It’s no secret that whistleblowers are self-sacrificers. They get blackballed, fired, their pensions get revoked, and their careers ended. But Allison Stanger’s book Whistleblowers is not really about those risks or the profile of these good Samaritans. Instead, it is about the history of American whistleblowers as seen through the corruption they witnessed, starting right at day one. The USA produces so many whistleblowers because it is so corrupt.

George Washington’s first Naval chief, Commodore Esek Hopkins, couldn’t be bothered following orders. He had personal business and his own agenda to attend to. There were profits to be made. He also tortured prisoners. He personally sued two whistleblowers, and Congress itself voted to foot their legal bills. It was not an auspicious beginning. Congress had to move to protect whistleblowers right off the top.

During the civil war, profiteers racked up fortunes gypping the military, selling it bullets filled with sawdust, shoes of paper and uniforms without buttonholes or buttons. The navy took delivery of ships so rotten they couldn’t hold a nail in place. It forced Congress to pass laws of accountability and safeguard whistleblowers. It allows whistleblowers to sue on their own behalf and on behalf of the victimized government.

Whistleblowers know they’re in for it. Despite all the laws, inspectors general and boards set up to protect them, they are seen as sneaky, disloyal, unworthy of trust or of their positions – or any others. For example, between 2007 and 2017, the OSHA whistleblower board threw out 30,000 claims (54%), upholding only 2%, Stanger says.

But the real meat of the book comes with the arrival of the internet. The flow of communications data has given birth to an enormous surveillance industry. The government employs hundreds of thousands to spy on the rest. It spends $50 billion of taxpayer money to spy on them. Personal privacy has long disappeared. If they want to know about you, they have the tools.

This has given rise to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, three completely different cases with different approaches, that Stanger shows need to be differentiated. But ultimately the result is the same. The security establishment does not look kindly on whistleblowers, and they have to plan in advance to save themselves, fleeing to Russia or the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Otherwise, it’s prison.

The security establishment, being secretive to begin with, has difficulty defending itself. Even dealing with its own employees is tricky. When top secret documents were published in the New York Times, the NSA had to warn its own that anyone downloading a top secret document to an NSA computer, even though it was now public, would have to be prosecuted.

There is also hypocrisy, of course. While Barak Obama was hot to nail Edward Snowden as a traitor rather than whistleblower, General David Petraeus walks free even though he delivered top secret “black books” to his mistress and co-author of his autobiography. There wasn’t even a whiff of whistleblowing about it.

For reasons I don’t recall her explaining, Stanger limits her whistleblowing to exposing corruption in the government. But there is all kinds of it outside government as well. One major tragedy was the Madoff case, the largest Ponzi scheme in history at $50 billion. A whistleblower named Harry Markopolos tried for years to show the emperor had no clothes, but government agencies kept their blinders on regardless. Madoff’s scam imploded (as it eventually had to) on its own.

Stanger gets frustrated over it all as we come to the present – the Trump administration. Trump has made the police, security and justice admin jobs all but impossible. He demands loyalty not to the constitution, but to himself personally. He tries to influence and woo all kinds of officials he should have nothing to do with, and fires anyone who won’t do his bidding despite the laws of the land.

Whistleblowing on Donald Trump would be laughable. With all his profiteering from his properties, his manipulation of the stock market, and his appointment of people to do his bidding rather than their jobs, he has made corruption normal and acceptable. Stanger spends the entire Conclusion lamenting what has become of the security establishment and the rule of law under Trump. Whistleblowing doesn’t really enter into it.

She quotes Richard White: “Gilded Age reformers decried corruption. Today, plagued by financial scandals, we seem both fearful of corruption and resigned to it. We seem uncertain about who it actually hurts and what difference it ultimately makes. The Republic seems perpetually corrupted, but instead of being outraged, we are not sure it matters.” It’s the new normal in the USA.

So the book is only nominally about the fine art of whistleblowing. It is really another attack on the sad state of the federal government, thanks to Donald Trump. It is in and out of focus, with corruption history on top, followed by surveillance and security, followed by whistelblowers.

David Wineberg ( )