Quotes About Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers play a vital role in ensuring that the federal government is accountable to the people it serves.

Many of the most important stories in the history of modern journalism have come from sources who have taken information without authorization.

I got more whistleblowers from the Secret Service than I do anywhere else. And if you look at that department and agency, it's the one place you can never, ever, ever make a mistake - ever.

Whistleblowers get fired and shot or crack up. You have to decide what you want to do. Do you want a career, or do you want to be an advocate? And where I've been an advocate, I do it not in my backyard. If I'm going to fight, I don't do it in the backyard. In other words, I can get more done by not doing it in the backyard. I can train my students in the right way to do things.

The fact is, American law encourages whistleblowers and, often, they go down in history as courageous people of principle who made their country better.

Whistleblowers deserve protection, but employees are not federal agents.

We should waive fees for those taking equal pay claims; they are our whistleblowers and should be encouraged.

The new right-wing movement is a wide group of people committed to free speech, anti-war, trade. It's sympathetic to whistleblowers.

The world is not kind to whistleblowers - a term of art with particular resonance in football, the most hierarchical and repressive of organized sports, a world of 'systems' and 'programs' and scripted plays, where reading a medical report requires a security clearance, and practice fields are patrolled like Guantanamo Bay.

In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?

The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution—and, in many cases, the support of their peers—in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.

Stone was no admirer of Snowden: he valued certain whistleblowers who selectively leaked secret information in the interest of the public good; but Snowden's wholesale pilfering of so many documents, of such a highly classified nature, struck him as untenable. Maybe Snowden was right and the government was wrong—he didn't know—but he thought no national security apparatus could function if some junior employee decided which secrets to preserve and which to let fly.

I mean, Ed Snowden was basically saying the same things that Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and other U.S. whistleblowers had said before him. But he came out more publicly, and maybe revealed more. He showed that when the U.S. government said, 'We are not surveilling U.S. citizens,' that was a lie.

We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets - you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well motivated.

The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.

The Official Secrets Act 1989 may need reforming for the digital era, but I would argue that at its heart there should be protection for whistleblowers.

ask Bill Binney, or Thomas Drake, or Chelsea Manning, or Diane Roark, or Coleen Rowley, or Jeffrey Sterling, or Thomas Tamm, or Russell Tice, or Kirk Wiebe. And look what they'd done to John Kiriakou—for exposing torture

The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.

Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks.

People don't realize that the Obama Administration has been, if anything, harder on whistleblowers than the Bush Administration. Part of the reason is that they know that the response will be more muted because the traditional constituency supporting whistleblowers just happen to be the same constituency as Obama's.

For future Snowdens, we want to show there is an organization that will do what we did for Snowden - as much as possible - in raising money for legal defense and public advocacy for whistleblowers so they know if they come forward there is a support group for them.

When whistleblowers come forward, we need to fight for them, so others will be encouraged. When they are gagged, we must be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime. This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.

as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement for an administration that came to office promising transparency.