In May 2020, Rebekah Jones was demoted and dismissed from her job as a Geographic Information Systems manager with the Florida state Department of Health. Seven months later, armed police showed up at the front door of her Tallahassee-area condo to confiscate her cellphone and laptop.
“I was asked to actually delete and then hide the data from the public,” Jones said in an interview.
Jones, before her dismissal, was the leader of a data management team in Florida that was tasked with creating and maintaining a statistics “dashboard” for tracking positive cases of COVID-19. But when Governor Ron DeSantis pushed to reopen Florida, Jones’s team was soon removed from its work on the website. Jones was told the reason for her firing was “insubordination,” but she claimed it was because she was pressed by health department officials to misrepresent COVID-19 statistics to make the disease look less prevalent in the state, which she refused to do.
“I was asked to actually delete and then hide the data from the public,” Jones said in an interview.
In July, after her dismissal, Jones filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that she had been retaliated against for refusing to manipulate data. Jones then created her own website, Florida COVID Action, to track state cases of the coronavirus.
In November, about 1,750 Florida government officials received an anonymous text on a state government emergency alert system. It read, in part: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this.”
Investigators alleged that the message was sent from an IP address “connected to Jones’s house,” which was enough for law enforcement to execute a search warrant for Jones’s home on December 7.
Though Jones denied sending the text message, she was charged in Florida with one count of “offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks and electronic devices.” Facing an arrest warrant, she turned herself in to the police and was subsequently booked into the Leon County Detention Facility. Although released on bail, she also announced she had been diagnosed with COVID-19 while in jail.
When telling the stories of whistleblowers, it’s easy to get bogged down in the timeline and the details, which are often muddied by conflicting reports. The police raid on Jones’s home, for example, comes with dueling sets of video footage: video from inside the home that Jones recorded and posted to her own Twitter account, and bodycam footage of the same event later released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
For Jones and others, the consequences of whistleblowing can follow a familiar pattern: First, a whistleblower—whether anonymous or not—reports what he or she feels to be malfeasance or deception; these complaints are heard, but often only long enough for superiors to determine whether the whistleblower’s revelations might be dangerous to the status quo; if so, soon the whistleblower finds his or her work responsibilities changed or curtailed, and they may be transferred or demoted.
Over a period of time, complaints about their work performance, which are unrelated to the topics on which they blew the whistle, are meticulously documented; then, they are typically fired. But, beyond losing a job, the ways in which whistleblowers can be punished are seemingly endless.
National security whistleblowers have perhaps faced the most severe punishment: Edward Snowden is currently living in exile in Russia, while John Kiriakou and many others have spent time in prison. Thomas Drake, the National Security Advisory whistleblower whose example taught Snowden about the risks he would face, was charged in 2010 with ten felony counts, several of them under the extremely punitive Espionage Act of 1917 (His crime? He shared information, none of which was classified, with a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.)
Whistleblowing can also be detrimental to careers. Many whistleblowers have lost jobs and benefits, including health insurance, as well as being shut out of their entire career field. As financial whistleblower Richard Bowen, a former high-ranking Citigroup executive who tried to tried to warn his superiors about the impending 2008 subprime lending disaster, later told an interviewer: “If you ever do decide to whistleblow within an industry, do so with the knowledge that your career is going to be blown up.”
So what legal protections are in place for whistleblowers? The world’s first whistleblower protection law was enacted in 1778 during the Revolutionary War. As of 2021, there are roughly fifty federal and state laws that contain provisions for protecting whistleblowers against retaliation. A few of these laws, such as the False Claims Act, date back to the Civil War. Others, like the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002—which provided recourse for whistleblowers exposing fraud in finance—create a legal framework for whistleblowing in specific industries.
Despite this maze of laws, whistleblowing cases often take years to work their way through the courts. For many whistleblowers, waiting on a favorable legal outcome is simply not a luxury they can afford.
Despite this maze of laws, whistleblowing cases often take years to work their way through the courts. For many whistleblowers, waiting on a favorable legal outcome is simply not a luxury they can afford.
While they wait for legal recourse and search for different jobs, whistleblowers experience what some researchers consider more insidious and even more damaging forms of punishment.
In a recent email interview with The Progressive, C. Fred Alford, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland at College Park, pointed out the extent of less tangible damage suffered by many whistleblowers: “Some people really do put their faith in the system, whatever that is exactly. It’s their world, and all of a sudden it’s shown to be a lie. Some people never recover from this insight.”
Alford, who wrote the 2001 study Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, has likened the emotional and psychological consequences of whistleblowing to a form of PTSD. “Above all,” he says, the whistleblowers he spoke with “did not expect family, friends, and co-workers to turn on them.”
Christopher Pyle, a whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. Army intelligence service was spying on legal political protests in the 1960s and 1970s, interviewed 125 Army officers during that time. “These former agents,” Pyle told The Progressive in an earlier interview, “were less worried about reprisals from the military than they were about disapproval within their relatively conservative communities.”
Most people agree that whistleblowers deserve protection under the law. A recent poll sponsored by the Whistleblower News Network, an advocacy publication for whistleblowers, found that 86 percent of likely voters in the United States agree or strongly agree that there should be stronger legal protections from harm for federal employees who report fraud in government programs.
Moreover, laws protecting whistleblowers are popular across political party lines. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, recently advocated for the House of Representatives to adopt a rule prohibiting the disclosure of whistleblowers’ identities in Congress, and Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has been a longtime advocate for whistleblowers’ rights.
Through February 4, there have been 4,667 whistleblower complaints filed with OSHA about unsafe working conditions related to COVID-19. It’s unclear when all of those will be resolved, if ever, as a recent OSHA report found that only 2 percent of the total caseload has been addressed so far.
For federal workers, the situation is also dire given that the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, which is charged with “protecting federal employees against improper employment-related actions,” has not had enough sitting members since 2017 to hear any of the 3,071 petitions currently pending.
Whistleblowers, meanwhile, are doing their jobs. They are insiders who are sharing their knowledge and experiences with those on the outside of their industries. The laws and systems set up to protect whistleblowers from retaliation, unfortunately, have failed them.