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Employees of organizations involved in unethical activities have a number of reasons to "blow the whistle" to the government, press, or both: material reward, a measure of personal fame, and sometimes just the feeling that you're doing what's right. Of course, not all countries have laws protecting whistleblowers, so many whistleblowers will have deal with a negative aftermath.
Today we look at some of the most important whistleblowers in history and some of the laws that were established after they stood up for what they thought was right.
THE OFFICERS OF THE USS WARREN
Commodore Esek Hopkins was, and still is a controversial figure, being a successful privateer, an unsuccessful slave-ship captain, and the first commander in chief of what would eventually be the United States Navy.
Hopkins did what he could with the Continental Navy's tiny fleet of jury-rigged frigates and managed a few notable victories, at one point earning a letter of commendation from John Hancock. But the men under his command had doubts about the Commodore's competence and ethical lapses that they expressed in a letter to the Continental Congress.
Based on the letter, Congress moved to dismiss Hopkins from his post, but not before a vengeful Hopkins brought a court-martial against "ringleader" 3rd Lt. Richard Marvin and civil suits against the other sailors whose identity he could determine.
In response, Congress released funds for the sailors' defense and passed a law declaring that exposing fraud and corruption in government offices was "the duty of all persons in the service of the United States," believed to be the world's first recognition of the value of whistleblowers.
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THE "FALSE CLAIMS ACT" VS. WAR PROFITEERS
The second major legal event in the history of whistleblowing was brought about by the American Civil War, where greedy suppliers took advantage of the national emergency to rip off the governments of both sides.
Faced with an overwhelming number of unscrupulous war profiteers, the Lincoln administration took the step of passing the False Claims Act of 1863, which allowed American citizens who discovered cases of fraud to sue on behalf of the government.
The most important part of the FCA was the use of "qui tam" provisions that allowed the citizens to claim a chunk of the money that the government would claw back from frauds as a reward.
This incentivized the insufficiently patriotic and providing for whistleblowing employees of profiteers-who would obviously be fired by their corrupt bosses as soon as they brought the charges.
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MARC HODLER VS. THE IOC
The greed and corruption endemic to the Olympic Games had been acknowledged ever since the game's earliest days, when cheats were punished by having to pay to erect a statue that would both honor the Greek gods and forever remind the world that Souvlakios of Feta (or whoever) had taken a dive in the third round.
When Swiss skier Marc Hodler first joined the International Olympic Committee in 1963, however, the Olympics were meant to be the ultimate honorable competition / proxy war between nations, and the bribery and double-dealing of host city selection was minimal and overshadowed by the political considerations of the Cold War.
After the Commies ended up taking the silver in the 400m World Domination event, however, the sky was the limit for IOC bribery attempts. Hodler held his nose and worked to uphold what honor he could salvage, but the breaking point was when a Salt Lake City news crew uncovered hints of gifts lavished on IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch by city and state officials.
While the rest of the IOC went on damage control, Hodler calmly announced to the press that not only were the allegations of bribery true, but they barely represented the tip of the iceberg.
Samaranch threatened to have Hodler fired and sued, but in the end it was the quiet Swiss skiing coach who rode out the scandal and continued to serve the Games until his death in 2006.
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DAVID P. WEBER VS. BERNIE MADOFF
After the extent of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme was fully revealed, virtually every financial news outlet in America agreed that somebody should've seen it coming.
In fact, somebody did see it coming, repeatedly warned his employers about how it was coming, attempted to tell everyone else that it was coming, and was eventually fired because he was so annoyingly persistent in attempting to shut down one of the biggest financial crimes of the modern era.
David P. Weber's term in the US Securities and Exchange Commission was marked by his unwillingness to keep his mouth shut about his superiors' unethically close ties to Madoff and fellow Ponzi schemer R. Allen Stanford.
For his pains, Weber was put on administrative leave after the SEC banned him from the workplace on ludicrously trumped-up claims that he was psychologically unstable and violent. After formally complaining to the government about the SEC's suspiciously inept handling of the Madoff/Stanford affairs he was fired for similarly lame reasons, but Weber's countersuit hit hard, earning him one of the largest whistleblower rewards in US history.
Today, Weber divides his time between the Maryland Defense Force (where he's a Judge Advocate for Maryland National Guard troops) and Goodwin Weber PLLC, a law firm dedicated to the support and defense of fellow whistleblowers.
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FREDERIC WHITEHURST VS. FBI LABS
Much of the FBI's authority rests upon their reputation as scientific crimefighters, applying the world's most advanced forensic technologies with impartial expertise and precision.
This image of legal and forensic professionalism was one of the reasons lawyer, chemist, and Vietnam intelligence veteran Frederic Whitehurst joined the FBI in 1982, soon becoming a Supervisory Special Agent at the Bureau's main laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.
There, Whitehurst saw FBI scientists mishandle, mislay, and misidentify important chemical evidence from the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings. After he came forward with his allegations of incompetence, Whitehurst was subjected to psychiatric examination, internal investigations, and a decade-long legal battle that nearly cost him his entire life savings.
Today, Whitehurst is the Executive Director of the Forensic Justice Project, a division of the National Whistleblower Center specializing in challenging flawed evidence and highlighting prosecutorial misdeeds.
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CHRISTOPH MEILI VS. UNION BANK OF SWITZERLAND
The famous banks of Switzerland based their reputation on their uncompromising neutrality and total refusal to share the assets or information of any client, no matter how villainous, and for years Holocaust victims' rights organizations struggled in vain to retrieve any details of the money and property that had been seized from Jewish citizens by the Nazi government.
All that changed after young night watchman Christoph Meili found that his employers at Union Bank of Switzerland had been quietly and systematically destroying records of Jewish accounts and dealings with Hitler's government.
Meili smuggled a few documents home and turned them in to a local Jewish organization, and while they turned out to predate the war they still contained evidence of accounts that had been opened by Jews who died in the Holocaust that had subsequently been hidden and plundered by UBS.
For the first time, solid proof of long-suspected collusion between the Swiss banks and the Nazis was made public, and the banks became embroiled in controversy and international condemnation.
Meili was fired, the government sought to indict him for violations of Swiss banking secrecy, his family began receiving death threats, and he and his family became the first Swiss citizens to seek political asylum in America. Because of Meili's sacrifices, however, the resolve of the Swiss banking system was broken and the trickle of Holocaust revelations grew to a flood.
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MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER VS. THE BUSINESS PLOT
One of the youngest Major Generals in USMC service, Smedley Darlington Butler was known as much or more for his post-military career as a lecturer, reformer, and political candidate.
Butler primarily saw action in the Caribbean and further south during the Banana Wars, which he famously described as "raping half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street."
Butler was regarded as a hero by many veterans' organizations for his support of the "Bonus Army" protests in 1931. He was also particularly outspoken in his criticism of the FDR administrations ties to big business, which he saw as continuing a tradition of profit-oriented military-industrial adventurism that he had been an unwilling part of early in his career.
That may have been why bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire, claiming to represent a consortium of powerful businessmen, sought out Butler in 1933 and invited him to lead a supposed army of 500,000 dissatisfied veterans in a Fascist campaign against the Roosevelt government.
Butler played along with the so-called "Business Plot" to collect as much information as he could before turning around and making a detailed formal report to a House committee, but most of the allegations were dismissed and controversially the names that Butler named among the business community were formally suppressed.
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FRANK SERPICO VS. THE NYPD
Frank Serpico's first experience with corruption was an incident from his childhood. Working as a shoeshine boy in his father's Brooklyn corner shop, a spit-and-polish beat cop walked in, enjoyed what Serpico called "the best damn shine I ever gave," and left without paying.
The next time the policeman showed up, Serpico's father confronted him, demanding the ten cents his son was owed, and the cop simply turned on his heel and walked out of the store. Serpico was next to encounter police corruption on a much more personal level, working as a plainclothes detective in the vice department and bearing witness to dozens of instances of graft, intimidation, and racketeering among his own partners.
His reports to his superiors having gone nowhere, Patrolman Serpico and like-minded Sergeant David Durk contributed to a major New York Times expose on NYPD corruption, which subsequently lead to the creation of a five-member corruption panel known as the Knapp Commission.
Less than a year after the story, Serpico was raiding the apartment of a suspected heroin dealer when he found himself trapped in a door, separated from his "backup" officers, shot in the face and abandoned to die.
Luckily, an old man living next door discovered and reported the unconscious cop and called in an ambulance; Serpico survived his injuries and subsequent NYPD harassment to testify in front of the Knapp Commission.
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MARLENE GARCIA-ESPERAT VS. THE PHILIPPINE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
After Iraq and Somalia, the democratic island nation of the Phillipines is the third most dangerous place in the world to practice journalism. Chemist Marlene Garcia-Esperat was painfully aware of this fact (her radio broadcaster husband was killed in 1989), but this didn't stop her from launching her own personal investigation into agricultural department in her home island of Mindanao after discovering that her lab was receiving less than half of what the government had budgeted for its operation.
Garcia-Esperat first took her grievances to court under Philippine graft law, but when it became clear her well-connected opponents would stall and dissemble as much as possible, she began writing a column for her local paper and appearing regularly on the radio.
Her writings and investigations were typically restricted to the Department of Agriculture, which is widely believed to be one of the richest and most corrupt branches of the Philippine government.
While Garcia-Esperat was never that big of a name in her home country she was still considered dangerous enough that in March of 2005, a man walked into her dining room and shot her in the forehead in front of her two sons.
Ironically, Marlene Garcia-Esperat became more famous in death than in life, if only because she became the first of a string of over fifty Filipino journalist murders to where the people ultimately responsible were publicly identified.
After one of the lookouts surrendered to police and plead guilty, he and his co-conspirators fingered officials high up in the Department of Agriculture chain of command.
The bureaucrats managed to get the initial charges quashed, but eager citizens and journalists routinely force the government to re-open the case in the hope that justice will ultimately be served.
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zeenews india10 of 10Next: The Wackiest Elected Officials Ever
SATYENDRA DUBEY
The "Golden Quadrilateral" project of the National Highways Authority of India is the first phase of a road-building project that will eventually become one of the largest road networks in the world, and like thousands of publicly financed road projects throughout history it is riddled with corruption and graft.
Dominated by what many Indians refer to as the Road Contract Mafia or "Contractor Raj," the Golden Quadrilateral is infamous for shoddy construction and shady dealings. Enter project manager Satyendra Dubey, a strong-willed engineer with no tolerance for the graft and corruption who once forced his contractors to re-build a six-kilometer stretch of road after he judged it undrivable.
Dubey soon realized that his superiors were likely crooked as well, leading him to write a letter to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee highlighting the NHAI's problems and asking to keep his identity secret.
Vajpayee immediately forwarded the letter (along with Dubey's unguarded identity) to the very people that Dubey accused of fraud. The engineer was officially reprimanded, but continued to make his case to the press and government until 2003, when he was found shot dead by the side of the road in a Varanasi suburb.
The office of the Prime Minister, realizing they may well have been responsible for his death, asked the Central Bureau of Investigation to take the case away from the local police, who were widely suspected to be in the pocket of the Contractor Raj. Dubey's murder prompted a massive outcry in Indian society, particularly among his fellow engineers and honest builders, and when the controversy wouldn't go away the Indian parliament finally introduced the country's first whistleblower protection laws.
The law as written currently only protects federal employees and its still hung up in the upper houses of parliament, but observers agree that it's an invaluable first step towards robust protection of Indian whistleblowers.
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