Corporate whistleblower protections
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Corporate whistleblower protections are, on John Kiriakou's account, the missing half of American whistleblower law.

The case that prompted him was Amazon's warning to two employees that they could be fired for speaking publicly about the company's cloud business serving oil and gas exploration, a warning followed by dismissal. Kiriakou called it "a very disturbing development inside a company that has already given us lots of different reasons to be concerned," setting it alongside reporting that warehouse staff were not permitted to leave their stations for the bathroom.

His objection is definitional. "Here we have an example of employees reporting waste, fraud, abuse or illegality, the very definition of whistleblowing, being threatened with the loss of their employment, and then the actual loss of their employment following the warnings."

The remedy he asks for is legislative rather than reputational: "this is another reason to go to our elected officials to complain, because there have to be protections, and they have to be codified protections, for whistleblowers in corporate settings as well as governmental."

The Uber case as a corporate example

Kiriakou devoted an edition of his programme to Mark MacGann, Uber's former chief lobbyist for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who handed 124,000 pages of internal documents covering 2013 to 2017 to the Guardian, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The route is the reverse of the national-security cases he usually discusses: no inspector general, no oversight committee and no clearance regime, but a direct transfer to a newspaper consortium, and no prosecution followed.

See also

- Whistleblower Protection Act
- The UPMC whistleblower case
- CIA spy tech from Amazon
