Even before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, the Second Continental Congress had approved the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1788. The act, passed on July 30, makes it incumbent on citizens to report violations of the law: “That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors, committed by any persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”
The text describes whistle-blowing not as a “right” but, instead, a “duty.” There are real risks to those who blow the whistle: retaliation, loss of their careers, and even incarceration. But many who blow the whistle, like Edward Snowden, maintain they had no real choice—it was their duty to alert the public to illegality and fraud.
In recent years, many whistleblower advocacy organizations, most notably the National Whistleblower Center (NWC), have been working to make July 30 permanently recognized as “National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.”
Currently, National Whistleblower Day (NWD) is celebrated each year on an “ad hoc basis,” according to Stephen Kohn, whistleblower attorney and Chairman of the Board of the NWC. For the past decade, it has been declared annually by a U.S. Senate resolution; Kohn would like to see the president issue an Executive Order that would make the day of recognition permanent.
But many who blow the whistle, like Edward Snowden, maintain they had no real choice—it was their duty to alert the public to illegality and fraud.
As he told The Progressive, “While the Senate has unanimously delivered on NWD for over ten years in a row, relying on Congress is not sustainable long term.”
The NWC also hosts a national conference to provide support for, and raise awareness of, the importance of the role whistleblowers often play in democracy. This year, the conference was held on July 27, in Washington, D.C., and featured high-profile speakers like Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (long considered an ally of whistleblowers) and Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins.
In his announcement of Whistleblower Appreciation Day, Grassley said, “Whistleblowers play a crucial role by shining light on wrongdoing.” With Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Grassley co-founded and co-chairs the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus.
Each July 30, support for whistleblowers in business, government, and national security appears to be both strong and bipartisan. The typical experiences of whistleblowers, however, especially those in the military and national security sectors, reflect the government’s fear of embarrassing or compromising leaks (as opposed to leaks politicians might find useful).
Take, for example, Daniel Ellsberg.
In 1971, Ellsberg, one of the most high-profile whistleblowers in history, was working as a military analyst, and, along with a colleague, photocopied thousands of classified pages that detailed America’s complicated and often disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War. He first shared them with several senators, who did not act upon the information, and then with The New York Times. They became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg would go on to support other whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden, and journalists and others who publish their stories, like Julian Assange. On June 16, 2023, Ellsberg, died from pancreatic cancer at the age of ninety-two. Although Ellsberg was fortunate enough to escape prosecution for revealing top-secret documents and has maintained that he wouldn’t have done anything differently, those intelligence-community whistleblowers who have received prison sentences under the punitive act in recent years often have much to regret.
One such whistleblower is Reality Winner, who revealed a classified document to the media outlet The Intercept that proved Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. After an interrogation in her home without legal representation present (an event which is shown in horrifying detail in the recent movie Reality, based on the transcript of that questioning), Winner admitted to leaking the document, and was eventually sentenced to sixty-three months in jail, the longest sentence ever given to a whistleblower in a federal court.
In a recent panel event featuring both Ellsberg and Winner, Winner answered the question of whether she would blow the whistle again with no hesitation: “I absolutely would not do it again.”
If that was at all unclear, she followed up by saying, “One hundred percent, zero out of five stars” and noting that “It didn’t accomplish anything.” Later in the presentation, Ellsberg noted that Winner’s being charged under the Espionage Act gave her no opportunity to explain why she revealed the information she did. Addressing Winner directly, Ellsberg said, “You should not have been charged with a crime, especially under the Espionage Act…You did what I said earlier, what I would like people to do. You acted on what you saw in a timely way when it might have made a difference.”
Whistleblowers like Ellsberg, Winner, Snowden, and Daniel Hale—individuals who had security clearances and were bound by nondisclosure agreements not to divulge classified information—knew their best (and perhaps only) defense was to attempt to remain anonymous.
When their identities were revealed, the Department of Justice charged each with crimes under the Espionage Act of 1917. The media outlets that they worked with—The New York Times, The Intercept, and The Guardian—have not, historically, been charged with disclosing top secret information. This long-standing precedent, which favors press freedom, is unfortunately in danger today.
In 2010, Julian Assange and his nonprofit organization, WikiLeaks, began releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents revealing information about the Iraq War that were submitted by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
While a 2017 report from the Department of Defense found that Manning’s disclosures “did not cause real harm,” she was successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act and received a thirty-five-year prison sentence. Although her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017, she was sent back to prison in 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury that was investigating WikiLeaks.
Whether you know their names or not, odds are that you have benefitted somewhere, somehow, from a person blowing the whistle
Assange is currently being held in the Belmarsh prison in London, under an extradition order that seeks to bring him back to the United States to face seventeen counts under the Espionage Act and one count of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” On June 8, 2023, Assange and his legal team suffered a defeat when his appeal was rejected in a U.K. court. If all further appeals fail, Assange will be extradited to the United States to stand trial.
Numerous national and international advocacy groups—including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders—support Assange’s defense. Their calls for action include petitions asking President Joe Biden to drop the charges against Assange and WikiLeaks. In the wake of the June 8 rejection of Assange’s appeal, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Director of Advocacy Seth Stern summed up the danger the Assange case poses to the freedom of the press: “The idea of Assange or anyone being tried in a U.S. court for obtaining and publishing confidential documents the same way investigative reporters do every day should be terrifying to all Americans.”
Whether you know their names or not, odds are that you have benefitted somewhere, somehow, from a person blowing the whistle on their employer or organization. Whether they are alerting the authorities to medical device bribery schemes in VA hospitals, sounding the alarm regarding the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, or helping the Securities and Exchange Commission “recover millions of dollars for harmed investors,” whistleblowers perform the vital function of providing transparency in business and governance.
At the very least, whistleblowers deserve for Biden to sign an Executive Order and give them their own permanent day of recognition, which would, as Kohn put it, “make a huge difference in improving the culture around whistleblowing.”
An even simpler thing that all Americans could do to honor whistleblowers is to do the one small thing that whistleblowers have wanted them to do all along: Pay attention to the stories it is their duty to tell you.