To understand the motivation for whistle-blowers, we first need to understand the motivation of the people who commit the crimes in the first place. In some cases, like Enron, the motive is greed, coupled with a feeling of invincibility. In other cases, like Watergate, the motive is psychopathy. In still others, it’s the thirst for power, fame or wealth that is unattainable by legitimate means. These are not simple crimes, and the perpetrators are careful not to, and convinced they won’t, be caught.

Every such crime has victims — those that are defrauded or whose investments are rendered worthless, those whose lives are ruined by unlawful persecution or by charlatans, those whose rightful claim to success or stardom is stolen by cheaters. What’s interesting is that the whistle-blowers are often neither the victims of the crime, nor the people whose job it is to prevent or detect such crimes. Often they are altruists who become aware of what appears to be criminal activity, and who can’t be discouraged, fooled, intimidated or bought off. Often they are low in the corporate, political or sports hierarchy, but unlike computer hackers, disinterested in being heroes or fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety. Often they are just doing what they think is the right thing, with no personal axe to grind with the perpetrators.

Are they heroes or are they fools? A recent story in Salon by Eric Boehlert, The Betrayal of the Whistle-Blowers suggests the legal system is stacked against them, and that their lives are more likely to be ruined than advanced by their actions. Here are quotes from two of them:

“What I have learned is, don’t do the right thing — don’t try to protect the American people when you see that they are in danger, because the law won’t protect you,” says Bogdan Dzakovic, a whistle-blower within the FAA who tried to air warnings about lax airline security years before the 9/11 attacks. He considers himself lucky: He’s still got a job with the FAA and collects a government paycheck. But he spends his time doing menial tasks. “My career is over,” he says.

Looking back on his decision to blow the whistle, [Richard] Levernier, [a tester of safety and security at nuclear facilities with 33 years of federal service before he demanded the DOE stop ignoring the huge exposure of these facilities to sabotage], has nothing but regrets: “Given my experience, I would not do it again, even though I truly believe it was the right thing to do. DOE’s inappropriate removal of my security clearance has ruined my career and life.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked several of the business leaders I know how they think their firm would deal with a whistle-blower exposing major scandal or fraud or negligence in their companies. Their answers were ambivalent: One the one hand they would want a major crime exposed, no matter the consequences, but on the other hand they believe controls in their organizations are strong enough to prevent or detect such crimes, and would therefore be highly skeptical of, even antagonistic to,  a whistle-blower who made major allegations that challenged or shattered those beliefs.

So what should a smart whistle-blower do? I’ve done a bit of work in forensics during my career, and it seems to me that as long as you have no desire for personal glory or financial reward for blowing the whistle, you can be successful if you follow these four rules of thumb (and self-preservation):

1. Never reveal your true identity. Use at least one go-between to provide the information to the media and authorities. Deep Throat understood this. Anonymity makes it harder to blow the whistle credibly, but protects you from the very high risk that either you’re wrong, and there is no crime, or that you won’t be believed, or will be scapegoated even if you’re proven right. There’s a reason why the totally anonymous Crime Stoppers and TIPS programs are so successful, despite the inevitable ‘false positives’.
2. Suggest where the bodies are probably buried, but don’t dig them up yourself. The real investigators — police, auditors, regulators — are more than willing to do the digging, successful or no, if there’s credible suspicion. That’s what they’re paid for. You don’t want to be Geraldo opening an empty vault on live television. You want to be the coach sending the syringe with the new steroid to the US Anti-Doping Agency.
3. Do your own research, but only within the law and within your authority. For every Erin Brockovich there are many whistle-blowers who achieved comparable results, less spectacularly, but without anywhere near the risk. Neither the media nor investigative agencies will do all the work for you — you need to do enough work to provide them with a smoking gun. That may take some time, patience, perseverence, level-headedness or even luck, but mostly it’s just legal, hard, work. If the media or agency that you or your go-between approach says you don’t have enough to go on, don’t get discouraged or mad — ask what else they need and go get it, legally.
4. Document everything. Everything.

If you want to learn more, the Government Accountability Project has a great site on whistle-blowing. Read their ‘How to Blow the Whistle’ page especially. The National Whistleblower Center also has excellent news and resources on the subject, including up to date reviews of current legislation and the protection it does (and doesn’t) offer. I’d suggest you also Google ‘whistle-blower’ and read some personal stories of what some individuals have been through, and their first-hand advice. Perhaps because of the potential stigma of subversiveness that whistle-blowing carries with it, and the loneliness and isolation it can bring, the Internet has a lot of ‘self-help’ type groups and sites to offer a life-line for whistle-blowers when the struggle against power seems hopeless.

There’s an old expression ‘No guts, no glory’. The correct expression for whistle-blowers should be ‘Lots of guts, calculated risk, no glory’.  If that appeals to you, your Tarot card is The Hanged Man, and you might just have what it takes to be a whistle-blower. Now, more than ever before, we need you.

Cole shows Ashcroft as a man without moral scruples, engaged in an all-out pathological war on imagined and trumped-up ‘enemies’ — anyone who doesn’t support the Government without question, without condition, without reservation. He cites case after case where aliens, and now some American citizens who are either Islamic or have the misfortune to have MidEastern names, have been treated as ‘enemy combatants’, with no rights, no recourse, no appeal, by the one-man McCarthyite wrecking-crew named Ashcroft. And all hidden under a blanket of secrecy under the guise of ‘national security’.

America has had psychotic extremists like this in power before — McCarthy, Nixon and others — but these were people who were bent on changing the law for their own deranged purposes, not ignoring and circumventing the law as Ashcroft is doing. What is particularly disconcerting is the lack of demands — by Democrats and the media — to have this man, who shows contempt for everything most Americans hold dear, immediately removed from office. In a review of Enemy Aliens in The New York Review of Books (from which the above cartoon by the amazing David Levine is taken), writer Anthony Lewis says:

“What was not inevitable [after 9/11]ónot necessaryówas that officials should act in an arbitrary, even lawless way. Commitment to law has been the great secret of America’s rise to wealth and power, and a main reason for the world’s admiration of our system. Law binds us all, great and small: so we believed. The Bush administration’s abandonment of legal normsóthe disregard of the Geneva Convention in Guant·namo, the order for trial by military commissionsóhas cost us dearly not only in our own values but in the world’s estimate of us. At a moment when we need allies around the world to join us in resisting terrorism, we have made too many think we are not really committed to law.”

This ‘ends justifies the means’ contempt for US  law is new. But US government contempt for international standards of law is a hallmark of the Bush Administration — the refusal to support or honour the decisions of the International Court of Justice, the refusal to sign the Land Mine Convention, and to ratify dozens of other international agreements endorsed by nearly every other democracy in the world. It is ironic that this administration, the most obsessed with law and order since Nixon, so openly disdains the law. For Bush, Ashcroft and the whole extremist gang, it’s all about power, and law is just in the way. It’s almost as if the first half of the Attorney-General’s title is in parentheses.

(thanks to Subdude for the link)

ó Isabel Allende, interview with Buzzflash

Now there’s a new report that suggests that, just maybe, anti-drug forces might be able to get sport cleaned up even without Olympic authority support. The US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), acting on an anonymous tip from an American coach, has just released an announcement (requires Acrobat reader — click on ‘USADA Statement’ from this press release page to launch the file) that they have developed a test for a steroid that is closely related chemically and in effect to banned steroids, but was previously unknown and undetected. The new steroid, called THG, was developed by a California laboratory. It has now been chemically identified, and in a first set of tests 350 American athletes tested positive for the drug. This was just from samples taken from athletes participating in June’s US Championships. If confirmed, all of these athletes would be banned from participating in IAAF events for two years, including the 2004 Athens Olympics. They would probably have to forfeit any medals they won in the World Championships in Paris that were held shortly after the June event.

What’s even worse for this apparently huge ring of cheaters, THG is an inert substance whose presence stays in urine samples for years, and testers could now go back and re-test samples of past Olympic winners, and possibly strip hundreds of them of their medals and world records.

And it doesn’t stop at American athletes or even amateur sport. The laboratory that developed THG, Bay Area Laboratories (BALCO), also represents such global sports luminaries as Ivan Lendl, Barry Bonds & John Elway, supplying them with performance-enhancing “nutritional products”.

This is a huge scandal, and could lead to the decimation of teams for next year’s Olympics, or even a cancellation of the event. Stay tuned — this is gonna be big.

Update 11pm Oct.19: The above number (350 positive tests), cited in the link above,  now seems in doubt. Other ‘unnamed sources’ are saying the number of positives was only ‘up to 20′ of 450 or 550 tests. The USADA is refusing to provide any numbers whatsoever, and say that they won’t discuss numbers until the grand jury investigating the scandal has finished its work. More updates as/if additional information becomes available.

Highlights:

• The greatest predictor of bankruptcy in America today is having children.
• In the last generation, the typical family has become a two-income family, with 75% more income, but costs that have far more than doubled, making job loss by either parent, or family breakup, or medical setback (for anyone in the family, including, increasingly, dependent seniors), economically disastrous.
• The costs that have risen most are mortgage, health insurance, car, preschool, after-school care and college. Spending on basics like food, clothing and furniture have actually dropped 20% for the average family with children in the past generation. ‘Excessive consumerism’ is a total myth.
• Home mortage foreclosures are up over 300% in a generation.
• The average mortgage rate in the US is 16%, ten points above prime, reflecting the huge increase in second and third mortgages and the number that attract rates in the 30% due to missed payments as a result of financial difficulties.
• One in 12 Americans with mortgages loses their home to foreclosure.
• The huge differential in house prices in areas with highly-rated schools (where residents’ children get priority placement) is a major factor in couples over-extending themselves and ending up bankrupt.
• The shame and stigma over personal bankruptcy is so great that those affected are unwilling to seek political action against usurous lenders and other contributors to the problem, or even acknowledge or talk about it publicly.

This is another consequence of the ‘privatize and deregulate everything’ mentality that is destroying the American middle class, and millions of families in the process. Public education, transportation, and health infrasructure has crumbled in many areas to the point where it is not only unreliable and poor quality, but even dangerous. As a result, families with incomes that would have once allowed them to live comfortably are now pushed to the limit trying to afford vastly more expensive private alternatives. And the outrageously high interest rates they have to pay to mainstream financial institutions are illegal in most first-world nations, where sensible regulation of such excess still prevails.