Who is a Whistleblower?

Who is a whistleblower? When you see this question you may come up with a typical answer like this.

"A whistleblower is a person who whistles"

Yeah, The answer is correct. But here I'm going to write about the whistleblowers in a different context.

Let us see who is really a whistleblower. Actually, an individual who reveals any kind of information or an activity which is classified as illegal, unethical or against the rules of the particular organization. The organization can be a private or a public sector organization.

The information which is being revealed by the individual can be categorized in many ways.

• Threat to national security
• Violation of company policy/rules
• Threat to public interest
• Violation of rules/regulations
• Fraud
• Corruption

The way of revealing these information falls under two methods. They are the internal method and the external method.

Internal exposing

A whistleblower can expose such kind of an illegal information within the particular organization directly to his/her supervisor or to the CEO.

External exposing

When a whistleblower chooses a third party outside the organization for the accusation it is called as external exposing. The government, law enforcement, media and other concerned parties are considered as third parties in this context.

There are two other whistleblowing classifications such as Public sector whistleblowing and Private sector whistleblowing.

An individual who leads public whistleblowing will be accused of criminal charges or custodial sentence.

When it's private sector whistleblowing the related person will be terminated from the job and civil or law charges will be charged.

Due to some famous incidents whistleblowing is considered as an ethically debatable topic. The life of the whistleblower will be in danger if his/her identity is revealed. There are many NGOs and programs to protect whistleblowers. There is no common world recognized law or act to directly protect whistleblowers. But legal protections are available in various countries like Australia, US, UK, Switzerland, Canada, and India.

One of the world famous whistleblowers is Edward Snowden. The incident took place back in 2013 but still, the topic is discussed among the people. Edward was working at National Security Agency at that time. He disclosed classified information from the NSA regarding global surveillance programs and the Five eyes intelligence alliance. Not only him there are many whistleblowers out there.

Whistleblowing is a controversial topic, one can see both good and bad but the decision is in your hand.