The Proper Channels For Whistleblowing Still Mostly A Good Way For Messengers To Get Shot

from the snitches-get-unsustained-retaliation-complaints dept

Wed, Sep 28th 2016 3:15am — Tim Cushing

Whistleblower protections offered by the federal government are great in theory. In practice, they're a mess. This administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The proper channels for reporting concerns are designed to deter complaints. Those that do use the proper channels are frequently exposed by those handling the complaints, leading to retaliatory actions that built-in protections don't offer an adequate remedy for.

Perhaps the ultimate insult is that the proper channels lead directly to two committees that have -- for the most part -- staunchly defended agencies like the NSA against criticism and any legislative attempts to scale back domestic surveillance programs. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are the "proper channels," whose offered protections can only be seen as the hollowest of promises, especially after the House Intelligence Committee's lie-packed response to calls for Snowden's pardon.

What the federal government offers to whistleblowers is a damned if you do/don't proposition. Bypass the proper channels and brace yourself for prosecution. Stay within the defined lanes and expect nothing to change -- except maybe your security clearance, pay grade, or chances of advancement within the government.

Congress doesn’t have much legal power to protect intelligence community employees from such retaliation. The Pentagon’s inspector general website concedes Congress cannot “grant special statutory protection for intelligence community employees from reprisal for whistleblowing.”

In most cases of personal or professional retaliation, it ends up being the whistleblower’s problem, says Tom Devine, the legal director for the Government Accountability Project. “The problem is that whistleblowers making most complaints proceed at their own risk,” he said in an interview. “There are no independent due process protections for any intelligence community whistleblowers. And contractors don’t even have the right to an independent investigation unless there’s security clearance retaliation.”

The limited evidence that has surfaced about using the "proper" whistleblower channels suggests the protections granted by the government are mostly meaningless. The intelligence committees won't comment on the treatment of government employees who have approached them to blow the whistle. Government contractors working within the intelligence community are even more tight-lipped, suggesting even civilians are on their own when when attached to government programs or projects.

The few reports that have made it out into the open indicate it's almost impossible for a whistleblower to prove any actions taken against them post-whistleblowing are actually retaliatory. An Inspector General's investigation of a whistleblower's retaliation complaints determined that anything that had happened to the whistleblower could not be conclusively linked to the Defense Department employee's whistleblowing.

All that can be determined is that dozens of whistleblower complaints do make their way to the intelligence committees every year. But even this is based on the assertions of the House Intelligence Committee, which refused to provide any further details. The outcome of the whistleblowing remains under wraps and there are no publicly-released statistics that total the number of complaints, much less which percentage of complaints are found substantial and investigated further.

Government employees and contractors are just expected to trust the federal government which, given its response to whistleblowers over the past two decades, isn't going to nudge edge cases away from bypassing the laughable "protections" and proceeding directly to journalists willing to actually protect their sources.

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Filed Under: ignored, proper channels, whistleblowing

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Lord Lidl of Cheem (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 3:42am

I keep seeing phrases like "This administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined." to indicate that the government is stepping up its levels of prosecution - perhaps the real reason for this is that the government has more corruption that need the whistle blowing for than all previous governments combined.
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- Lord Lidl of Cheem (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 3:47am
  
  Re:
  [dupe please delete]
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- Anonymous Coward, 28 Sep 2016 @ 5:21am
  
  Re:
  Perhaps.
  However - as everyone knows ... correlation is not causation.
  If there were any data in support of the claim, but it also could be that prior administrations were better at covering up their deeds, it also could be partly due to the advent of the internet and its communication abilities. It could be due to a combination of many things.
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- Anonymous Coward, 28 Sep 2016 @ 8:45am
  
  "This administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined."
  
  Most of the time if your crime reporting is getting better, it will look like the crime rate is going up. Even if it's the same as before.
  
  I don't really have an iron in the fire here, but I'm curious; is it possible that there just are more whistleblowers these days as a result of better reporting on them, or better (comparatively, however minimally so) protections for them encouraging more?
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Lord Lidl of Cheem (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 3:42am

I keep seeing phrases like "This administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined." to indicate that the government is stepping up its levels of prosecution - perhaps the real reason for this is that the government has more corruption that need the whistle blowing for than all previous governments combined.
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Ninja (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 4:21am

So the message sent is: dump the damning content to some journalist as anonymously as possible and be prepared to be screwed royally if somebody finds out.
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- Michael, 28 Sep 2016 @ 4:58am
  
  Re:
  And if you leave the country, don't make up a fake excuse to tell the NSA why you are taking a day off. Be sure to tell them you are fleeing the country to avoid prosecution so they cannot point to your lie to show how dishonest you are later.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Sep 2016 @ 4:43am

Why messenger are shot
Politicians, including senior bureaucrats, practice the religion of personal power, and as a religion is always right, any criticism is seen as blasphemy, and should be punished as such.
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Whatever, 28 Sep 2016 @ 5:21am

As usual, the criminals that frequent this cesspool don't seem to get it. If you want don't like something and want it changed, you work within the system to do it. That means doing everything you don't like even if it gets you nowhere. If you don't like those terms, you can just fuck off. Nobody needs you selfish, entitled assholes to rock the boat. Alas, America seems to be full of people who think of no one else but themselves, and are willing to inconvenience everyone in a bid to justify their own criminal behavior. It's pathetic, really.
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- Daydream, 28 Sep 2016 @ 5:42am
  
  Citation needed.
  Well, everybody's saying "don't follow official channels", because as far as we've seen, attempting to follow lawful channels in blowing the whistle on illegal government/civil service activity, tends to get the whistleblower prosecuted instead of solving the problem.
  
  Heck, I googled 'list of whistleblowers', and the Wikipedia page that comes up says "Many of these whistleblowers were fired from their jobs or prosecuted in the process of shining light on their issue of concern.", right at the top of the page.
  
  Do you have a particular case in mind where a civil service employee 'blew the whistle' on illegal activity and helped to shut it down through lawful means, without being prosecuted/persecuted?
  I really am interested in proof that working within the system works.
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- Quiet Lurcker, 28 Sep 2016 @ 5:50am
  
  Re:
  Perhaps you would do well to study up on why we have a First Amendment to begin with (pun not intended).
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- PaulT (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 5:58am
  
  Re:
  "Alas, America seems to be full of people who think of no one else but themselves, and are willing to inconvenience everyone in a bid to justify their own criminal behavior."
  
  It sure does. Which is why it's doubly sad that the whistleblowers who expose such behaviour are so poorly treated.
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- Uriel-238 (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 6:05am
  
  Once again I have to call Poe
  At you can just fuck off this completely sounds like parody of the proper channels position. And yet someone could be saying all of this and believe it's not a reprehensible pro-tyranny position, especially after Germany.
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- art guerrilla (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 6:20am
  
  Re:
  at whatevs
  dog almighty, you are one stupid and cruel POS...
  are you part of ass unsteins bot army ?
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- Ninja (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 7:16am
  
  Re:
  Marked funny for the comedy! Not intentional? Oops.
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- Anonymous Coward, 28 Sep 2016 @ 11:29am
  
  Re:
  Be sheeple that blindly obey all the rules even when they're unconstitutional, wrong, immoral or unjust. The very principle by which this nation was founded. Good call Whatever
  
  /s
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- Anonymous Coward, 28 Sep 2016 @ 1:19pm
  
  Re: Whatever
  the criminals that frequent this cesspool don't seem to get it
  Is this a confession?
  Don't be too hard on yourself, sonny.
  Eventually you might get it.
  It's pathetic, really
  
  Yes, you are.
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scatman, 28 Sep 2016 @ 5:22am

well
'the first rule about fight club...'
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Median Wilfred, 28 Sep 2016 @ 7:08am

Purpose of universal surveillance becomes clear
It finally dawned on me that one of the real motivations for dragnet surveillance, and that weird legalism where all the call data records are actually collected, but not legally collected until someone actually looks for them, is to find out who ratted out the "Intelligence Community". The NSA has concluded (at least internally) that it can't 100% prevent leaks/traitors, so it decided to collect it all and figure out which traitor/kremlin butt boi committed espionage by revealing astronomical cost overruns and obviously unconstitutional surveillance of the general populace.

Watch the furor if/when it's revealed that industrial espionage took place, or that the NSA has been surveilling ELF, the Friend's Society or some anti-war student group for the last 15 years.
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Roger Strong (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 7:21am

That's strange; everyone laughed when Monty Python did this.

(How Not to Be Seen: Wikipedia - YouTube)
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- afn29129 (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 8:17am
  
  Re:
  One step further, Don't even tell yourself.
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Padpaw (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 9:08am

America has what I consider to be the most criminally corrupt government around. Though I live in Canada so that might be colouring my view on that a bit.

No wonder those who expose their leaders crimes get punished instead of praised.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Sep 2016 @ 10:39am

The FDA Isn't Coming Tomorrow
At a multi-billion dollar company I raised concerns to senior management because I had reasons to believe that the clinical lab I was working at was changing data to make some of the products look like they were performing better than they were. There was a two month investigation and then they asked me to sign some paper saying that I encrypted the data I was working on using portable hard drives, which was true. We weren't using encryption on highly sensitive data when I started using it, and I was ordered by my manager not to message the security team about concerns. I desperately needed the job at the time, our network was not secure and I had nowhere near enough space to do my work on the network drives that weren't reliable anyway (files weren't always visible across computers for some reason), and we had almost no support from any technical group in the company, so I used Truecrypt for years and I signed, thinking that yes, I did the right thing, and now we can do things properly. Two weeks later they asked me to resign and told me not to challenge the "mutually agreed upon" termination because I committed what I didn't know was an illegal action, and then they told me to remember that I signed that paper.

I'm not restricted by a non-disparagement clause so technically I can talk about them all I want as long as it's true, but I know that I can't come forward willingly or else nobody will ever hire me again or worse.

I had many more concerns, some even related to product safety issues, but mostly about how:
- a small pool of panelists were re-used with some on as many as fifty studies a year, but mostly on thirty or more using products with long-lasting effects.
- the lab focused on speed and throughput over quality, with mistakes covered up, standards ignored or non-existent, and lab-staff using the motto 'garbage in, garbage out.'
- no electronic data capture or audit-trail for most of the data.
- very poor analysis algorithms (laughably called 'our versions of x').
- data/images listed as having positive results that were not discernible upon inspection.

Later on some of my co-workers told me that HR called them in and asked them if there was any reason to think that I was a vengeful person and other horrible things. I don't know what would have happened if they said anything other than what they did.

In the end, I'm preparing my resume while my former manager who by the way disabled security by making thousands of people unrelated to our department system admins on a health information protected database and gave his administrator password out to everyone in our lab... is still there.

Note that the subject line is a quote from one of my former VPs when I first brought this to her attention.
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The System Works, bruh, 28 Sep 2016 @ 2:14pm

Use the proper channels or your whistleblowing might actually be effective, causing all kind of problems, ain't nobody got time for dat.
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That One Guy (profile), 28 Sep 2016 @ 2:45pm

Same concept really
Just like the problems don't exist until the whistleblower 'creates' them by attempting to report them, whistleblowers aren't being persecuted and punished because look, the groups responsible for investigating such things say that they aren't!
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