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>> John Haskell: Welcome to the Library of Congress, everybody. I'm John Haskell, director of the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress. In the words of the charter, the Kluge Center was created, quote, "to reinvigorate the interconnection between thought and action through conversations and meetings with members of Congress, their staffs, and the broader policy-making community in order to bridge the divide between knowledge and power." On a day to day basis, what this means for us at the Kluge Center is that we support scholars in residence here at the library doing innovative and specialized work and we project scholarly work to a broader audience in events like this one. One of the most prestigious positions at the Kluge Center is the Cary and Ann Maguire chair, supporting exploration of the history of America, with special attention to the ethical dimensions of domestic economic, political, and social policies. The appointed scholar, appointed by the librarian of Congress, conducts research on the ethical issues associated with policy and government in the US or on the ethical implications of significant issues, events, and movements in US history. Each year, the Maguire chair participates in a public program to highlight his or her research at the library. This year, Carl Elliot, at the far left here, is completing his residency doing research on whistleblowing in research on human subjects. Today's event will be a freewheeling conversation with this esteemed panel probing the ethics and history of whistleblowing in the US. The Kluge Center has two events I wanted to alert you to that are coming up soon. One is an author salon event on January 30. Our NASA chair in scientific innovation and astrobiology, Susan Schneider, who's written a book that just came out this past fall at the Princeton University Press called Artificial You, which explores some of the implications of artificial intelligence. That's January 30 at 4:00 p.m. here at the library. Also, on February 19, Ivan Krastev, who was Kissinger Chair in International Relations at the Kluge Center last year, has a book coming out in the US called The Light That Failed, which is about some of the political effects of the breakdown of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. I also want to say a word or two about an important series that started at the library this past fall called National Book Festival Presents, which is an extension of the National Book Festival, which, as many of you know, is a one-day event over Labor Day weekend every year, and the library drew hundreds -- actually thousands of people to the library this fall for events featuring Andre Aciman with his follow-up book and also, actually, Neil Patrick Harris was here with children's books -- that drew quite -- actually overflow crowd -- and Karen Armstrong on more serious topics, on theology, also is coming, and there's events coming on February 6th and February 13th in the evenings in Coolidge Auditorium that will be announced in the next week or so, and please keep an eye out for that. Let me tell you a little bit about the three panelists. I've already mentioned Carl is the Maguire Chair in Ethics in American History right now here at the center for the next few weeks. He's been here about six months. He's professor in the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. Elliot is the author or editor of seven books, including White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, and Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. At Kluge, he's working on a book about whistleblowing and researches on human subjects, as I've mentioned. Carl writes in the popular press frequently, including in Atlantic and many other publications -- New York Times, Mother Jones, et cetera. Next to him, Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College. Currently she's at the Safra Center at Harvard, which is -- does work for people of all ages, actually, on civic education. Stanger's the author of Whistleblowers, a history of whistleblowing in the US which just came out last year, and One Nation Under Contract: the Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy. She will be the next Maguire chair in ethics and American history later this year. So she's already been appointed by the librarian, so no matter what she does here, she comes as the --
>> Emilia DiSanto: You're clear. [Laughter]
>> Allison Stanger: Please don't worry. You're fine.
>> John Haskell: Don't worry. She was just asking me about that. [Laughter] So we'll have a conversation up here, the freewheeling conversation I alluded to earlier, for the next hour or so, and then we'll reserve time for questions from the audience, so don't just burst forth with questions. There'll be plenty of time at the end, and we'll take those questions. So I wanted to start with some really basic things, and I'm going to go identify Carl to take the first question because I know Carl has talked about and written about the term "whistleblower." When did that first come into use?
>> Carl Elliot: No, I'm not a historian, so take this with a grain of salt. It's generally -- it's -- well, I would say it's often attributed to Ralph Nader, because Ralph Nader organized a conference in 1971 on corporate responsibility, and he spoke about whistleblowing there. If you look at his remarks, though, you'll see that he doesn't actually introduce the term as if it's new. It seems to have been something that was in the air, a term that people were using at the time. Charlie Peters and Taylor Branch wrote a book in which they described the term "whistleblower" -- this was in 1972 -- as a kind of conscious effort to put a positive moral spin on what had theretofore been seen as a harmful or morally negative action. You've got to come up with something. If you're not going to call them squealers or snitches or turncoats or Judases, you have to come up with something that sounds better, and so whistleblower is the term that --
>> John Haskell: So Allison, historically, what -- when, because your book talks about people doing that sort of thing, really, going back to the revolution, right?
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, I think the --
>> John Haskell: So what was the term used back in the old days, or has whistleblowers been around longer?
>> Allison Stanger: Well, my research would date the term back to 19th-century Britain, where it emerges for a referee blowing the whistle at a football or soccer match. You know, you've just violated the rules. Stop play. Let's assess penalties and move on. Or for a policeman blowing the whistle on a criminal. Stop. Cease and desist. Carl's right that it really emerges in the context of the American press in the 1970s. You can really track that using all sorts of nifty tools that Google provides, showing, you know, Google -- what is it called? Google Ngrams, where you can check the usage of words, and you'll see it explode in the 1970s, and of course if you would look at it for 2019, just [whooshing sound] [laughter] you define exponential growth, but the concept really dates back to the American Revolution. The first whistleblower protection law was really passed in 1778. That's before the ratification of the US constitution, and it's interesting to just look at that story. I don't know if you want me to tell a little story, or should we save the stories for later?
>> John Haskell: Well, yeah, do the story --
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: -- because this involves President Washington, right, even though he wasn't president yet?
>> Allison Stanger: Exactly. Well, it's the first law emerges because ten sailors blew the whistle on the first commander in chief of the United States Navy, a man by the name of Esek Hopkins, and they did so with a litany of complaints. He tortured British prisoners of war. That's sort of interesting. They were worried about, even in war time, that you shouldn't treat the enemy improperly, but if you look at some of the quotations, it's all the sort of quotations you might imagine about he had no moral compass, he believed there was no man that could ever -- who existed who could not be bought, he had no scruples. On and on. He used his office, his public office, for private gain, and indeed, what I show in my book is that people had focused originally just on this charge about torturing British prisoners of war, but in reality, Congress was really concerned about him abusing his public office for private gain. He was taking ships. Congress would tell him to send the US Navy, you know, to defend -- to engage the British and Chesapeake Bay, and he would instead defy those orders without sending anything back to Congress and take the ships to the Bahamas instead. Why? Well, Rhode Island, the state from which he hailed, was very much bound up in the slave trade, and there were commercial reasons for him to take ships elsewhere. There's a military history debate about this which we can talk about, but I see no evidence to suggest that you really had these compelling strategic reasons for the war effort to go to the Bahamas and not tell Congress where he was going, so, but so this really exists since the beginning of the Republic.
>> John Haskell: And so --
>> Allison Stanger: It's an American thing, not a partisan thing.
>> John Haskell: You know, it's funny. Carl brought up the negative connotation that the word --
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: If you look at -- if you look up in thesaurus.com here, here's what I came up. I mean all of the synonyms are blabbermouth, snitch. ^M00:10:00 They're that. I mean --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Rat.
>> John Haskell: -- there's none of them that has a great connotation. On the other hand, Time Magazine came up with -- had a cover story some of you probably saw very recently about how whistleblowers are the guardians of democracy. [Laughter] So I mean I guess it's somewhere in between, right, but I mean what's the sense? You guys all have a lot of experience with whistleblowers directly and of course the whole community and how people think about it. Is the word more often negative or not, or does it completely depend on who you're talking to?
>> Allison Stanger: I'll just -- yeah, I'll let you add onto this. Just it starts out as this American concept.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yes.
>> Allison Stanger: You know, it's we had the world's first whistleblower protection law, and then the United Kingdom passes some laws in the 1990s, so then it's seen as this Anglo-American idea, but just recently, European Union passed weeping whistleblower protection legislation just in October of last year. So now it's become really associated with the rule of law and keeping elites honest and sustaining democracy, but if you look at post-communist Europe, for example, when they first introduced the concept, all the words, they had to make up new words because it had negative connotations, which shows you that the idea of whistleblowing really presupposes that there's some ideals worth defending, that the regime stands for, something that's worth upholding. If it's an oppressive dictatorship, you know, reporting on misconduct is serving the authorities and is seen as a negative thing.
>> John Haskell: So let's get Emilia on this. So let's get on the ground now, [laughter] taking whistleblower --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yes.
>> John Haskell: -- complaints, and Emilia worked for Senator Grassley taking in whistleblower complaints for many years on the Hill. I think I forgot to read your bio, didn't I?
>> Carl Elliot: Yes.
>> Emilia DiSanto: I'm not the scholar.
>> John Haskell: Oh, yeah, so.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And I never wrote a book. Let me start there. [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: Let me make it clear. I've known Emilia for a long time. It was like, Well, everybody knows who Emilia DiSanto is, but --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: Emilia's career was on the Hill for many years. She's been in government service for 30 years and worked as the lead investigator for Senator Grassley on the Senate Finance Committee, which has a jurisdiction that's so broad, not that Grassley never necessarily sticks to jurisdictions, --
>> Emilia DiSanto: You're right.
>> John Haskell: -- [laughing] but even if he did, the jurisdiction is actually bigger than any other committee in Congress, one could argue, and also at the Aging Committee. Amelia also worked there, and it's -- and her time with Senator Grassley fielding whistleblower complaints and doing investigations, she worked in -- as assistant IG at the State Department most recently and was chief of staff and deputy IG at FHFA, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. So now I finally got your -- you can think about your answers. I finally got your bio in there. [Laughter] So what was it like taking them in? How did you make some decisions like with like -- what was your role exactly with the Senator?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Well, whistleblowers for the senator were sacred, and I think many people know very often somebody like Senator Grassley is known as the godfather of whistleblowers, and I think a lot of people knew that. When I came to the scene, you know, there were one or two a year. When I departed, I probably had close to 50, which went across the executive branch, but also included individuals from corporate America. So I found that whistleblowers could be anyone. Heck, I had someone's wife come and blew the whistle on her husband. Now I don't think they had a happy marriage, right? [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: Not afterwards, anyway.
>> Emilia DiSanto: But nonetheless, she came in as a whistleblower and reported him as defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, and that was always a lesson to everyone of a whistleblower can be anyone. Anyone. I've had nurses of physicians come in. I've had staff members in the executive branch regarding activities from an inspector general come in, had individuals come in regarding activities of secretaries of the various executive branch offices. And the rule was you take them all seriously. Didn't matter what, because whistleblowers, in the business I was in as an oversight professional, were absolutely critical because they allowed me to use my time and resources very efficiently and effectively because they could help me target an area, target a question, target an office and see whether or not the information that I was being provided was true and accurate and actionable, because if you have an office that's in trouble or you have an individual who's creating a problem, your duty is you want to fix it. That's an opportunity for improvement, whether it be in the executive branch or whether it be in the corporate sector. Does that make --
>> John Haskell: And so how did you separate the wheat from the chaff? Were there obvious times it was chaff?
>> Emilia DiSanto: It was very rare --
>> John Haskell: Or was there wheat and chaff at the same time? [Laughter] I mean what was the --
>> Emilia DiSanto: It was very rare that you had an individual come in as a whistleblower that had absolutely no information that was blatantly false. It was very rare. The question is how true was it, okay? It was a question of degree, and something that became very important was being able to understand the story, because sometimes people make stories, and they believe those stories, and from that story, being able to dissect out the facts, the facts that you can use to cause to be a catalyst for positive change, whether that -- again, that be in the executive branch or whether that be in the private sector. It didn't matter, but it took time and energy. I can tell you I had one whistleblower came in from the SEC one time, and I had put a -- I -- we always had a rule that we met with every whistleblower, anybody who claimed to be a whistleblower, and I had put 30 minutes aside just to assess what was going on, and we spent six hours with him, and we spent six hours with him because he also came in with 10,000 pages of detailed documentation regarding the situation that he believed to be true. So you always spend time with them, but as I said, rarely was it the case that the information was completely false and misleading. It was not the case, at least not in my experience.
>> John Haskell: So it might be useful for you to say -- you said people from the private sector coming in. You're sitting there in a congressional office. Congress in effect owns the federal government, as it funds and gives legal authority to everything the executive branch agencies do. So what business does Grassley have in getting into the private sector complaint? How did he look at that?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Well, if one dollar of federal funds was associated with that company, whatever it might be, we had the position that we had jurisdiction. You touch federal dollars, touch a federal contract, touch a federal grant, and I had never really been in the position where a corporation said, I'm not talking to you. I'm not listening to you. I'm not responding to you. You may be in a situation where you'd have to negotiate a bit regarding what the situation is, but typically -- typically -- they would work very hard to be forthcoming and cooperative to the extent possible, and that's when what I used to call we'd start dancing the tango. You know, we start dancing the tango and see what we can get, see if we could get to the bottom of something, and often the corporations, especially at higher levels, they were unaware sometimes of things that were going on within their own corporations. They didn't know. They were at a high enough level that those things did not lead up to them, so very often they would also become interested in something that was going on in their own organizations that they were completely unaware of. So as a general matter, I think the corporate sector was typically very, very cooperative, and quite forthcoming.
>> John Haskell: Allison, you said something to me once about whistleblowers sometimes coming to you, right?
>> Allison Stanger: Right. Oh.
>> John Haskell: And here you are.
>> Emilia DiSanto: You're the mother lode.
>> John Haskell: You're trying to mind your own business, [laughter] teaching bright young minds at Middlebury College and writing an occasional --
>> Emilia DiSanto: There you go!
>> John Haskell: -- article and book, and so what are people from the real world doing coming to you with their complaints?
>> Allison Stanger: Oh, you have no idea. I mean it's understandable because I published this book on whistleblowers that came out in September of this year, coincidentally the day that the impeachment investigations were announced. [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: And that was --
>> Allison Stanger: That was the publication date.
>> John Haskell: You knew that was going to happen.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, absolutely.
>> John Haskell: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> Allison Stanger: But no, my inbox has been flooded with people sending thousands of pages of documentation. Sometimes I'm a little afraid to even click on it because you never know who could be sending it to you and what it might do to your computer, but in most instances, it's people --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Real people. ^M00:20:01
>> Allison Stanger: -- who have real people who feel that they haven't been heard and are desperately trying to get someone to listen to them, and what I think was so compelling about the most recent whistleblower complaint, and you would be in a better position to judge this than I would be, given your experience, was that it was so well-written.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Oh, some of them are incredible.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, and if it's well-written, you have a much better chance --
>> Emilia DiSanto: They're thoughtful.
>> Allison Stanger: -- of being heard, and so I have tried to be helpful with some whistleblowers, and --
>> John Haskell: When you say try to be helpful, what do you mean?
>> Allison Stanger: Getting the story of the alleged misconduct as fact-based and lucid as possible, because if somebody has been through a great -- as a whistleblower, you go through an enormous emotional ordeal. We all know. If you go something like -- through something like that, you're trying to construct the narrative in your own mind. You know how you have something traumatic happen to you and you're trying to even talk about what happened to you? You can't even like put the pieces of the story together. That's very much a typical thing, but that is not the way to get the ear of someone to actually address your complaint, so one can be really helpful and consult them.
>> John Haskell: So what you do about it is to try to help them make it clearer, and are you --
>> Allison Stanger: If I -- if --
>> John Haskell: -- helping people connect people to journalists?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Collect [inaudible].
>> Allison Stanger: If -- well, if I can be helpful in any way, I will. Then you run into some flamboyant personalities, too, because most -- a lot of whistleblowers are difficult people. They're people who don't see the world like other people do. You know, the majority of people are looking at some practice saying, Oh yeah, that happens. Business as usual. And the whistleblower is the one that says, Well, wait a minute. No.
>> Emilia DiSanto: No.
>> Allison Stanger: You're violating your own rules. You're going against your own mission. That can't stand if we're going to stand for anything.
>> Emilia DiSanto: I think that's very true. They have a -- they're motivated by right and wrong. They're motivated by something that they're asked to do, something they're not asked to do, something they're asked to forget, something they're asked not to include, and they are shameful for that, and they are offended enough that they say, No, I'm not going to do that, and in some way, they're an employer's nightmare, okay, because an employer wants -- you know, a lot of employees believe you tell your boss what they want to hear, you drop what the boss wants dropped, you anticipate what the boss wants. You surely don't proceed and do what they don't want, but a whistleblower has sometimes a much higher calling of what they believe is right and wrong, recognizing that most individuals do not elect to take that path because it can be an incredibly difficult path, not only for you as the whistleblower, but for your family. I mean I have been up close and personal where individuals had their trash gone through, where they receive offensive phone calls at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning, where attempts to entrap them have happened. It is a very difficult road, and they often know that road, and despite that -- despite that -- they're going to proceed.
>> John Haskell: We'll pursue that a little bit in a second more. Carl, people have to come to you, with some of the things you've written, right?
>> Carl Elliot: Yeah, quite a lot. I have to say most of them aren't whistleblowers, though. Most of them are victims in some way, which is slightly different. I mean because I write about medicine and medical research and I often write for magazines, people want me to write about their cases, but it's very often people who want me to write about the ways in which they have been mistreated by the system in some way, or a member of their family, and very often, they're right, and I've written some of those articles, but whistleblowers -- in the realm of human subjects research, whistleblowers are very rare. The more typical case is that everybody involved stay silent. They know what's going on. They see what's going on. They see the research subjects are being lied to or mistreated in some way, and they say nothing, and then if it does come out, it's because either an investigative reporter hears something and digs into it or a family member goes to a lawyer or to the press or, rarely, to some kind of regulatory agency. I have to say the oversight bodies for human subjects research are so poor that that barely works.
>> John Haskell: And you all are -- and Carl's not talking specifically about whistleblowers, but you two talked about people and described them. You said, you know, the people who are operating on a right and a wrong, but I know I've read about and even perhaps one of you has suggested to me at some point that there are people who do the whistleblowing and they may have -- as you said, there are gradations of the truth, because they could be trying to cover up for something that they've done, too, right? I mean there can be some serious gray areas.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Absolutely. I mean there's always shades of gray, and I can tell you most recently, I've been involved with helping out where a whistleblower brought a matter up while at the same time trying to negotiate a settlement with an employer, and they're trying to increase the amount of that settlement by putting pressure elsewhere to make that happen. So there are definitely shades of gray that happens with a whistleblower, but at the end of the day, you cannot and you should not dismiss them for that reason because they're underlying facts. Again, looking into whistleblowers is a fact-based business. It's an evidence-based business. Somebody like me was not there to judge them -- wasn't there to judge them in any way -- but to assess the facts, find sufficient evidence to support those facts, and then make something better, be a catalyst for positive change, or expose a situation that needs to be corrected. That was my job, not to necessarily judge the individual that was coming to me for a myriad of reasons that can come up. Do you agree?
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah. Oh, no, absolutely. I mean the thing I -- when I speak about this topic that I stress and that's important for the current moment is that the motives of a whistleblower don't matter.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: It's the substance of the complaint. It's the facts.
>> Emilia DiSanto: The facts, yep.
>> Allison Stanger: And there's all sorts of examples in American history of whistleblowers with very mixed motives. You know, Mark Felt, who was responsible for -- you know, was Deep Throat in Watergate.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: He didn't have the purest of motives. In exposing that information, he was increasing the likelihood he could become not number two at the FBI, but number one. But it doesn't matter, because it was what he exposed that needed to be investigated that was relevant. So the motives don't matter.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And that's a very important aspect, especially if you're an oversight professional or you're an investigative professional -- that you must keep with the facts. It's about the evidence. Adjectives and adverbs, I always -- I used to say to people, have no place in that work. It's strictly the facts supported by documentation, supported by information by one or more individuals. I mean I remember one case where -- what did we have? It started with a letter, and next thing I knew, we had interviewed 63 different employees regarding the actions of a very, very high-level government official, okay? That was the situation. Now were people happy that we were doing that? I can tell you no, [laughter] they were not happy doing that, but was it the right thing to do under the circumstances, and then was the administration understood that an action needed to take place to correct the situation? Absolutely, and the reason that would happen is because you walked in there with factual information. If you didn't, you know, "I feel like they're not doing a good job. You know, people just don't like them." That's not what plays with whistleblowers. It's the facts, and it's those facts that end up being catalysts for positive change, whether it be removal of an individual, whether it be a change in their position, whether it be a change in a program, whether it be the elimination of a program. Could be anything, but that's what drives everything.
>> John Haskell: So Allison, you know, you've written for a broad sweep. ^M00:29:29 You've done this stuff. And Emilia, you're getting right to the point of like so the larger notion is to try to make things better. What specifically does a member of Congress do in order to make things better? It's all well and good for you to do an investigation of the FDA or -- these are just random examples -- or the Defense Department or anything else, but what the heck are you going to do about it? Like what specifically is done by Congress to make it better?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Congress can make life very difficult. I mean it's that simple.
>> John Haskell: So what do they do?
>> Emilia DiSanto: You have the power of the purse string. You have the power of legislation, and legislation -- you know, when they say legislation is sausage-making, it really is. You can start with a very, very good concept, you could start with a good idea, and then as it morphs, it turns into something -- a nightmare for an organization, a nightmare for someone or an organization or a program or, heck, for an entire agency. And so you have the power of the purse. You also have, you know, organizations don't want to be seen as poor or badly-run or mistreating individuals or trying to hide information. People don't want to be in that kind of environment. People don't want to work in those types of environment. So there is always the aspect of the reputational risk for an organization, too, that needs to be considered in those types of situations, and I'm sure many people here have heard about Dingle-grams and Grassley-grams, and those are the -- you know, the letters that come and ask for a whole lot of information and a whole lot of documentation, and so the executive branch, there truly is a balance that there is an oversight responsibility on the part of Congress. It is very, very well-established, and you use it, and again, it can be through legislation, it can be through forcing some type of guidance, it could be through the power of the purse, and the power of the purse definitely gets organizations' attention very, very quickly, and you can direct activities, or you can direct certain documentation, or you can direct monitoring. I mean you can go to an inspector general and ask that they conduct an audit or an evaluation or an inspection or an investigation, or you could go to the GAO and have an audit done of a particular area, or you could have someone simply monitor a program and report back to you regularly. So there's a lot of opportunities to try and help an organization along, see the light, and do the right thing.
>> John Haskell: Allison, what's a great example of an action taken based on a whistleblower that you covered in your books?
>> Allison Stanger: Oh, there's so many. I mean the Mark Felt example is an obvious one, --
>> John Haskell: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: -- which led to the removal of President Nixon from office, but just to show you that it's not a partisan issue, we can take the case of Boss Tweed, a Democrat who ran Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic Party organization. He was one of the most corrupt men imaginable, buying votes, skimming, all sorts of things, but the incredible thing about that corruption that's different perhaps from corruption today is he built New York City [laughter] -- Upper West side, the Upper East side, Brooklyn Bridge, laid the foundation for the Metropolitan Museum -- but when he was finally caught and exposed for his -- by someone who was mad because the check hadn't been cut for him, Sheriff Jimmy O'Brien, once the public heard about it, they were shocked. They were appalled. He was tried, he was thrown in prison, and he died thinking his life had been entirely a waste. What's different about corruption today, I think, is that people are aware it's going on. They think it's everywhere, and they don't quite know what to do with it. So that's something that's changed, and we could have a conversation about why that's changed, but I would hope we could get back on track and expect more from our elected officials.
>> John Haskell: I think you were on the Hill when I was in the late '90s. I remember Senator Roth did a whole series of hearings. They used to do like two weeks of hearings on the IRS, and they had whistleblowers, and these people had to be protected. Voice --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Scramblers, yes. We used to have voice scramblers, yeah.
>> John Haskell: Yeah, voice scramblers, and you couldn't see them. But the thing I remember is I worked on the House. I remember coming over to the Senate side and seeing the IRS commissioner who'd just been fried in a hearing coming out onto the steps of the Russell Building and instructing district offices to quit doing certain things. He was embarrassed so much by the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> John Haskell: -- sort of thing, where a hearing exposed things that they were doing.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Well, it is the reputational risk in that regard, and as I said, sometimes organizations, especially, you know, the upper management, are unaware. They are unaware because there are people who keep things from being exposed. I used to tell corporations that if employees from their offices were landing in my office, they were doing something wrong because if you were a corporation, you did not want anyone from your company to land in the -- in my office or in the office of any of my staff members because that immediately became a problem. It was that simple.
>> John Haskell: So Carl, you mentioned that the whistleblowing isn't happening in the human subject research very often. So what is it that's happening to discourage reporting of malfeasance? Why aren't people doing it there? That's sort of the other side of the coin.
>> Carl Elliot: Well, I was just about to break in and say I think I need to inject a note of pessimism into this generally, optimistic discussion. [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: Here's your opportunity.
>> Carl Elliot: Because -- I mean because what I see is nothing but blackness on the human subjects side of things. There are few whistleblowers. When they do speak out, they're vilified, they're punished. Even if they have some sort of nominal win, they feel as if it wasn't worthwhile. They feel as if the win was a loss, and the institutions don't change.
>> John Haskell: So when you're saying -- what are the institutions? Universities or --
>> Carl Elliot: Well, I would say my own university was the subject of one of Senator Grassley's investigations. [Laughter]
>> Emilia DiSanto: It's such a small world. [Laughter]
>> Carl Elliot: There were --
>> John Haskell: An Iowan just loves to make fun of Minnesota [inaudible]. [Laughter]
>> Carl Elliot: One of one of many such investigations over the years, and it didn't really change much, I have to say, at the University of Minnesota. I mean they survived it. There was some news coverage for a while. The press lost interest after a bit, and so did the public and, you know, I think the university got through it just fine.
>> John Haskell: What were they being investigated for?
>> Carl Elliot: This was a conflict of interest. The chair of spine surgery had been getting millions of dollars in undisclosed funding from Medtronic, a device manufacturer. But we've had human subjects abuse cases as well that have gone on sort of much longer without whistleblowers. I think the field of medical research is even harder than -- harder for whistleblowers to work in than corporate and government offices for a number of reasons. One, academic medicine is extraordinarily authoritarian, hierarchical sort of organization. It's much more kind of militaristic in its organizational arrangements, which I think makes it difficult. Secondly, there is a kind of elevation of the value of medical research so that it -- the sort of central dogma of academic medical centers that this is the highest human good that there is, and if you question that in some way, then you're treated like a heretic in the church. And the other thing that makes it very difficult is it's very -- it's hard to know who to blow the whistle to in human subjects research because the oversight body, the main oversight body, is the Institutional Review Board, the ethics committee in the academic health center, and usually they are complicit in the wrongdoing. So if you feel as if subjects have been abused and that abuse has been sanctioned by your IRB, who do you go to then? And there's some answers to that, but it's not entirely clear, and most people don't really under -- 
>> John Haskell: Is that a common thing in professional organizations? Let's just -- you know, any of them. Could be in the medical field. It could be in, you know, the realty business. ^M00:39:59 It could be anywhere that they're -- they police themselves, right? Like Allison and I are geeky political scientists. Political consultants police themselves, right?
>> Emilia DiSanto: That doesn't usually work so well.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah. They're -- yeah. [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: So there is no whistleblower protection act for political consultants on dirty tricks in campaigns --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> John Haskell: -- and that sort of thing. Is that the fundamental issue in the private sector?
>> Carl Elliot: Well, I mean I don't have that much of a point of comparison. I know how it would work in medical practice as opposed to research, but then you would go to the medical licensing board -- that's where your complaints would go -- or you would get a lawyer and file a malpractice suit, but neither of those things work for medical research. The licensing boards don't deal with research abuses, and lawyers tell me that civil suits, malpractice equivalent suits for research misconduct, rarely succeed.
>> John Haskell: So here's a really broad question. Maybe we can start with Carl and then see what the other two of you think. Why isn't it in an agency's or a firm's interest to root stuff out before it festers, or maybe to refine that, when do organizations support whistleblowing processes, and when do they not? And I guess this ties to what I've just been asking: Does it depend on the kind of organization? How do you answer that? I mean you have this black view of things, and I know Carl was [inaudible].
>> Carl Elliot: Well, where's the money in that?
>> Emilia DiSanto: He is blackness. All right.
>> Carl Elliot: I would say, yeah, Where's the money in being honest? I mean the organizations that I deal with with human subjects research are generally hospitals, academic health centers, and some of the more famous cases, like the Tuskegee syphilis study, it was the US Public Health Service, and the rewards for the people in those organizations are pretty clear. I mean they are academic advancement and, increasingly, financial rewards and, you know, if you work in an academic health center, then it's clear to you what your value is to the organization. It's bringing in revenue. I mean you bring in research grants, or you bring in money from seeing patients, and that doesn't necessarily line up with honesty or integrity.
>> John Haskell: But if the dirt comes out, --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: -- then your enterprise could be at a risk, couldn't it?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Your project. Right.
>> Carl Elliot: Well, you have an interest in keeping it quiet, but that's a different thing from doing the right thing, and I mean what you find with the people who do come forward and try to blow the whistle is that the institutions try to keep it quiet, but as far as doing the right thing, that's very rare. In fact, we have a mutual friend, Gary Ellis, who works here at the Library of Congress, actually, in the Congressional Research Service, who was the head of the Office for Protection of Research Risks in the 1990s.
>> John Haskell: That was at the NIH, yeah.
>> Carl Elliot: Right.
>> John Haskell: Yeah.
>> Carl Elliot: And he took the job very seriously and shut down research, something like 17 different academic health centers, or threatened to shut down research by withholding federal funding, and he wound up losing his job as a result of that. He was removed from his office for taking it seriously, and I -- when I was -- I had lunch with him the other day, and I asked him a question that I had asked other people who work in equivalent offices: Can you give me an example of a research institution that did the right thing in response to a research scandal, and by right thing, I mean compensate the victims, punish the wrong-doers, take steps to make sure that it doesn't happen again? And he couldn't come up with a single example. I can't come up with a single example, either. It is -- it appears to be universally the case that research institutions act badly and then try to cover it up. [Laughter] 
>> John Haskell: So much for higher education, right? [Laughter] So in the -- you know, the original question I just asked, Emilia and Allison, why -- you know, is there -- are there instances of either agencies or firms that you know of who have taken actions to sort of maybe encourage whistleblowing because it could -- at least internally, it could prevent a bad reputation?
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, no. I'll paint a slightly more optimistic picture [laughter] without disagreeing with you. I think the problem is that in academic institutions, they can just continue to go on by covering it up because they're optimizing for other things besides the bottom line even though the financial incentives are so large. But in the corporate world, you know, I think there's more of an appreciation for the value of whistleblowing simply because if you don't have a robust internal dissent channel, you are increasing the probability --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Risk.
>> Allison Stanger: -- that you're going to have -- yeah, you're going to have --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Risk.
>> Allison Stanger: -- much more risk --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Risk goes up.
>> Allison Stanger: -- to your brand, and in some instances, if you look at, say, the case of the whistleblowers with WorldCom and Enron, if anybody remembers those, if those whistleblowers had been listened to internally, those companies might still be around today.
>> John Haskell: How about Boeing, more recently?
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, that's another.
>> Emilia DiSanto: That's a nightmare.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: It's a nightmare.
>> John Haskell: That was an internal whistleblower.
>> Allison Stanger: Maybe you want to --
>> Emilia DiSanto: That was an internal -- well, I just want to add some additional light --
>> John Haskell: Yeah, of course.
>> Allison Stanger: Yes.
>> Emilia DiSanto: -- from Carl. [Laughter]
>> Carl Elliot: No friends.
>> John Haskell: Are you going to be on the dark side also?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Poor Carl. Poor Carl. One thing that did come out of the information regarding financial conflicts of interest with physicians and researchers is that the physician payment sunshine bill is something that did come out of that, and to get there was literally four years of work on the part of a really extraordinary O and I staff in finance and --
>> John Haskell: Oversight and investigation.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Oversight and investigate. I'm sorry. And that is the first bill that requires drug companies to report how much money they pay to physicians. That information didn't exist before, and that is what came out of some of the financial conflict of interest investigations that were going on during those four years in finance. I just wanted to say there's just a little glimmer. Maybe it's just a little flicker out there, but it's definitely there. I think for -- whether it be for corporations or for the executive branch or, heck, for any organizations, you want to promote a culture of openness and transparency. You want to have that. You want people to feel safe to say something because it's far better if you're an organization for them to come tell you than for them to go tell someone else, and that's provided that you have a willingness to correct the situation, to look into the situation honestly, without retaliating against the individual, and I say that very honestly because I mean I have seen terrible retaliation against whistleblowers, and I said, you know, and I've always said, It can be through the front door where I actually remove you and I terminate you from your job, or it could be much more subtle, when suddenly you get a promotion and now your office is in the basement, you have nothing to do, and you have no computer. So there's so many ways that organizations can react, but if you promote a culture of transparency, a culture of safety, and create opportunities for people to go speak or if they have a concern and agree that you're going to follow up on certain matters and they know that you're going to do that, as an organization, you are much safer, and not doing that basically increases risk in an organization. And sometimes it doesn't matter how big the organization is at all, but if you promote that type of a culture, employees react to that, and I have seen where corporations saw what happened and then created, you know, ombuds office in their organizations where individuals could go and say, I have a concern about X. Well, that person can go look at that matter. It's not to say that they're going to agree with you. They don't have to agree with you, but you have to at least look into the matter and provide individuals who feel strongly about something a rationale for why that happens the way it happens, okay, and that would be the advice that I would give to organizations to stay out of harm's way and have an outlet for people who are whistleblowers, for people who have a tendency to say, "I'm not going to stand for it. Stop," to go.
>> John Haskell: So Allison, any sense of agencies that do it well, that do it -- I mean either of you, but you study this. I mean are people -- ^M00:50:00 it's -- there at least as a mechanism, right? The Inspector General Act of 1978 -- 
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, no, oh, and I think it's --
>> John Haskell: -- put in place a mechanism. There's whistleblower protection bills.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And we have the newest bill that came out in 2012.
>> Allison Stanger: Exactly.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And then we have PPD-19 that came out for the intelligence community.
>> Allison Stanger: And there are things we're going to learn from this present circumstance that could lead to further legislative reform because obviously, in the national security realm, --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yes.
>> Allison Stanger: -- national security whistleblowing is the most fraught, because in order to expose misconduct or wrongdoing or illegality, you in a sense have to break the law to do that because you're dealing with classified information.
>> Carl Elliot: Classification.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Some classified information, right.
>> Allison Stanger: That's an extraordinarily interesting area. In researching whistleblowers, I interviewed the entire senior leadership of the NSA as well as the NSA whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden, and that's a really fascinating thing because what you -- you talk about different narratives. You really had two narratives that had nothing in common, and so part of the job of, you know, sorting truth from fiction is to try to determine what the real story is when people have these conflicting narratives, and it's --
>> Emilia DiSanto: And that's a very important role --
>> Allison Stanger: And it --
>> Emilia DiSanto: -- in the oversight -- for oversight for oversight professionals.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: It's a very, very important role to kind of figure that out because you want the right thing to happen. I mean you do want --
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: You want something good to happen after --
>> Allison Stanger: Right.
>> Emilia DiSanto: -- all this. I mean that's what it comes down to.
>> Allison Stanger: But it presupposes a belief in a distinction between fact and fiction. The whole thing collapses otherwise.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Oh, no, it has to be -- things have to be based in fact.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And they have to be evidence-based. It's that. It's that simple. So that's, why coming back, you have to make sure you don't get involved in the story. Stories are things that people tell themselves. They have some facts in them. They tell themselves a story, they believe the story, and they believe that you should believe their story, but, you know, as an oversight professional, that's not the job. The job is to get to the facts, create the evidence around those facts so that you have -- you know, you have a compelling story. And I have to tell you from the IG community now with the -- ^M00:52:15 ^M00:52:18 IGs are now required to look at every whistleblower case that comes in. They have a 180-day cycle to do that, and the Whistleblower Protection Act of 2012, that also expanded that to include contractors, employees of contractors. So if you're an executive branch and you have a contract with a corporation, you have a contract with Microsoft, you have a contract with anyone, employees of that organization can now go to the IG as whistleblowers, and the IG has a requirement to look into those matters, and that's the way it is right now. And I can tell you at the Department of State, we had many contractor employees were coming in because once the law passed, we weren't quite sure what was going to happen, and then contractor employees began coming in and speaking to us and telling us about problems that existed in the agency itself or with the contractor itself or both.
>> John Haskell: So the -- I know the Department of Defense kind of has a built-in office of contrarians, in effect. I've seen the guy in action at a think tank around here to talk about -- so he's paid, and he's very high on the senior executive scale, and he runs an office. He's paid to be the difficult guy to go to the people in power. I think State Department put in something after Vietnam at some point to say, Hey, we can't have groupthink here. We have to have some people who are paid to provide an alternative viewpoint. I mean is that at all common across the government? I don't know that in other places. By your silence, I may be hearing. [Laughter]
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah, I don't.
>> Allison Stanger: What is the group called?
>> John Haskell: At DOD? I can't remember the name of it.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Oh, I don't know. The contrarians.
>> Allison Stanger: The -- yeah.
>> John Haskell: They're the contrarians? That's why I use it.
>> Emilia DiSanto: There you go. [Laughter]
>> Allison Stanger: At the State Department, there literally was a dissent channel.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah, State Department does have a dissent channel, and --
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: That's a post-Vietnam thing, I think.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And it is and it can be extraordinarily active on some areas. No question about that. Having been someone who read the channel, there could be a lot of different things in there, a lot of things that are enlightening, a lot of things that you want to follow up on, but that's a good thing because people need outlets for things that they believe are not right, can be better, are wrong, that they're not willing to do, things that people think are unfair, and it provides an opportunity to fix it or at least, first of all, to be aware of it and then take an opportunity to correct it or help people understand the situation better. Sometimes there's a lack of understanding can lead to people creating a story that brings them in a direction that they shouldn't go. Sometimes simply sending information out or sending guidance out or sending out a point of clarification to staff and say, "We've come to understand people are believing this regarding this issue. Let me clarify," and you just address it.
>> John Haskell: I'm going to hit Carl with a couple of kind of finishing questions before we go to questions from the audience. What could be implemented in the realms that you look at to encourage conscientious dissent, and what's the cost? What's the societal cost by not having better systems? ^M00:56:08 ^M00:56:14
>> Carl Elliot: The first is hard, and I think there's a tendency to think that there's a sort of legal or bureaucratic solution, and no doubt there are things that could make it better. I'm speaking just of human subjects research. There are no whistleblower protections for human subject whistleblowers, for example. I mean there may be state laws, depending on where you are, but in general, they're not, and so you could institute things like this. You could institute ethics hotlines. In general, I don't think that that is the big problem, though. I mean I think there's a tendency to think that the retaliation that's experienced by whistleblowers is a kind of practical steps that are taken within the job, that they're punished, that they're demoted, that they're fired, and those things do happen, but the really painful thing, I think, for the whistleblowers that I've talked to are personal. I mean think about it. I mean all the whistleblowers that I've talked to have blown the whistle for reasons that are purely conscientious moral reasons. There's nothing that they're going to get out of this, and there's a lot that they're going to lose, and they just feel like they have to do it because they're the kind of person that does this sort of thing. Like they're being true to themselves, and a lot of them assumed that everyone else -- their friends, their colleagues -- will see things the same way, and instead, they don't.
>> John Haskell: Yeah.
>> Carl Elliot: Instead they're punished, and their friends side with the authorities, and their colleagues, the people in the office next door, side with the authorities, and everybody thinks that they have betrayed the organization, and they find themselves painted as troublemakers or disgruntled employees, and rumors are spread about them, and they've lost their reputation. So the very things that they're trying to fight for, which have to do with their sense of self-respect, they find themselves losing as a result of doing something that they feel they have no choice but to do, and it's hard to come up with a bureaucratic solution for that. I will say this: It feels as if the people -- like everybody that I've talked to has been marked in some way, I mean, deeply, and often these are people who blew the whistle, you know, 30, 40 years ago on abuses, and they still feel it very deeply, and they're wounded. The people who seem to have come through it the best are those that didn't act alone. Often what you'll find is there's a -- there will be a case in which you think that there is a single whistleblower, but it turns out they're actually a group of whistleblowers working together, and if you have that kind of solidarity, then you're -- one, you have a lot more confidence in the moral stand that you're taking if it's shared by other people. ^M01:00:01 Two, if there are others who are seeing the same thing that you see, it's harder for the organization to paint you as somehow kind of a lone vigilante who's intent on destroying the organization. But mainly, the solidarity that comes from actually having a group of people who are working together protects your mental health in a way that's not there if you're acting alone. So you know, to me, I don't know what you can do to encourage that sort of thing. You need a culture in which whistleblowing is encouraged, which is very difficult to create, but in the absence of that, you need some sort of mechanisms to create solidarity in dissent.
>> John Haskell: Thank you. So let's see what questions we have. Just indicate there's a couple gentlemen here. We have right in red right here, Mike. Keep your questions direct, and if you want to identify who you're pointing it at, go for it.
>> Well, you mentioned Edward Snowden, and it troubles me, because in a democracy, the kinds of problems and deceptions that he revealed are really important as taxpayers and as a democracy, and Chelsea Manning, he exposed crimes that violated the Nuremberg principles, so I don't understand how these individuals are being incarcerated, in Manning's case, and Snowden would be if he came back. I just don't understand how that's possible.
>> John Haskell: That's an interesting comment. Allison, we'll let you address that.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah. Well, in my book, I go into those two cases in great detail, but Manning was mistreated, and President Obama commuted her sentence because of it, but I would argue that those are two very different cases, the case of Chelsea Manning and the case of Edward Snowden, and again, you have to look back on what exactly was revealed, and it can't be what you think is being revealed. It has to be what did the evidence show. In the case of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, they both thought they were blowing the whistle on the United States for all kinds of crimes. If you actually look at the documents, it's hard to see that. You really see in these State Department cables diplomats doing their job, and if anyone is really getting the whistle blown on them, it's dictators in the developing world who were the most embarrassed that what people in those countries thought of their leadership, they could see in those cables that the Americans, although they wouldn't state it publicly, saw very clearly what was going on in those countries. So that was -- in my book, I argue that Chelsea Manning wasn't a whistleblower. Edward Snowden's another story entirely and a much more complicated case. What makes it complicated is, again, the perils of national security whistleblowing, but what Snowden revealed was nothing less than a transformation in standard operating procedures at the National Security Agency that took place without anybody knowing it. They started as emergency measures during wartime when the United States was attacked on its own soil, but then they slowly, over time, became standard operating procedures without any sort of public discussion, and Snowden in a sense did a public service, I think, and I go through this in great detail, and I listened to both sides of the story before reaching this conclusion. He performed a public service by initiating the discussion which led to the revision of the Patriot Act, led to changes in laws, and if you read his memoir, which has new information in it, that only further validated the point I made in my book that he may one day be viewed as America's first traitor-patriot, and there may be some others down the road, too.
>> John Haskell: So there is -- Mike, there was somebody. The gentleman, I think it was, two rows back. You had your hand up, right? No? Oh, I thought somebody else had their hand up back there. Who else has got a question? ^M01:04:28 ^M01:04:32
>> So and kind of phrasing it the good, the bad, and the ugly, how do we explain looking at people we call whistleblowers that we're putting up on that higher moral pedestal from people who may have believed they were being the sort of whistleblowers when they testified in the McCarthy hearings?
>> Allison Stanger: Great.
>> And how do we make sense of looking at what history see as, I think, very polar opposites?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah, there's a lot of layers.
>> John Haskell: A good question.
>> Emilia DiSanto: There's a lot of layers --
>> Allison Stanger: -- to that question. Where to begin? It's hard to avoid talking about the present moment when you ask that question because I think where we have to begin is, again, with the facts and with what misconduct is revealed, and it can't just be simply somebody believes that something is wrong. We've got to really look at whether laws were violated, whether unconstitutional acts were committed, and that's a long, painstaking process. The McCarthy example is really fascinating. I've been thinking a lot about this recently because, you know, the administration has accused the intelligence community of doing all kinds of things. I don't want to rehearse all the complaints here, and there have been accusations of McCarthyism, but to me what is fascinating is, even with the McCarthy era, there were all sorts of abuses committed, but the American people were anticommunist, and people thought they were doing this for the national security of the United States, and the fact of the matter was there were all sorts of Russian operatives.
>> John Haskell: [Inaudible] yep.
>> Carl Elliot: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: Everything we know since Cold War documents have been released shows that this wasn't crazy to think there was a communist plot to subvert American democracy, abuses made entirely, but there was kind of a national security argument there. What's interesting to me about this current situation with Ukrainegate or whatever you want to call it is that there's literally no national security argument one could make -- and maybe if you know one, you can make it for me -- that would justify why you needed the shadow foreign policy operating in secret at odds with the policy that was the official policy of the United States, as implemented by the State Department, and also as for which funds were appropriated by Congress. So in answering these questions, we just really have to insist on consistency, insist on a distinction between truth and falsehood, and that's hard to do in this social media environment where everybody is trying to present what's currently being discussed as hopelessly partisan. I would hope, if anything, what you would take away from this discussion today that whistleblowing is a concept that is deeply American and that is rooted in the rule of law and that really doesn't make sense in an authoritarian situation, and the rule of law depends upon a distinction between truth and falsehood, and hopefully we're going to insist on that in the weeks ahead. It's just hard to do within the current social media environment, which takes us on to a whole 'nother topic, which is my next book, so we'll stop there. [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: She'll be working on that here.
>> Carl Elliot: Hey!
>> John Haskell: And one thing --
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: -- Carl brought up before we went to questions, about how it's tough to do it if you're alone and there's no culture of dissent, is that it seems to have parallels to the situations with sex discrimination and other sorts of discrimination or, you know, the Me Too movement, right.
>> Allison Stanger: Me Too. Perfect example.
>> John Haskell: So that's what sort of triggered in my mind it's very hard for one person to come out and make a complaint, and then they get, you know, vilified by management or whatever.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: And I know you've looked into that a little bit, Allison.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, and I'd be interested in what you think about this.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yes.
>> Allison Stanger: This is something I'm getting quite fascinated by because, again, remember, when we talk about a whistleblower, we're meaning someone who has exposed an urgent concern. We're not considering all the people who come forward and say, This is really important, and then you look at the evidence and a different --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: -- conclusion is reached. And one of the things I think there's evidence to show is that people who are considered to have an urgent concern may look a certain way. That is, complaints that come from historically marginalized groups -- people of color, LGBTQ -- may not be seen as urgent as frequently as others, and that's an interesting question, because given, you know, the history of democracy in America, whistleblowing is speaking truth to power.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: But there's a lot of lies we've told ourselves about how our democracy function that we're sort of grappling with and wrestling with now, and I think whistleblowers may play an important role in the future in helping us move toward a world in which -- you know, a democracy in which we really have genuine equality before the law, where every American citizen is treated with the dignity and respect that they deserve.
>> Emilia DiSanto: I can tell you a little bit.
>> Allison Stanger: I don't know if that --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Right.
>> Allison Stanger: -- squares with your reality, but --
>> Emilia DiSanto: I think, you know, having dealt with a lot of whistleblowers, some where I knew their names and I knew their families, and some were so fearful that they -- we had other names for them. ^M01:10:08 I mean we had Apple, we had Peaches and because they were afraid even to give you their name, and you just continued to work with them. And, you know, when you're dealing with a whistleblower, you're dealing very much with the whole person. You know, you really are. You come to know them. You know that they have families. You know they worry about their mortgage. They're worried about being exiled. You hear -- you live that with them and in a very personal way because of what it is that they're doing, but I think as a general matter -- and the policy that at least I espoused in the office and Senator Grassley's directive is everybody, if they come in there, be a whistleblower, they have your time. They have your time, they have your ear, they have your patience, and it didn't matter who it was, and we had individuals who were across the board, who were low-level employees, and then we had individuals who were very, very high-level employees that were actually afraid to go somewhere within their own organization. So we worked very hard to ensure that everybody had their moment, everybody had the time, that you remained patient because the information -- as I said, it was very rare. I don't think I can remember one whistleblower who walked in with nothing that was entirely false. I don't think that ever happened. Now working with them to get to the facts, trying to uncover it, trying to -- could take years. Years. I mean you could work with somebody for very, very long periods of time. So I think your point is very well taken as that develops with time, and going back to something Carl said, you know, it's one thing when an individual is exiled or they're afraid for themselves and their family, but there is when you have more than one joining together -- and we've seen them in some organizations. We've seen in some organizations where they come as a group, seven, eight, ten, 12, 15 people who say, We have all seen it. We have all experienced it. These are the facts. That is very helpful because it's a support mechanism for each of them when the heat gets hot, and they all knew the heat would get hot, but they supported each other and we kind of worked through it to the point sometimes during a review where we would actually draft a letter to an agency that says, So-and-so is a whistleblower. If you take any action against them, we will be watching that and we will react to that, becoming very up-front about please do not take any retaliatory action against this individual.
>> John Haskell: I don't think there was a please at the front of that, actually, right?
>> Emilia DiSanto: I tried to say "please," [laughter] but we were --
>> John Haskell: Is it --
>> Emilia DiSanto: But we were very direct about please don't take action, because there's often information there that is going to be helpful to your organization, and you need to accept that.
>> John Haskell: Grassley's been in Congress for over 40 years in the end, so it's like -- you know, and he's a politician through and through, of course, so he's made this stuff work for him politically, and there are other members who do that. Nobody as much as he, so it's not a -- it's a great example of doing something that one could say is doing the right thing and then actually making it work for you. I mean he's unassailable in Iowa, and Democrats do win statewide in that state. [Laughter]
>> Emilia DiSanto: They do.
>> John Haskell: What other questions do we have? Let's see. The gentleman or lady back there, and then this gentleman.
>> I wanted to say that I'm really looking forward to Professor Stanger's book and the next book as well, because what Counsel DiSanto's just talked about I think is getting -- one of the most important things that we're going to be needing to deal with within the next decade is the whole social media and how the power of non-governmental just plain corporations -- Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook -- how one or all of them can be co-opted overtly or without knowing it, possibly, and make life really difficult for a whistleblower, and if somebody is -- if it takes years to use the psychological analysis and just empathy to get a whistleblower to come forth, those years, you know, just a few weeks of a lot of harassment via social media or just your phone not working or something can lead to somebody being really shut down pretty quickly, and that's something that isn't a governmental agency at all. So I think that's something that I really look forward to y'all dealing with, and I'm sorry I won't be able to come to the next Kluge Center conversation on AI, which is one of those key components --
>> John Haskell: That'll be on --
>> -- of the book.
>> John Haskell: It'll be on the website.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah, yeah. [Laughter]
>> John Haskell: So any comments on that? It's an --
>> Allison Stanger: Well, just a quick point. I'm going to be teaching a junior seminar at Harvard in the spring on the politics of virtual realities, and I just started yesterday what I was going to do for the opening, you know, meeting, just the introductory meeting. I wanted to show them this piece in the New York Times which you may have seen two days ago that basically announced that Facebook will not be changing its policies regarding political advertising for the 2020 campaign, which basically is sanctioning additional foreign electoral intervention, which obviously I think we can all agree that Americans should elect their officials, and not foreigners, right? [Laughter] So this is not a small matter. So I want to open the class with that article and just get a sense of what the students think about it, and then we'll go through the material in the course and come back to that article in the end and see if they have a different take. I don't know what the barometer will read, but this is an extraordinarily important issue, --
>> Emilia DiSanto: But that --
>> Allison Stanger: -- and it's not even front-page -- it's not even the lead story in the New York Times.
>> Emilia DiSanto: But you bring up an interesting point as to whether or not, and that's always a question when you're on the Hill -- as to whether or not you want to make the information public. There are cases with whistleblowers where information does not become public, that you work with the whistleblower, you work with the organization, you work with the program, you work with the secretary of some agency where no one's the wiser, and you ensure that change is implemented. You agree to monitor that implementation so that people don't falter, because that's always a very big issue, but the role that you want to have in what I'll call the social world, the social media world, is a decision that you want to make, and those are conversations that you'll have, because, you know, very often, you have [inaudible] well, they're just going to go to the press. Well, that might not be the best thing, not for the individual and not for whatever issue it is that they've brought to your attention that they believe needs your attention. So that's also a question that you ask yourself and deal with yourself, because there are very many issues that you'll just deal with quietly.
>> John Haskell: This gentleman has a question right here.
>> So I work for the Environmental Protection Agency, where there's a lot of --
>> Allison Stanger: Oh, God.
>> -- passive dissent, but and there is no culture of dissent, and there's certainly no official channel. So this might be a little particular, but I was recently speaking with a foreign service officer based in West Africa, and he wasn't even aware of how to access the formal channel of dissent, and he was leery of even inquiring about it or doing it because he thought it would have to go through his direct supervisor. So I'm just curious what the formal channel of dissent looks like in State.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Well, I mean there is a dissent channel where individuals can put information regarding their concerns, but I would never -- I would also consider the Office of the Inspector General. We do have confidentiality requirements. Now they are not under all circumstances, for all reasons, okay? There are limitations, but they are there, and you can grant individuals confidentiality and work through their cases, and depending on what office is doing that, if it were an investigation, it's usually there's some kind of criminality that could be involved, but I would encourage people to go there. I mean think about it. There's, I think, 72 inspector generals. Every agency has one. Every one of those organizations, you know, has investigators and have evaluators that look into matters. So if they're leery about even asking about the dissent channel, they should contact the Office of Inspector General. All of them have an 800 number, a hotline number. ^M01:20:04 You don't have to provide your name. You can provide an entire description of what's going on and they will look into the matter. I mean we have individuals at State Department and also at FHFA, which had oversight of Fannie and Freddie, where 800 number where there are individuals there who all they do is take, intake, the various cases that come in on the 800 numbers.
>> Allison Stanger: Do we know that those channels still exist?
>> Emilia DiSanto: The dissent channels?
>> Allison Stanger: Uh-huh, at State Department.
>> Emilia DiSanto: I believe that they do. I mean I didn't leave that long ago. [Laughter]
>> Allison Stanger: When did you leave? When did you leave?
>> Emilia DiSanto: I left about nine months ago.
>> Allison Stanger: Okay.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And said channels did exist, and I believe that they still exist because they're part of the culture of the Department of State, but if people are nervous about those kinds of things or nervous about an avenue to go through in the organization, please don't hesitate, and go to the Office of -- Offices of Inspector General, because recognize those offices are independent.
>> John Haskell: And they're in-statute.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And they're in the statute. They're independent, and an inspector general has a dual reporting responsibility to the organization and to Congress, and they do not have to go through the organization itself to speak to Congress or to bring matters to Congress. They are independent, they're objective, and they're very fact-driven. So that's where I would encourage people to go if they're nervous about another avenue.
>> John Haskell: What other questions? Way back there, Mike. We got somebody in the back row.
>> Hi. My name is Devika [phonetic]. I have a comment that may turn into a question. I -- so I used to work in the tech sector, so a lot of the commentary on culture and whistleblowing is very top of mind. I think most of what we know about big tech comes from some form of a leak or whistleblowing today, and I've been one of them, and I think the point that was made about culture is a really important one because as I was going through it, you know, a point that Snowden made in his book was even the word whistleblower, it assumes a certain balance of power, right, or it's a narrative told from a certain perspective, you know, the word leak, the word whistleblower, and sort of challenges the reader to think about, Well, what is the word, you know, from the institution of the people, right, when the institutions that we work for or that we elect do wrong by us? And so I wonder, and I guess this would be the question, as sort of experts, do you see a problem with that word? You know, because it assumes a certain balance of power, an equation of power, and it's a narrative told by a certain perspective, and for me, I found it very troubling -- that employee-employer relationship that's codified in many laws in various states, but just culturally in general, within, you know, the private sector, at least.
>> John Haskell: That's an interesting question, and I'm going to let Carl start.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: I know -- I happen to know Carl got a great liberal arts education, [Laughter] so sort of doing the kind of analysis you're talking about. It's like so does that word have connotations that is detrimental, as she asked?
>> Carl Elliot: I'm not sure, but I've heard it before. In fact, I was at the Joe Callaway Awards for Civic Courage just a couple of months ago, and one -- and they were giving awards for two whistleblowers, one from Boeing and one from the CDC, and the Boeing whistleblower did not like the term whistleblower. I mean he felt it had negative connotations, negative connotations of the sort that it was invented to -- you know, to counter, and I wonder if -- I mean this seems to be the way that language works. You come up with another word that is meant to, you know, have different sort of connotations and is meant to be less insulting or demeaning, but over time, it comes to take on the same sort of characteristics of the word it's meant to replace, so I'm not sure. I mean one thing that someone in the audience did ask the Boeing whistleblower was, "What would you suggest?" and nobody in the room had an alternative suggestion. So, you know, I'm not sure, but I also feel as if we came up with an alternative, it would come to take on the same kind of connotations of being a snitch and being a Judas that --
>> Emilia DiSanto: Truth-teller.
>> Carl Elliot: -- you know, that they all do.
>> John Haskell: Allison, you have any thoughts?
>> Allison Stanger: I myself could put --
>> John Haskell: Maybe you can assign that to your Harvard students.
>> Emilia DiSanto: There you go.
>> Allison Stanger: What, the Snowden memoir?
>> John Haskell: No, no, the --
>> Emilia DiSanto: New term.
>> John Haskell: To come up with a better word.
>> Allison Stanger: Well, I just have a different impression. My understanding was that Snowden was perfectly fine with the term whistleblower, because to me, it's very much bound up with the history of our country and American ideals, and those ideals obviously are being flaunted in all kinds of ways currently, but that doesn't mean that the ideals aren't something against which we can measure reality and try to improve. So a whistleblower is really trying to speak truth to power and keep our elites honest, and it's just awfully hard to do in a world where there's such an imbalance of power between the 1% and the 99%, so we need to think about ways to remedy that. That would be my personal perspective.
>> John Haskell: Do you have the last word?
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah, and I think today, the term whistleblower, the connotations are different than they were in the past. I think they've evolved with time from, you know, the person who was the rat, you know, to a person, you know, who has -- kind of has a high -- you know, has a moral compass, and I think if you say the word whistleblower, and people say, Oh, they have a higher moral compass. They want -- they're truth-tellers. They want the truth exposed and they want to help things -- make things better despite the fact it often has negative implications for them and sometimes for their families. So I think it's evolved over time to be more the positive than the negative over time. That's kind of what I've seen, I think, over the last probably 15 years or so.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah. Now it's a European concept as well.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> Allison Stanger: So it's really become bound up with liberal democracy.
>> Emilia DiSanto: And it's evolving. It's evolving.
>> Allison Stanger: Yeah.
>> Emilia DiSanto: Yeah.
>> John Haskell: Well, thank all three of you for the fascinating discussion. We appreciate it.
>> Carl Elliot: Thank you. [Applause]