Hello people. We Fauci won’t have much longer to kick around. But we will always have Covid.
The clear view
In late 1969, Daniel Ellsberg made a bold and consistent decision. As an employee of the RAND Corporation, a US government contractor, he had access to classified documents that contradicted top officials’ promises that the Vietnam War could be won. He secretly copied the documents and tried to make them public the following year, first through Congress and then through the press. In June 1971, The New York Times published the first of a series of articles on what would become known as the Pentagon Papers. The government filed a lawsuit to suppress them, and as the case went through the courts, Ellsberg leaked the papers to The Washington Post. By this time, the FBI was after him, although he had not publicly admitted his role as a whistleblower. He came clean just before the Supreme Court ruled… Time to continue publishing on June 30. Ellsberg was arrested and tried for theft and conspiracy, only to be released for government misconduct.
Earlier this year, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko made his own decision. A security expert handpicked in November 2020 by then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, to address the company’s chronic shortcomings was fired last January after clashes with current CEO, Parag Agrawal. Zatko believed that Twitter’s management did not take steps to fix the security vulnerabilities – and that Agrawal lied about those shortcomings to the board of directors, shareholders and regulators. Like Ellsberg, he decided to go public. Unlike Ellsberg, Zatko was able to use the services of a non-profit organization, Whistleblower Help, which was created specifically to help people like him and keep them out of legal trouble. After meeting him in March, a co-founder of the nonprofit John Tye agreed to work with Zatko.
Zatko and his associates devised a strategy and launched a coordinated campaign to expose Twitter’s alleged misconduct. They used a full rack of Scrabble tiles to file agency complaints… SEC, FTC, DOJ. Zatko met with the staff of several congressional committees and is scheduled to testify. Most dramatically, he and his team broke the news by orchestrating a leak of his complaints from one of the congressional committees. The recipients were The Washington Post and CNN, and their stories went live under a joint embargo on Aug. 23. Zatko gave interviews to both organizations, who treated him lovingly. The After photographer even made an artful shot of Zatko and his specular reflection, full of oracle vibes. (In contrast, Agrawal was depicted as gloomy about the grounds of an unnamed conference in a dark hoodie.)
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because another whistleblower, former Meta program manager Frances Haugen, announced a similar rollout last year. hair allegations, complete with agency and conference briefings and glamor photos on 60 Minutes and in The Wall Street Journal. And, of course, redacted documents leaked out just in time from a convention friend. No coincidence that her whistleblower herpa was the same as Zatko’s, John Tye.
Clocks of conscience have been around for as long as institutional crime has been around, but it’s kind of become a trend in technology. This is in part due to recent laws protecting whistleblowers in certain cases, especially when it comes to reporting corporate fraud to the SEC. But the phenomenon also reflects a workforce fed up with employers who have seemingly given up on their once idealistic principles. “Whistleblowing is a growth industry,” said Tye, who once briefed the NSA before co-founding his organization.
