It's really important to realize, whistleblowing
is in America's DNA.
It has been a concept since before the Constitution
itself was ratified.
The first whistleblower protection law in
the United States was passed in 1778 during
wartime.
It is used to bring down the first commodore
of the United States Navy, Esek Hopkins.
Hopkins was a Rhode Islander.
He was someone who had been involved in the
slave trade, as the Brown Project illustrates
quite clearly.
And people think that the reason that Hopkins
was removed from his post is because he was
torturing British prisoners of war -- and
he was doing that, as the whistleblowers Marvin
and Shaw revealed, but that was just the tip
of the iceberg.
The real reason he was removed -- and research
in digital archives shows to be so -- is that
he was defying George Washington who was telling
him to engage the British in the Revolutionary
War effort in certain positions on behalf
of the Congress of the United States, and
Hopkins was instead directing his fleet to
The Bahamas to serve, effectively, Rhode Island
elites who were still very much involved in
the slave trade even though slavery was illegal
at this time.
So I think this is a really interesting example
because it shows how important the founders
saw fighting corruption right when you first
see it.
Whistleblowing is a cousin of civil disobedience.
Hannah Arendt thought that civil disobedience
was a uniquely American institution, very
much connected to Tocqueville's emphasis on
the importance of civic associations and the
vitality of American democracy.
Civil disobedience is different than whistleblowing
because civil disobedience is about highlighting
unjust laws, and you break the law in order
to get public opinion on your side to believe
the law is unjust and should be overturned.
Whistleblowing is different because it's not
about breaking unjust laws.
It's about serving the rule of law itself.
So whistleblowers expose illegal or improper
conduct that is at odds with self-government.
So whistleblowing is related to civil disobedience,
but they're two distinctive enterprises.
You might say that civil disobedience starts
with outsiders and slowly gains popular support
and that's how change comes about, whereas
whistleblowers are insiders who see behavior
that they believe is improper and expose it
either to the authorities or to the press.
And this is a really important way of keeping
our elites honest because if we don't have
honest elites, you can't have self-government.
You can't have liberal democracy.
The first whistleblower protection law actually
says you have an obligation to report misconduct
when you see it, and this is intimately connected
to democracy.
And I really believe the Founders were right
on that point, and you can see this in a number
of examples today where, you know, take the
#MeToo movement.
That very much started with insiders exposing
horrific misconduct.
And then slowly you saw through social media
that actually -- I think it's some statistic
like 40% of women on Facebook came forward
with #MeToo, 'this has happened to me as well.'
But that started with elites pointing out
that this has happened and it's wrong, and
that rallied all sorts of other people to
say, 'Hey, wait a minute.
I might have kept quiet about that.
I might have thought that was partially my
fault, but you know what?
It's not my fault.'
And that to me is also an instance of whistleblowing,
and these are important if we think that democracy
is something that belongs to all the people,
not just some of the people.
