The Diane Rehm Show

Thank you for this important topic. U.S. agents who warned of the possibility of 9/11 but were ignored have said they believe that that tragedy might have been prevented if there'd been something like Wikileaks to leak to (see http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/15/opinion/la-oe-rowley-wikileaks-2... ). And leaks published by Wikileaks are widely believed to have had many positive effects around the world (see, e.g., http://huff.to/i9NQQc or http://t.co/i7XfdtZ ).

Lately, however, it seems that the more important the leak, the more likely the leaker will be persecuted for their trouble.

There are many things that should be changed in order to right the balance; I hope this legislation will be a start.

(AP) WASHINGTON - "The Internal Revenue Service has awarded an ex-banker $104 million for providing information about overseas tax cheats - the largest amount ever awarded by the agency, lawyers for the whistleblower announced Tuesday.

Former Swiss banker Bradley Birkenfeld is credited with exposing widespread tax evasion at Swiss bank UBS AG. Birkenfeld himself served roughly two and-a-half years in prison for a fraud conspiracy conviction related to the case, which resulted in a $780 million fine against the bank and an unprecedented agreement requiring UBS to turn over thousands of names of suspected American tax dodgers to the IRS"....................................................

UBS the home of Phil Graham and the author of the now infamous Graham,Leach,Bliley act. It seems crime does pay,and pay very well. How convenient the crooks have their own legalized hiding place.

What about whistle blowing on government sites like area s4 that do not exhist officially? I'm speaking of the case where employes at area s4 (area 51) burned toxic chemicals related to the stealth program and could not bring a suit for their health problems because the government did not acknowledge the existence of the facility under the whistle blower protection act?

As long as employers press employees for productivity over quality, mistakes/downright malpractice will occur.
e.g. When confronted with a problem in electronic devices that had a series of unusual failures, a shipping supervisor at a pharma company repeatedly yelled at the top of his lungs "I don't give a damn about FDA regulations and rules; I have products to get out the door!" After proper testing, techs learned the supervisor and workers were plugging too many other devices into same circuits - "failing" devices were shutting down via "brown outs" (insufficient amperage/surges) to automatically protect themselves from damage. By installing UPS units to run critical devices and plugging other non-critical devices into yet other circuits, problems were obviated. In fact, engineers who designed the initial set-up had not provided enough proper circuits to isolate critical devices from heavy duty package handling devices.......like trying to pull loaded railroad freight cars with a VW Bug up/downhill through the Tennessee mountains.
Regs in crucial situations must be delineated to seemingly extreme details. Workers must be prepared and educated to follow even minutiae under such situations - NOT rail against the rules.
The word "sabotage" comes from the French word "sabot" - wooden shoes worn by very low wage unskilled workers during the early years of the industrial era - to slow down/stop machines, the workers stuck shoes into gears etc.

Product quality in substances, devices, or software, must be designed for quality PRIOR to production, long before an item is made. Testing after the fact is always a lesser way to ensure safety/usefulness. Tests can never improve a product - only detect SOME problems. Make/design it to be impossible to produce a defective item to begin with.

p