidio in San Francisco.  This library holds books donated by their authors.  The books are not published, nor are they available for check out from the library.  They are books for having been written, not for reading.  When the library becomes too crowded with donations, some are moved to a hermetically sealed cave elsewhere in northern California.  Sometimes whistleblower complaints feel like books in the Brautigan library, completed by their authors but unappreciated by anyone else.

We don’t always learn why the donors wrote their books.  An elderly woman spent five years writing hers and said the experience was wonderful.  She donated the book soon after she finished it.  One man brought in a book he had written thirty years earlier.  It had been rejected 459 times by publishers.  He felt old, he said.  Another spent 20 years writing his book in barely legible longhand.  He staggered out, possibly under the influence of alcohol, after dropping off his book.

We don’t really know what sends whistleblowers into action, either.  Our apologists refer to prosocial impulses.  Whistleblowing is a moral act.  We claim we could not have lived with ourselves if we had stayed silent – which J. Fred Alford calls moral narcissism.  We were just doing our jobs.  But our adversaries routinely win when they insist we were disgruntled employees and we made our disclosures in bad faith.

Some of the authors wanted to sum up their wisdom.  One wrote about chickens.  Another about winning the war in Vietnam.  A man compiled seven volumes on the state of Nebraska, which he had never visited.

When we begin our whistleblowing, we, too, believe we have some special knowledge.  We know what the organization did, and we know the relevant law.  We want to put it to good use.  But maybe we get things wrong.  Brautigan suggested the woman who wrote On Kissing had never been kissed.  If so, her view might be skewed. 

Or maybe what we have just isn’t that important.  A girl in a red dress brought a book about a pancake.  But she was only seven years old.  More is expected of whistleblowers.

When one begins a project – a book or whistleblowing, say – it is with hope.  Whistleblowers hope justice will be done, we will get even with someone, we will get back what we deserve, or we will win some reward.  We pray someone will pay real attention to our efforts.  Like the guy with the record-breaking number of rejection notices, often we don’t get what we want.

A difference between us and Brautigan’s authors is the end point.  Taking a book to the Presidio library marks an end to the enterprise.  The writer may slip it shyly onto the counter or slam it down.  Either way, it is done.  But whistleblowing leaks through to the rest of our lives.

For some, the experience can extend indefinitely.  Almost 50 years after Daniel Ellsberg rose to fame he still wins awards for his courage.  Edward Snowden’s life was forever changed by his decision to reveal what offended him.  Jim Holzrichter lost his audit career as a result of Northrup although he picked up a new calling as a consultant on whistleblower cases.  Robert Purcell kept his case going for 18 years until the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal.

Even after our project has ended – after we’ve run out of money or energy to keep it going – like a bad divorce it continues to affect the way we see the world.  That’s why settlement agreements usually require the whistleblower never to seek employment with the organization again[1].  Otherwise, if we return we’ll just make more trouble – as the TSA found after it had to take Robert MacLean back.

My whistleblowing experience has stained the way I view charities.  Four plus years after I was fired, I still look for signs HomeFirst will go out of business.  That it lacks the cash to repay its short-term credit line gives me a sordid thrill.  I am convinced other groups are corrupt in their own ways.  Even organizations I have given money and time to in the past and may still do today, they probably fail ethically as much as HomeFirst.

My past whistleblowing opened a distance between me and the world that didn’t exist in the same way before.  A lack of trust is what I have.  Or perhaps I am just getting old, and I respond to having been rejected more than I like.

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[1] For example, Jeanette Dawson, Carol Slavish, and Michelle Holmes.  The settlement agreement HomeFirst Services proposed to me contained similar language.

Whistleblowing and Social Control

Whistleblowing and Social Control

Whistleblowing is an act of defiance that triggers social controls.  It expresses a grievance against an organization, and it provokes the organization’s outrage against the individual.  The exchange plays out according to the usual rules and has no need for talk of morality, according to Donald Black.

For Black in The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, social control includes any process people use to define and respond to conflict.  That includes criticism, gossip, litigation, punishment, compensation, avoidance, psychotherapy, witch-hunting, feuding and warfare.

Social control varies in style.  Different language and logic can apply.  Criminal law may be invoked or tort law.  The objective may be therapeutic for juveniles or the mentally ill.  A conciliatory approach may be taken in marital, labor, and international disputes. 

Black describes a variety of general responses to social conflict.  It can be tolerated.  The offender can be avoided.  The offended can take unilateral action (“self-help”) against the offender, possibly leading to reciprocal action that mounts to blood feud.  The two sides can negotiate an agreement with or without the help of a third party.  Sometimes the offender applies self-control by giving up or even committing suicide. 

Societies resolve their conflicts in different ways depending on their size, diversity, and legal sophistication. 

But across all the conflicts that result from deviant behavior, the high status party tends to win, Black writes.  The high status offender is less likely to be punished, and the low status, more.  The opinion of the high status person is more likely to be recognized as interesting or important.  Objective analysis doesn’t come into play except by accident.  Ethical evaluation is bent by status.

Into this setup walks the whistleblower.  He is most likely to lose although the magnitude of his loss is uncertain at first.  Many lose their jobs.  Some are blackballed and kept from finding new jobs – like Jessie Guitron, James Holtzrichter, and Grant Timmons.  

Black assures us in the crystalline terms of academia that our outcome was in the cards we were dwelt.  My project with HomeFirst Services was doomed to fail from the beginning.  I was the lesser power at the table, and the minor wrongs that I alleged gave me no more influence.  The governmental third parties were more closely aligned with HomeFirst which receives 8o% of its revenue directly or indirectly from the government.  So they favored HomeFirst.  That’s what I think.

In any case, HomeFirst unleashed the retaliations that others in my position have experienced and that Black describes as normal.  I was fired and lost my whistleblower retaliation case.

If I knew I would lose, what then?  Not just that I might lose or would probably lose, but if I knew for sure that I would fail, HomeFirst would be unaffected, and I would lose my job and some money besides, what then?  What if I also admitted that my motives were not entirely pure, just like HomeFirst and the State of California would point out.  What then?

Maybe I’d be brave and do it all anyway.  For the moral reasons I’d salvage from my mixed motives.  I’d find philosophical reasons to act like Camus’ Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill despite the certainty it would roll back.  Simple emotions would drive me: the way they pissed me off before I blew the whistle and after.

For some, the loss is neither academic nor fanciful.  Whistleblower Karen Silkwood famously died when Kerr-McGee applied self-help to shut her down.  In obscurity, Eliud Montoya’s loss was likewise tragic. 

Montoya worked on trimming crews at Wolf Tree for about 10 years.  In 2017 he began collecting information from the undocumented men who made up most of Wolf Tree’s workforce.  After his boss Pablo Rangel-Rubio recruited them to work at the company, he cashed their paychecks and kept a cut of the money.  The scheme generated $3.5 million for Rangel-Rubio and his brother.  In April Montoya complained to the company but wasn’t well received.  In August 2017 he filed a complaint with the EEOC.  The next day, two guys hired by Rangel-Rubio murdered Montoya.

When we embark on our whistleblowing projects we think we are unique.  We alone are standing up to power.  We alone are moral actors.  Although academics and support groups have described the bad things that happen to whistleblowers, we think our situation is one of a kind.  But Black assures us the problems we face and our lack of success are entirely natural.  That’s the way it’s been for decades – even millennia – and in all cultures.

The Whistleblower Identity

The Whistleblower Identity

I think this is the way it worked with me:  I found a problem while doing my job, and my boss got upset.  That irked me.  Then I raised another issue which had been around for a while and I knew would set her off.  I took a moral stance and got blown back.  I decided I was, and had to be, a whistleblower.  It ended badly for me.

For a long time after I made my first disclosure about HomeFirst Services at the end of 2013, I thought of myself as a whistleblower.  It was part of my identity.  It explained why I had been fired.

Erik Erikson introduced the concept of identity in 1950, and public interest grew quickly.  Erikson, who trained under Anna Freud, applied it to a stage of youthful psychological development.  He described a process of integrating roles and skills with an eye toward how one will perceived as an adult – its social dimension.  Identity, he wrote, provides a sense of continuity and sameness – its internal dimension. 

The concept evolved.  Recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah offered a new formulation.  Identity comes with labels, he writes, and ideas about why and to whom they should apply.  It shapes our thoughts about how we should behave and how others should treat us.  Whether we have a right to claim an identity and to receive particular treatment may be contested by others. 

The whistleblower identity is attractive to some.  It helps justify our actions after we defy expectations of our employee identity.  It seems to promise protection, even if the promise is eventually broken.  But its contestable nature is key to the organization’s defense after it retaliates against us[1].  Despite my eight allegations of HomeFirst violations, my retaliation complaint, and my 150+ page rebuttal to HomeFirst’s defense, the State of California still determined I was no whistleblower.  We had different understandings.

Some balk at the idea of being a whistleblower.  They say they were just doing their jobs.  That was Adam Wapniak, an audit officer in New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, when he called out poor payment practices and other problems.   That was Cynthia Cooper before she leveraged her WorldCom whistleblowing into a speaking career. 

Sometimes the identity is assigned for the simplest things.  Terry Chapman and Guillermo Toledo, who worked with the Kern (CA) High School District PE program, spoke up at a Board meeting.  They were promptly labelled whistleblowers by a local news station.

Multiple identities can coexist in a single individual.  They do in Appiah who can be read as Ghanaian, British, or American.  They can intersect: a black man’s expectations differ from those of a Christian-black-trans, for example.  Because of this fluidity, democratic societies have fractured into ever narrower identities, according to Francis Fukuyama.    Each identity demands recognition and a proper measure of respect, he says.

Terry Albury’s double identity as an FBI agent with Ethiopian origins created a problem when his office started going after Somalis.  He added whistleblower to his identities and was canned.  Jennifer Denk was an employee of PharMerica, but the oath she swore when she graduated from pharmacy school led her to file an FCA suit against her employer.  The suit succeeded although PharMerica denied doing anything wrong.  Siobhan O’Connor was also torn: she cares for her boss Bishop Malone, who allowed sexual abusive priests to stay in ministry, but she is a faithful Catholic who felt God called her to leak documents about Malone. 

Identities can emerge or recede over time.  I did not always see myself as a whistleblower.  I didn’t in 1992 at MAI Systems or at Catholic Charities in 2005 when I witnessed violations but stayed silent.  I became one only in 2013. 

I came to see myself as a “whistleblower” at HomeFirst, but before that I was a “highly valued member of the team.”  I doubted, though, how well I was valued.  Some of my professional opinions didn’t seem respected at all. I didn’t like the way I was treated.  That valued employee identity wasn’t working for me.

Groups often don’t get the recognition they want.  Then they organize; they take action.  One result, Amy Chau writes, has been identity politics, which became a hot topic in the context of Donald Trump’s election.  In the lead up to 2016, identity politics was a problem the Democratic Party would have to overcome or recover from.  It’s safe to say that whether Democrats focus on it or not, identity politics will be vexing for years.

Whistleblowers, though, don’t organize and are weaker as a result.  The National Whistleblower Center aims to help whistleblowers, but, resources being limited, it helps only bigger-time guys than me.  Same thing for Government Accountability Project.  But combining our efforts as whistleblowers – or even consoling each other – is difficult because we are constrained by confidentiality requirements and the threat of lawsuits from our (former) employers.

The whistleblower identity can be dysfunctional.  It can get us into trouble without solving anything.  Still we do it.

In Dangerous Minds Ronald Beiner describes the threat that ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger pose to liberal society.  They helped fuel fascism on the right and left, white supremacists, and other poisons.  Nietzsche’s übermench and those privileged with access to Heidegger’s ineffable Being may face struggle, danger and death, but that’s the source of their emotional appeal, Beiner (citing George Orwell) says.

We are challenged to be sure that our confidence in our special causes is not another dangerous idea.  It would be nice to know that we really are attracted to do good rather than engage in struggle, danger, and the risk of (career) death. 

At the end of our project, when we view it all from a distance, our efforts can appear foolish.  The idea that we have a moral obligation to blow the whistle can seem silly.  Maybe it’s better for us, our families, and society if we just walk away from the jerks.  That sounds a little like Howard Roark, but maybe.

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[1] For example: Terry Albury, Eric Borcik, Martin Desmond, James Friedlander, Paul Somers, and Reality Winner.  And famously Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.  The State of California determined that I, too, was not a whistleblower in good faith.

Whistleblowers and Victims

Whistleblowers and Victims

Whistleblowers occupy a curious area of the moral landscape.  They are renegades who cooperate with authorities.  They are ethical purists who betray their loyalties to employer and co-workers.  They are heroes (villains to some) and, usually, victims.  They are Davids who are smacked down by Goliaths.

In The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, moral culture is defined by the grievances we have, the ways we handle them, and the languages and practices that go along with all that.  In an honor culture, they write, reputation counts a lot.  We act quickly, and physically if necessary, if our honor is insulted.  Legal authority, if it exists, is not trusted or relevant.  Think of the Hamilton-Burr duel: Burr felt insulted, and Hamilton felt forced to accept Burr’s challenge.  Then Vice President Burr shot and killed the former Secretary of the Treasury.

As societies develop legal systems, dignity culture emerges.  There, our virtue is internal and beyond real injury.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.  People admire our ability to shrug off insults.  If a matter is truly serious, we take it to a third party.  American society in 1804 was in transition to a dignity culture, and Aaron Burr was called a murderer.

In the 1970s – around the time whistleblowing began – a new phenomenon surfaced.  Microaggressions were minor insults that the dignity culture would ignore.  But for those in what Campbell and Manning call the victimhood culture, if they recur often, they add up to a serious injury.  The authors offer the example of clutching one’s purse when an African-American walks into an elevator.  These insults can affect people at all levels of society.  President Obama, addressing the death of Trayvon Martin, spoke of the sting he and other blacks know in such situations.

In this environment, even words can hurt.  Like the tone deaf “All lives matter.”  Victimhood culture combines the rash sensitivity to insult of honor culture with an extravagant reliance on dignity culture’s use of third parties to resolve differences.  Negotiation is impossible.

The status of victims of offense – say, racial or ethnic minorities, women or LGBT individuals, the differently abled, or the poor – is raised on the way to punishing offenders.  Privilege is deplored.  Faced with two competing story lines, we believe those whom we find more virtuous – the victims.  If oppressors claim to be victims, we insist we are the ones truly victimized.  To suggest a victim may be partly at fault is tantamount to victim blaming.

As my whistleblowing failure drifts years into the past. I rethink the experience: I accomplished nothing, beyond getting fired.  Maybe I had the narrative all wrong.  Maybe I wasn’t the ethical purist, the heroic renegade.  Perhaps instead, I played a different role: that of the victim.

Like those who complain about microaggressions, I called out violations that seemed trivial to many.  The incident that launched me on being a whistleblower – a $130,000 overbilling by HomeFirst Services – was dismissed by the company, Santa Clara County, and the State of California.  My first true whistleblowing action – about a licensing violation – led to a State monitoring visit, but that was about it.  I offered many other complaints and thought them all valid, but they received no attention. 

That happens to others, too.  Dozens of whistleblowers called out unsafe conditions at the Manchester (NH) VA center, but an investigation decided their claims were unfounded.  James DeNofrio, an administrative officer at a VA center in Pennsylvania, claimed his boss had dementia, but he performed normally in tests.  Michael Gurrieri, an internal investigator with the San Diego (CA) school district, reported mishandling of sexual abuse claims and was fired.  A victim like him, I tend to believe Gurrieri, but a jury and various authorities ruled his claims were unsupported.

If breaking the law is seen as minor and unworthy of response, what then of the retaliatory insults that lead to a forced resignation or termination?  For us, eyes rolled in response to our suggestions, exclusion from meetings and important work, relegation to underequipped offices, and pictures of rats taped to our lockers add to a workplace that unfairly rejects us.  We are penalized when denied raises and promotions.  Instead, maybe these insults only prove our bosses and colleagues are jerks and we should get out of there.

Like players in the victimhood culture, whistleblowers rely on third parties to resolve our conflicts.  Sometimes we use them extensively.  To support of my allegations against HomeFirst, I made more than 200 complaints and follow-ups to 30 different federal, state and local agencies.  That sort of excess can be necessary because each violation and retaliation complaint is handled separately and these agencies don’t act quickly.  Still, it might demonstrate a freakish obsession.

As in victimhood culture, whistleblowers earn high status, justified or not.  They are said to provide great value to society.  They are courageous.  They are heroes.

Victimhood culture can generate political success when masses of followers are moved to demand justice for the downtrodden – blacks, females, LGBT, and more.  They can bring down those who mistreat minorities.  Although based on arguably minor violations, they are often linked to atrocious acts: blacks killed by police officers and women raped by powerful men. 

Whistleblowers, on the other hand, seldom lead anyone.  Our charges are technical and involve confidential information.  We appeal to reasoned analysis, not to emotions that inspire others to action.  On the rare occasions when we spark political change – Edward Snowden’s disclosures, for example – interest soon passes.

The benefits of victimhood culture can be unclear to those who question whether microaggressions truly accumulate to serious harm.  But Campbell and Manning claim the social damage is real.  On college campuses, academic freedom and freedom of speech are threatened, they say.  Greg Kukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue similarly in The Coddling of the American Mind. 

The revelation of hidden misdeeds surely benefits society.  But it is not obvious that whistleblowing by employees produces benefits that outweigh its costs to individuals who make disclosures and the billions of dollars spent annually to maintain the whistleblowing system.  The process has failed.

After fifty years of whistleblowing, the time may have come for a new approach.  One in which employees do not invent loyalty to an organization and stay to fix its failings.  If they remain in an organization after seeing misbehavior, they should recognize their selfish reasons for staying.  Policies and laws that leave them open to retaliation should surprise no one.

A better strategy might be: gather the information you need, leave, disclose the misdeeds if you like, and get on with life in a healthier space.

When Whistleblowing Is Foolish

When Whistleblowing Is Foolish

We like to think our whistleblowing is heroic.  We stand by our consciences.  Setting selfish interests aside, we act to benefit the community.  But lots of times, especially in retrospect, it’s clear we are simply fools, going about it as we do.

Terry Albury was born in Northern California in 1979.  While studying at Berea College in Kentucky, he interned with the FBI.  After graduation he joined the FBI, becoming an agent in 2005.  From 2009 to 2010, he served in Iraq with duties that included interviewing Iraqi detainees.  He returned to the US in 2012 and was stationed in the Minneapolis field office where he served in an counter-terrorism squad.

Albury was a straight arrow.  Perhaps because his mother was a political refugee from Ethiopia, he had a well-developed sense of social justice.  He was a Big Brother.  At the time of his arrest he was happily married.  His wife, whose parents were Cambodian refugees, thought of following him into law enforcement but put her career on hold to raise their two children.  He won many awards from the FBI.  At his sentencing, his attorneys described him as a consummate professional. 

Life can be difficult for people of color in America.  Minnesota ranks 8^th among states in the percentage of whites in its population.  The FBI has had issues with diversity, and Albury was the only black in its Minnesota office.  He complained of racial jokes and hazing.  He felt alienated and isolated.

Between February 2016 and January 2017 Albury collected information about how the FBI recruited informants and identified potential extremists.  The tactics reeked of profiling and intimidating minority communities, he thought.  He could have filed complaints with the FBI, but he didn’t believe that would do any good.  So he leaked the documents to a journalist at The Intercept, where it formed the basis for a series on FBI practices.  He became a whistleblower.

Albury could have approached the problem differently.  He might have decided that he was just stressed and the problem wasn’t that big a deal after all.  And not one that he was going to change any time soon.  He could have complained internally if it made him feel any better. 

He might have held on for three years to get his retirement, and then complained to The Intercept or anyone else who cared.  Or he could have helped the people the FBI mistreated.  That might have been good.

Instead he got sucked into the whistleblower role.  Maybe he was going to be the next Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden.  Unfortunately he played the fool, setting the stage for Reality Winner.

Similar to Snowden, Winner was an intelligence contractor who grabbed NSA information. Hers was a May 5, 2017 report on Russian cyberattacks.  Four days later she decided the government was going to conceal the information.  She mailed a copy to The Intercept, which then called the government about its story.  The FBI learned about the call on June 1, and they arrested Winner on June 3.  Her big disclosure was soon common knowledge from a variety of sources.  Winner was sentenced to 5 years in prison.  Burned by The Intercept.  For nothing.

Albury took more care than Winner would, he sent his 25+ files to The Intercept in encrypted emails.  He changed file formats to avoid detection.  But The Intercept burned him too.  They sent a FOIA request to the FBI about two of the secret documents.  The agency was surprised the requester knew the name of a secret document.  It checked who had accessed the files.  A few did, but Albury was the only one who copied portions of the files into another document.  Office cameras caught Albury taking photos of his computer screen while he was accessing other files.  A January 2018 search warrant led to the discovery of more classified files at his home.  In April he agreed to a guilty plea, and he was sentenced to four years in prison.

For some, blowing the whistle is quite rational.  It’s like a business decision to get an expected return.  Maybe their employer cheated them out of wages or illegally discriminated against them, and they want what is due to them.  Or they file an FCA lawsuit hoping to recover a reward.

The rest of us are “ethical” whistleblowers, driven by emotions and moral judgment.  The outcome from our whistleblowing will determine how foolish we were in our projects.

I thought I was justified in my complaints about the behavior of HomeFirst Services of Santa Clara County.  They were all ignored or considered immaterial.  After I was fired, the State of California determined that I was no whistleblower at all and did not deserve the protection I sought.  But I was close enough to retirement to manage, and I stopped legal action before it cost me too much.  I was just a little foolish.

Albury and Winner proved to be quite foolish whistleblowers.  They had a lot at stake because they were both fairly young and Albury had a family to support.  They went up against very powerful organizations that have a sympathetic audience in today’s America.  They used a media outlet that would inadvertently reveal their identities.  Their disclosures were not big news to anyone.  Nor did they disclose striking moral or legal violations.  Although they were both sentenced to years in prison and ruined lives, they accomplished nothing.

Even if other options are available, we are attracted to becoming whistleblowers.  We are pushed by some dissatisfaction.  Maybe some anger.  Possibly a sense that the situation is unjust.  We are pulled along through the dangers by the myth of the idolized whistleblower.  If we are lucky, we stop short of being too foolish.