Focus 580; Whistleblowers

In this part of focus 580 we're going to talk about whistleblowers. Sometimes all that stands in between the public and institutions both private and public could be one of the other institutions that break the law sometimes all that stands in between the public and these institutions is the conscience of one employee. However deciding to be a whistleblower can be very difficult. As our guest points out this morning in fact it can be the most important decision that an individual ever makes. And as we know there are certainly plenty of examples at the personal costs for these people can be very high. In this our focus 580 We're talking with Tom Devine from the Government Accountability Project based in Washington D.C. He's the legal director and co-founder of gap. He's been working as a whistleblower advocate now for more than twenty five years. He's the author of a book that's published by the Government Accountability Project titled The whistleblowers Survival Guide. He served as counsel on every major whistleblower law passed at the federal level since the 80s. He's also author of the whistleblower provisions of the

Organization of American States anti-corruption law and he regularly appears before audiences all over to talk about whistleblower protection and also issues of occupational free speech and national security he is based in Washington D.C. this morning he happens to be in California. He's talking with us by telephone. And as always questions from people who are listening are certainly welcome. The only thing we ask is people just try to be brief so that we can keep the program moving but anybody is welcome to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Mr divine. Hello. Howdy. Thanks for talking with us. I thank you for having me. Maybe we should give you the opportunity just a little bit at the beginning here to talk some more about the Government Accountability Project. Wes sure and I'm glad we were in an I think or they grow side and I don't want to hide anything but I don't want to waste too much time on the interview on the app where a nonprofit nonpartisan public interest organization I

reason to be is supporting one subplots and this is a term that some of us like beauty or truth that's in the eye of the beholder. But but what we mean the people that we champion are employees to exercise free speech rights to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust. And usually there are abuses the power they can only continue because they're being conducted in secret. There's so indefensible that if. Folks who are affected by it were aware of what's going on it would have to stop and we do it in four ways. One is just representing clients like regular trial lawyers in hearings to defend their jobs when when they're fired or harassed a second is following through on their dissent. What they were challenging is improper and all too often the whistleblower gets sucked into its struggle for survival for professional survival we. We nickname it. The sound of professional

suicide. Or And we call whistleblowing committing the truth because you're treated like you committed a crime and the point of the dissent gets lost in the in that struggle in. We do open up investigations to expand their their beachhead into the false story. The third thing that we do is. Work very very hard to try and strengthen the laws protecting freedom of dissent in public policy context and actually that's why I was pleased to be able to talk with your listeners this morning. There's a very very striking anomaly in our country that corporate workers as a result of Enron and MCI had scandals. You have probably the front strongest free speech rights in the world now and they've always been.

A little better than than serfs if they were union labor labor management contract. They they could be fired. Well I mean they didn't have any free speech rights so you might as well have been a totalitarian society. But now they can go to court and have jury trials if they're harassed for defending the shareholders against misconduct that would that would threaten investments threaten stock values or really any significant misconduct. But the government workers are absolutely the opposite. They have a Whistleblower Protection Act which was passed in 1989 and on paper with the strongest free speech law in history and. Thanks to a very almost obsessively hostile activist court with a monopoly on judicial review and being subjected to kind of minor league bureaucratic boards for their day in court.

It's been it's become a Trojan horse and whistle blower protection act for federal workers is creating more victims than it helps it's a trap and a group which for I for years to get Family Test in fact it was kind of my professional baby back in the 80s. When my baby grew up to be Frankenstein we have to warn people against asserting their rights because the finish themselves off if they do. There have been people who have been whistleblowers in in government and in the private sector and there are some names that may be you know some people will recognize everybody from probably one of the most famous federal whistle blower's Ernie Fitzgerald who did that he worked in the Pentagon and blew the whistle about problems with procurement and then you have guys like Jeff why again who was that scientist who worked for the tobacco company and and blew the whistle about what they knew about the dangers of smoking and his his story went on to become a book and

then went on become a movie. So there are examples here and there of different people different circumstances public sector private sector. What is though. Is there something in fact that they all have in common and what is it that. Prompts them to do this and they must have the knowledge that it's not going to be easy for them. I think what they all have in common you could describe on two levels. One is that they're exercising freedom of speech to challenge conventional wisdom whether it's the party line or eye view and Copernicus and Galileo. This was a blur as for challenging the idea that the world was flat and the earth was the center of the universe and they got the whistleblower treatment too. But the other thing that they have in common is that. They just can't live with keeping quiet about something they know they can't. Keep their mouth Shaq can't keep it to themselves and live with themselves

and their motives can be from the novelist to the basest. Sometimes they just can't keep quiet because they want to get revenge against someone or they want to use their knowledge to help them in power themselves. Other times there are people who are willing to risk everything for the values that they've been raised with kind of like the people who are religious people who live their church values every day of the week instead of just on Sundays. And. It's it's there's really no way to. Stereotype generalize that a whistleblower is necessarily a hero or or a jerk. It's but it's part of what makes us human in retaliation. On the other hand as I've long ago stopped thinking with this is something that's just evil that you harass

somebody who exposes the cover up. It's like the institutional equivalent of an animal instinct when when an animal is threatened it tries so eliminate the threat and. If someone hits me slugs me I don't think you know maybe I have that coming or what's the lesson I could learn from it. Marian my reaction is to Karabakh eliminate the threat and I also want to get even and this is just this is life that people are going to to challenge the conventional wisdom in science happens throughout throughout history. And that they're going to be taking a lot of risk whenever they do that whenever they see a challenge for the crowd or what the people who have power are saying. And boy what a tough decision. It's one of those life's crossroads decisions that you'll never be the same again. It's. It's for better or worse and

I've seen people who have they they've grown and blossomed because they they knew who they were. They knew that they could count on themselves to be true to to their values and that they overcame fear too in order to stand up to something that was wrong. And sometimes regardless of the result they end up that way. There's other people who are just ruined by it. They lose their their professional lives. Their bank accounts their their family and that's a very common break up from the stress of your whole world caving in have nervous breakdowns. Many many can just be better for the rest of their lives because they did the right thing and this is what this is the way the world treated them. And it's it's one of those. It's why. Those. Moments in life where you decide what values are going to define my life versus what's cheap

talk what's just lip service. Is it ever possible for a whistleblower to remain anonymous. Oh absolutely in fact. Another book that I coauthored is called The Art of anonymous activism and Deep Throat was one of the most effective whistleblowers in history were asked of scratching their heads and speculating about who that person was. Oftentimes you can be much more effective being anonymous rather than just kind of publicly being in the face of whoever's misconduct you're trying to challenge because once a whistle blower. It exposes him or her and stuff it triggers a hollow series of almost predictable automatic institutional reactions and besides at a minimum making the person a pariah and putting them under investigation and everything

else. But the whistleblower is liable to be isolated from coworkers and cut off from the evidence be out of the loop and it's impossible to turn information into into power to make a difference. When you stop having that information in a you go from being an insider like Jeffrey Y again to being the outsider who nobody tells anything to so it can cripple your effectiveness. And this is a another very personal choice that we help people make at the Government Accountability Project do they. They want to take the risk of being exposed. Sooner or later they'll probably have to come out of the closet and bear witness and give testimony at some point if if they're willing to accept that inevitability that at what point do they stop being confidential and maybe stop having the inside sources of information and

evidence flowing to them. There is many people who just. They want to get something off their chest but they don't want to risk Bernard. They don't want to become an outcast among many of their peers and friends and coworkers. And for them the right thing to do might be just calling a confidential hotline. They're not very effective because it's hard to have any follow through but at least they have a clean conscience and get it off their chest and then they can move on from from something very personal choice and we don't try to tell people which choice to make we we try to make sure that they have their eyes open for whatever they choose. And I tell you the reason we wrote that book The Art of anonymous activism is because the federal laws are. Such a caricature. They're like 1984 you know some of the things that the political critics talk about now with

peace being war. You know her there. It's. It's hopeless to try to defend yourself under the free speech laws for government workers that you're virtually guaranteed that you're going to spend two or three years of your life just dragging out and reliving this nightmare and you're not going to wake up from it and probably forty or fifty thousand dollars in attorney fees in order to get a guaranteed ruling that you had it coming in in endorsement of whatever harassment that you are trying to challenge some fact that's that's happened 94 out of 95 times in the court with a monopoly on judicial review sense. Congress passed the strongest free speech line in history on paper it's one of these real anomalies and our group sadly our job is to blow the whistle on the lie that we helped to get past

that we allowed the campaign to get past. Because it's just been totally twisted and guided in its implementation. We have a caller. I will get right to in a moment for everyone else I would like to introduce Again our guest maybe just. We're talking this morning with Tom Devine he is the legal director and the co-founder of the Government Accountability Project it's based in Washington D.C. It's the nation's leading whistleblower organization was founded in 1977 and among other things they're interested in educating for occupational free speech they've also been involved in litigating whistleblower cases and publicizing the concerns of whistleblowers. And if you have questions you can certainly call us we do have someone here ready to go on our line number one. A caller here in Champaign County. Hello. Good morning. I say your name is associated with a corporate responsibility project to end. I'm wondering how philosophically you can time together in the sense that you know we have this campaign of

privatization and one of the you know publicly traded companies are regulated governmentally So there's there's that entree but I wanted you to talk about that but also if you could get to some specifics about your work with the whistleblowers I think both corporate and governmental in the monumental scandal in Iraq which I can't get so. Grub has visuals in the billion dollars unaccounted for in Iraq. I don't know why I think I can imagine that perfectly clearly but if you would talk about both those things I'm glad too. In that gap we don't care which bureaucracy is selling out the public whether it's government or corporate. But there are a tremendous amount of abuses in the corporate sector and for example we. Represented whistleblowers who are challenging nuclear power plants under construction in

the 80s that were accidents waiting to happen. And take 50 to 100 affidavits from whistleblowers who are telling the truth about the way these things are really being constructed and it led to the government turning on the corporations that they had kind of been colluding with and died with in requiring such major repairs so that the plants would be off of that. The utilities actually would convert them to other sources of energy like gas gas plants or call fired facilities. We helped whistleblowers set toxic incinerators that were burning dioxin and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury and horrible poisons and PCBs. Right next to churches and school yards in important areas. Thanks to those whistleblowers the plants were

relocated but the incinerators were relocated or they were they were shut down. In the area of. Meat and poultry inspection we represent corporate workers all the time so that things like the Jack in the box scandal tragedy don't become that. They say it's the rule rather than the exception in thanks to those corporate web suppliers. We've we've stopped or we've stopped our country has stopped. Deregulation of government approved food where there are big corporate corporate Einar systems vouching for the USDA seal of approval on four occasions since 1981 when we we first started working with corporate suppliers there. Now what you said about Abu Ghraib is very. Very insightful because I was a whistleblower who exposed human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib after the the hong pemmican

public information apparatus that they didn't know anything about it in whole government agency was deceiving our Congress in one. You know when she committed the truth in a nightmare that made a caricature of the point of our stated reasons for being in that country was was exposed and that the soldier was operating without any rights. There's a Military Whistleblower Protection Act for the group to pass but you don't have any rights for him. Making disclosures through the chain of command under the military lights it's like a lot of these lies they have they're so chock full of loopholes that I'd say it's kind of like driving down a road with more potholes and pavement than in your day in a row in your transmission or your career in that little post being closed thanks to the Abu Ghraib with supply. The Senate is said that now you have free speech rights for

challenging military misconduct to your commanding officer or to your superior officer. If there were death threats against the guy actually in his community too so he actually is suffering from the repercussions but I want to also want to do if you could get at the the corporate malfeasance in the Iraq that has to do with you know the amount of money that's being scamming and there were specifically some insiders in Halliburton who who did come forward but I haven't heard anything much more about them and I'm just wondering. Whether you have any you know anything specific on that. I guess I'm going up and down with the rest. Thank you for your work. Oh thank you for caring and Halliburton with suppliers in Iraq. Illustrated a real phenomenon of fraud in government contracts. And actually that's the one area where the lies working

for whistleblowers wanting to challenge that type of fraud is something with noble roots from from where you have been where I came from Illinois. A lot of it was called The Lincoln Lawyer. The false claims act as its official title and that allows private citizens to blow the whistle with deeds more than just making noise. They can go to court in on behalf of the Treasury and behalf of of our country sue government contractors who engage in fraud. And it's. It was kind of its genius as it combines. Doing doing well and doing good. If they prevail in the West obliviously that they get to keep anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the recovery to the taxpayers. This was first passed during the Civil War by President Lincoln because defense

contractors were just too shoddy then and they are now and there are too many union troops getting killed by their own weapons backfiring and are not working in life and death situations. And so he got this law passed to basically deputized the citizens to go to court and challenge fraud and over the years that it got eroded like most of them. It's pretty much irrelevant. It was revived in the 1980s by Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. Our neighbor and liberal democratic. Anderson from California Howard Berman Senator Grassley is a Republican senator and since the lie was born again it's been the most effective anti-fraud statute on the books. Just to give you a flavor.

In 1985 before it was revived before this was was with modernized the Justice Department had the civil division and collected 27 million dollars from fraud in government contracts. It was a big year for him. They usually would collect like seven to nine million. One of the first 10 years after the FOSS Claims Act was was revived that average went up to 300 million dollars a year. It's a real house the Buddhist one. We deputize the whistleblowers gave him franchise them to follow through in court. Then the last three years the recoveries have been over one billion dollars a year. Last year alone in one Medicare case. The recovery was 1.5 billion hours in. This just shows how much of an impact these folks can hear. Your example sir actually is very

insightful of the challenge that we face right now. However helping whistleblowers they are sponsored by what gaps sister organizations the Project on Government Oversight you can see are their testimony and statements on their website Pogo dot org. Which reminds me to tell you about our two in with the border rights campaign where we're working whistleblower singular dot org. But they weren't allowed to testify in Congress. The chair of the House Government Reform Committee Tom Davis declined to allow them to to bear witness in the hearings. Mr. Davis who is the gatekeeper for him whether the whistleblower will be modernised in make credible again in the House of Representatives. And if the jury is out whether he's going to allow the legislation to even have a vote or have a vote in the form that it's been

approved in the Senate committee. The campaign to restore. You're a genuine whistleblower protection law for government workers. It's been going on for about five years now and. Won't get too bogged down here a bit but separately describe why this is creating so many victims. But after a lot of hard work the Senate Government Affairs Committee last month voted passed unanimously. Everyone from people like Senator Sununu and Senator Bennett from the conservative Republicans to Senator Durbin and Senator Levin from the Liberal Democrats one of the heroes of it was Senator Fitzgerald of Illinois whose committee he had the subcommittee that he had to make the first approval in his staff worked very hard and they got it out of there Senator Susan Collins of

Maine another Republican sponsored and adopted the legislation. But. And we expect there to be a unanimous Senate passage of the law soon and it closes all sorts of loopholes that of deprived people like National Security Whistleblowers trying to prevent another 9/11 from being unable to defend themselves when their security clearances are called which is a great way to brand somebody a traitor and they can't really even defend themselves with the blower law doesn't apply there to overturning the hostile decisions that have made the current law just a nightmare. And we haven't gotten the first ballots in the House of Representatives in Chairman Davis's staff Is it sad that they want to work on this. But the only thing they have. They've expressed any openness to would just be sort of window dressing. And so. There is a real need for folks like yourself and

everyone else listening to this show to get in touch with their congressman. The Senate we're doing real well they're going to pass a strong whistleblower law for government workers. But in the house that needs to be somehow the pressure in Congressman Tim Johnson can make a difference if you let him know you expect it of him that the House of Representatives you want him to make sure that the Government Reform Committee and the leadership Mr. Hastert find time to vote on the Whistleblower Protection Act. It's been nicknamed the Taxpayer Protection Act when it was passed before it's just been so effective going after fraud and waste and the only way this law won't get restored is if it's killed in the back rooms by politicians who just try to pretend it doesn't exist or say we don't have time for it. If it's passed unanimously in the past

and doesn't take long to take a half an hour to give rights to the people who are sticking up for the taxpayers second they're next in one of the real lessons I've learned that the Government Accountability Project is it's not realistic. Expect government workers to defend the public. If they can't defend themselves. The profiles in courage they're the exception not the rule. And every year there's about a half a million government workers who witness government illegality or waste mismanagement that cost the taxpayers over half a million dollars just from their personal observations and they remain keep their mouth shut. They remain silent observers in a major reason. If they can't defend themselves they stick their necks

out for this and start getting harassed and people like to become writers. So get in touch with with with Congressman Johnson. You can reach him at 4 0 3 4 6 9 0 in his district office and I guarantee you if he hears from 20 to 30 people listening to this program he's going to get on the phone to Chairman Davis and say what's holding up the Whistleblower Protection Act. You can make a difference. Well we have another caller here to talk with someone listening this morning in her balance and we'll go there one number. Oh yeah I was wondering about. Well first I'd like to say that the sun like you believe in team playing too much. Well being a little facetious there since I believe in your cause. But I would just want to know what you might say it sounded like you've kind of addressed that by saying it doesn't. It doesn't really apply. But the most interesting whistleblower to

me in the last few months has been that little adman. She says she knows about you know that the FBI knew that that there are real plans in place to attack the US with aircraft months before the strike. Strikes happen and you tell us anything about her situation that you might know about now going up unless and thankful absolutely Shay's classic illustration. What we call the Paul Revere whistle blowers. And since 9/11 a majority of it we to mainly how people who are challenging environmental misconduct and consumer safety issues consumer protection but since 9/11 there is just a surge of national security whistleblowers who pretty obviously were motivated by by patriotism and we

call them the power of their whistleblowers because they really have been using free speech to exercise the freedom to protest there. They illustrated a number of very important value of free speech. The freedom to warn and they have been warning for years that the terrorists are coming or not ready or not prepared. And we've helped folks cross the border on the set of nuclear power plants who reveal their nuclear weapons facilities that a year after 9/11 we still haven't even have any contingency plans to if a plane crash. Then to Los Alamos the capital of nuclear weapons development in the world. I didn't even have a plan for it or at the airports. They have been warning

for four years that we are sitting ducks to anybody who wanted to hijack a plane and in fact it was a blur that kind of teamed up with a local television station in breach security at the same gates that the hijackers used on 9/11 a few months before the tragedy and the FAA declined to do anything that would interfere with the airline's carrier's schedules. They made so much noise about it. It just goes across the board with these type of whistle blowers. Miss Miss adman's is has a very very very honorable gutsy colleague named Colleen riling. You may remember was one of the persons of the year. But two years ago for Time magazine. A year and a half ago and miss rowing is working very hard with us to try and

get the whistleblower rights restored for for government workers she had no idea the vacuum of freedom that she was. And when she exercised her right to to warn Congress to to alert Congress that that we've missed an opportunity in what she said about team playing is very gets right to the heart of some of the contradictions involving whistle blowing. But you know it's most whistle blowers. They're they're doing this as part of their duty on the team or to defend the best interest of the team they're not trying to bring down the corporation that they're working in or reduce the budget of the government agency where they're at. They think their organization is going to get in trouble if it continues to cover up

abuse. This is the power that are betraying its mission and I really agree with them. Teams ultimately don't do very well by cheating and you know you've seen that with the track stars whose careers are over because they tried to cheat. And most whistleblowers are trying to act to defend the organization where they work to defend its integrity. In C that it really gets the results that it promises to the public. But it puts them in the position of being branded as traitors. People who aren't team players too and that's unfortunate and sometimes that's true. You know it takes all kinds I was saying earlier some to some people I was a part of because they're you know kind of cantankerous father type A personalities. But so often they're sticking their necks out in the most painful choice of their life in defense of the team that they're part of because they're afraid that otherwise it's going to be ruined.

We have about 15 minutes left and I just once again people who anybody might have tuned in that our guest this morning is Tom divine He's the legal director and co-founder of the Government Accountability Project was founded in 1977 it's a nonprofit public into. Organization it's the nation's leading whistleblower organization they're interested in promoting government and corporate accountability by advocating for occupational free speech and also by litigating whistleblower cases. Questions welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 1 4 5 5. You talked about the fact that there is this. This legislation that was passed to try to provide some protection for federal government employees and the problems with it and how now you're trying to strengthen that or strengthen their rights by legislation that's has come out of committee in the Senate. Probably you say you think probably will pass in the Senate but the problem isn't in the house. I'm curious about what the what the situation is for state

employees in is that just a matter of legislation from one. Stay tuned to another are there states for example that have whistleblower protection for their workers. Yes. There are over 30 states have whistleblower protection for government workers. And actually 40 have corporate rights through the common law system they call it the public policy exception to the doctrine they kind of hit or miss the boundaries of those rights. But the states do and that's another major reason in the NRA passed a false claims that if any anyone is listening to your program and they get evidence of fraud in the state government contract they would have the right to go to court and challenge it and share in the recovery. If they they went but that's another reason we really need to pick to restore legitimacy to the fado because it's being copied by the states in so many instances and let me just give you a flavor of

why the federal law is turned into a bad joke. It's like a magnet for cynicism among government workers. PAULSON And there are so many who oppose I wouldn thing is just it's too long of a list but a few of them. That's a whistleblower law doesn't apply in the law papers as it applies to any disclosure that's genuine evidence of serious misconduct. And he doesn't count if you're talking to a coworker. Which means your country isolated you can't get supporting witnesses. It doesn't count if you talk to your boss which is where 95 percent people naturally guns a boss a guy problem away you waive all your free speech rights if you do that it doesn't apply. For information that you learn about from doing your job which is supposed to be the point of government workers being able to be public servants instead of bureaucrats that's the personal eccentricity that you learned about in your off time.

In the real kicker for me is that it doesn't apply. If anyone has ever raised the issue before. So if you're not the Christopher Columbus of your scandal you proceed at your own risk. You can't go after ingrained corruption. You can't be a supporting witness for a pioneer whistleblower and then that the people who exercise their rights in a screen that for that reason they're the lucky ones you get passed out and go out with the flu palls you're going to get a ruling that you deserved to be fired. And that's because this court is rewritten the congressional statute the language the language of the law Congress passed said you have free speech rights if you disclose information that you reasonably believe is evidence of a list of misconduct. That's fair and and it's it's a very common boundary. But this court the federal circuit court of appeals level before they get to that you first have to

overcome a presumption. Boy you know legally they have a word's presumption. Trigger is the Pandora's Box of Sophos tree lawyer Sophos tree. And the presumption is that the government acts correctly fairly lawfully in good faith which is now a bit hard to swallow. But the real kicker is the proof you have to present to overcome that presumption is irrefragable proof. In fact I've never heard of that were before. We've tracked it down to Webster's fourth nuclear and irrefragable means incontrovertibly uncontestable undeniable. We're incapable of being overthrown. In with the best that claim means. If the personal wrongdoer doesn't concern us.

You deserve to be fired for challenging whatever misconduct you witnessed in the personal run to a concensus who needs a whistle blower. This case came out in this this doctrine came out overturning an administrative ruling on behalf of a whistleblower who had challenged Air Force pork barrel that was so outrageous. The secretary of the Air Force agreed in Las Vegas and Las Vegas they suspected of it. Terry of the Air Force the grading caps of the pork barrel program. But now the local base commander was a poor sport in excess of this. The Professional the sexpert out into the desert 70 miles outside Las Vegas the man it's time for a little 10 office doesn't strip them of our duty as something they sent him out there and paid him to sweat like a professional solitary confinement you know. The court ruled he had it coming because he didn't have irrefragable proof in this legislation to restore the Whistleblower Protection Act with sweep that

aside and establish normal access to court so that government workers weren't prisoners. A system that is pretty much structured not to create victims if say they defend the public. A minute from now on in my daily conversation I'm going to see if I can work irrefragable and had a good word. How much of this do you think is particularly the reaction of the federal courts. Does it have something to do with the perceived need for secrecy in government and that that is somehow tied particularly to concerns about national security. Since the 11th. September 2000. Oh I don't think there's any question about it. But this one card it's got a monopoly on federal workers rights is way out of sync with the courts that have done rulings for the corporate

whistleblower laws. The normal national judicial system in fact we did a study and almost everyone who had one in peals quote of the corporate whistleblower law would have lived under that the doctrines of the for the federal workers and but the courts pick pick us up at the state and state level in this supposed level. It's sort of what defines the rules of the game and you may apply them against the state government workers. Wow. But absolutely in response to your question. The fact that it is so it is maybe more difficult even now than it has been in particular because of the attitude of the courts toward whistleblowers. Has that has that had a noticeable effect on the number of people who were willing to do it to be whistleblowers. You know that's the interesting thing is it has gone down but the information is still out there and in fact the government's

really cracking down on it. One of the big lessons we have learned that gap is even in terms of national security secrecy can be a very severe threat to national security of course sometimes that's good. But everything has to have a balance. If it's too far in one direction it becomes a caricature. And. Secrecy threatens national security when it covers up bureaucratic negligence that sustained our vulnerability to terrorist in the federal government is cracking down more and more ugly repressive fashion to defend secrecy than at any time since the 1970s when it came to the Government Accountability Project in fact you may remember when the FBI whistle blower Colleen riling was on the cover of TIME magazine. So it's the year of the whistleblower in an ad gap we've nicknamed

2004 the year of the gag in then give you a few examples of government ploys who tried to warn the public in these people were often threatened with determination or placed under criminal investigation for leaking information. One example was. The prescription drug where the chief Medicare actuary was told he would be fired if he communicated with Congress. The true price tag of that which is one hundred forty billion dollars more than the government was. The administration was telling Congress and that will only pass by a couple of votes I doubt it would have passed if they had known the truth. Or there is an FDA scientist who tried to blow the whistle indent successfully and near approval of anti depressants for teenagers that were causing them to commit suicide rather than hopping them deal with their emotional problems. He was literally given a

script that he had to read or one of the FDA scientists was given a script to read in response to any public questions about this drug and it was just propaganda. Well it. The Department of Agriculture the meat inspectors I'm back in the area and so I've been exposing them. The much publicized reform against mad cow disease is actually structured to miss the worst suspects in that the cows that even fit into the narrow criteria are next sale is being tested or at TSA the Transportation Security Administration that guns are still getting through the airplanes despite everything they make us do in the long lines and taking off our shoes. They haven't made the reforms to keep guns off the planes or to keep explosives from being smuggled in through the cargo. At the Department of Energy they they had all these cost and to prove that nuclear weapons plants could defend themselves against

a terrorist attack in thanks to whistleblowers in the M.E. the government passed with flying colors. Terrorists every time. But whistleblowers expose that. As a matter of fact the tests were read right. Are you still there mister. Well we appear to have lost the guest but we're pretty much at the end of the show anyway so maybe we'll just say we we want to make sure that we thank him for his time we've been talking here this morning with Tom Devine. He's a legal director co-founder of the Government Accountability Project in Washington D.C. founded in one thousand seventy seven it's an organization that represents whistleblowers and if you are interested in finding out more about Gap the Government Accountability Project you can and if you have access to the Internet you can look at their website which is w w w dot whistleblower dot o r g you can find out all about them and their activities.

Our guest Tom Devine is author of a book that's published by the Government Accountability Project. It's entitled the whistleblower's Survival Guide.