No matter which country, wherever the whistleblowing takes place, the words of whistleblowers are identical in terms of retaliation. Everyone has experienced this fact in their own way: the future appears grim after their professional career came to an end because as in most of the cases, the business world turned its back on those who dared to tell the truth. The justice is slow whilst files are kept waiting and the opponents ostracize the personality of the whistleblower. The citizens find themselves powerless, financially crippled and an extremely large majority of families are in great distress. The same techniques are used in countries that claim to be developed and which proclaim to be democracies. Everything is done to both ostracize the whistleblowers and to minimize the visibility of their alert. However times change, attitudes change and these past years many are the ones who joined the Resistants facing a system where everybody gets chewed up.

I have often wondered whether, like me, the other whistleblowers had in mind President Kennedy’s quote when they decided to blow the whistle, to alert:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

President John F. Kennedy

However since the Secession war (American civil war), the United States of America has protected their whistleblowers by an important legislation, which protects those defending the general interest and the common good. In the 1980s, Erin Brockovich turned out to be the most famous of the American female whistleblowers. Her story inspired the Hollywood movie in which Julia Roberts played the role of this middle-class mother who exposed the scandal of contaminated public water that was causing diseases to the citizens in her region. She finally managed to win her bitter fight. Nowadays, she helps other citizens in the pharmaceutical, medical or environmental field.

More than forty laws protect the whistleblowers in the USA. In 2017, the Administration willingly informed its civil servants on whistleblowing or actions to handle whistleblowing. Paradoxically, the scandals that have hit the headlines these last years have shown that imprisoned or exiled US whistleblowers-citizens who have exposed a certain number of malfunctions of the US government have never been so many.

As a result of the review in 2007 of the American law, employees now are able to deliver the proof of “violation of the law, rules or regulations, mismanagement and waste of funds and abuse of authority. Whistleblowers can save lives as well as billions of taxpayer dollars. They play a critical role in keeping our Government honest, efficient, and accountable thus recognizing that whistleblowers root out waste, fraud, and abuse and protect public health and safety”. These disclosures are allowed but exceptions are established by the law. The case of the military analyst Chelsea Manning and the computer specialist Edward Snowden enter the realm of these exceptions. Another restriction to the implementation of this law is relating to the employees of the US postal service (UPS) as well as the NSA (National Security Agency) of which Edward Snowden was an employee – or even of the FBI. Indeed, despite the important number of laws, which is the pride of the country, many whistleblowers employed by governmental agencies have been making the news internationally as their lives and those of their relatives have been turned upside down.

Chelsea Manning received a thirty-five year prison sentence for ‘treason’ and was then granted a Presidential Pardon of her sentence when President Obama left the White House. Because she refused to testimony in front of a Grand Jury again Julian Assange, the whistleblower was imprisoned again