Entrepreneurial Whistleblowing

Subtitle: A tale of two gentlemen

First lets think about entrepreneurism. Some examples:

* A small CD-ROM publishing company comes up with a nifty idea for putting medical journals on CD-ROM for doctors. Since, as the founder explained to me, in Saudi Arabia back in the 80's you could just not get current medical information. There was a time, Little Theorem, before the internet, nope, no google either. CD-ROMs were massive! 650Meg of data! So this was nifty but along came the internet and the web and well, you can tell the rest. That company was swallowed (drat missed my opportunity for some stock gains, will never ever make that mistake again, if I can help it).

* A trio (do startups always require a trio? I used to think so - the perfect triefecta of general manager/CEO, finance & sales guy, and technical genius). They escaped from the big corporate world of ATT to found their own tiny software company. Yes in fact we sold compilers under the Micrsoft label, once upon a time. I even saw Bill Gates walk across a crowded floor one time at one of those private high tech parties around Comdex (which used to be a big technical conference), and even heard he was a good dancer. This was before Melinda. Well I never did get to dance with him. Alas, that company was also swallowed, by a very-large-customer-headquartered-in-Cary-NC who still exists too!

So entrepreurial companies - people with vision, passion, and a desire to break with the big bad corporate world. No meetings allowed! Popsicles for everyone! Ping pong or may be laser tag on occasion! OK you get the picture: not held back from tradition, and in fact too impatient to wait on tradition. The desire to make-things-happen-right-now.

So lets see how entrepreneurialism can apply to whistleblowing, and the two gentlemen so subtitled: Mr. Drake and Mr. Manning.
One gentleman, Mr. Drake, took the prescribed route, reporting what he saw as un-lawful things (spying on people without getting official warrants) going on at the NSA through appropriate channels. The chain of command, congressional inquiry hearings. Years go by. Inaction results.

One gentleman, Mr. Manning, took the entrepreneurial road. Contacting Wikileaks about what he saw in Iraq as an Army Private First Class, as the un-lawful abuses of war. Prisoner abuse, with Americans complicit. Innocent civilians killed outright.

Both may serve jail time. One got his message across, and Wikileaks now has published over 300,000 documents which detail field reports on the abuses of war in Iraq. The other got lost in the bureaucracy (and eventually got his message across).

It is interesting that existing whistleblower laws, which aim to protect federal employees who report abuses within their federal systems from retaliation, exempt people in intelligence agencies. There is (was?) pending federal legislation to enhance whistleblower protection to cover intelligence employees as well. Write your congressperson about that, assuming they recover from lame duck November without being cooked or boiled..