Hello friends. we there will be no Fauci to kick around longer. But we will always have Covid.
Plain view
In late 1969, Daniel Ellsberg made a courageous and consequential decision. As an employee of the RAND Corporation, a US government contractor, he had access to classified documents that contradicted top officials’ promises that the Vietnam War could be won. He secretly copied the documents and over the next year tried to make them public, first through Congress, then through the press. In June 1971, The New York Times published the first of a series of articles on what would be called Pentagon Papers. The government sued to suppress them, and while the case progressed through the courts, Ellsberg leaked the papers to The Washington Post. At the time, the FBI tracked him down, although he did not publicly acknowledge his role as a whistleblower. He became clean just before the Supreme Court allowed it Times continued publication on June 30. Ellsberg was arrested and tried for theft and conspiracy, freed only for government misconduct.
This early year, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko made its own decision. A security expert selected by Jack Dorsey, then-CEO of Twitter at the time in November 2020 to address the company’s chronic failures, he was fired last January after clashing with the CEO. Currently, Parag Agrawal. Zatko believes Twitter’s management hasn’t taken steps to fix its security issues — and Agrawal lied about those shortcomings to the board, shareholders, and regulators. Like Ellsberg, he decided to go public. Unlike Ellsberg, Zatko can exploit the services of a nonprofit, Whistleblower Aid, was specifically set up to assist people like him and keep them out of legal trouble. After meeting him in March, a co-founder of the nonprofit, John Tye, agreed to work with Zatko.
Zatko and his handlers strategized and executed a coordinated campaign to expose Twitter’s alleged misconduct. They used a rack full of Scrabble bricks to file complaints from agencies… SEC, FTC, DOJ. Zatko has met with staff members of several congressional committees and is expected to testify. Most notably, he and his team made the news by staging the leak of his complaints from one of the congressional committees. The recipient is washington articles and CNN, and their story went live under the general embargo on August 23. Zatko gave interviews to both organizations, which treated him amiably. The parcel the photographer even captured an artistic shot of Zatko and his reflection in the mirror, full of magical vibes. (In contrast, Agrawal is pictured roaming the grounds of an unnamed conference in a dark hoodie.)
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because last year, another whistleblower, former Meta program director Frances Haugen, had a similar introduction to the subject. she allegation, complete with agency and congressional briefings and captivating imagery in 60 minutes and in The The Wall Street Journal. And of course, the recompiled documents leaked just in time from a congressional friend. It’s no coincidence that her whistleblower’s sherpa is the same as Zatko’s, John Tye.
Conscientious whistleblowers have existed as long as institutional misconduct persists, but it has become a trend in technology. This is partly due to recent laws that provide protection for whistleblowers in certain circumstances, especially when Report corporate fraud to the SEC. But the phenomenon also reflects a workforce fed up with employers who seem to have abandoned their once-ideal principles. Tye, who used to blow watch into the NSA before co-founding his organization.
