File:Whistleblowing.pdf

A whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who tells the public or someone in authority about alleged dishonest or illegal activities (misconduct) occurring in a government department, a public or private organization, or a company. The alleged misconduct may be classified in many ways; for example, a violation of a law, rule, regulation and/or a direct threat to public interest, such as fraud, health/safety violations, and corruption. Whistleblowers may make their allegations internally (for example, to other people within the accused organization) or externally (to regulators, law enforcement agencies, to the media or to groups concerned with the issues).

One of the first laws that protected whistleblowers was the 1863 United States False Claims Act (revised in 1986), which tried to combat fraud by suppliers of the United States government during the Civil War. The act encourages whistleblowers by promising them a percentage of the money recovered or damages won by the government and protects them from wrongful dismissal.

This is a list of major whistleblowers from various countries, beginning in 1966 and continuing to the present. The individuals below brought attention to abuses of government and large corporations. Many of these whistleblowers were fired from their jobs in the process of shining light on their issue of concern. This list is not exhaustive.

Jesselyn Radack (born 1970) is a former ethics adviser to the United States Department of Justice who came to prominence as a whistleblower after she disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) committed an ethics violation in their interrogation of John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban" captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan) without an attorney present, and that the Department of Justice attempted to suppress that information. The Lindh case was the first major terrorism prosecution after 9/11.

She is currently the homeland security director of the Government Accountability Project, a leading whistleblower organization.

Radack was born in Washington DC and attended Brown University. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and graduated magna cum laude in 1992 as a triple major with honours in all three majors. Since 1983 when Brown began tracking such data, only one other student has received honors in three concentrations.

Radack graduated from Yale Law School and joined the Justice Department through the Attorney General Honors Program where she practiced constitutional tort litigation from 1995–1999 and then worked in the Department's newly created Professional Responsibility Advisory Office (PRAO) from 1999-2002.

Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.

Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.

Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense" and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".

Paul Holdengräber (born March 15, 1960) is a United States interviewer and curator best known for organizing literary conversations for the New York Public Library's public program series, LIVE from the New York Public Library. Since February 2012, he has hosted “The Paul Holdengräber Show” on the Intelligent Channel on YouTube.

In 2004, Holdengräber founded LIVE from the New York Public Library, a conversation series with writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists. As Director of LIVE from the NYPL, Holdengräber has interviewed hundreds of public personalities, including Patti Smith, Zadie Smith, Anish Kapoor, Edmund de Waal, Brian Eno, Jan Morris, Harold Bloom, David Remnick, Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, Jessye Norman, William Kentridge, Jay-Z, and Werner Herzog, among others. He has curated programs featuring Norman Mailer, Gunter Grass, Bill Clinton, Spike Lee, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jeffrey Sachs, Charlie Rose, Malcolm Gladwell, Keith Richards, and many others. He has worked in partnership with such organizations as Rolex, The Moth, PEN World Voices, and others.