A corporate whistleblower gets a payday (a good thing). While whistleblowers like Snowden that reveal illegal government programs risk the death penalty if they ever sit foot in US soil again.
There is a huge difference you're ignoring. The act of whistleblowing on Monsanto was unlikely to be illegal (at least I do not know what laws that could be used against the whistileblower, ignoring any whistleblower protections). Snowden, however, violated numerous amounts of laws in his act of whistleblowing.
Now I'm not saying what Snowden did was right or wrong but these two are not equatable.
Government protections for whistleblowers are important but protecting someone who had to break the law in order to whistleblow versus someone who did not are two very different things and I think mixing the topics may take away from the importance of one versus the other (protection from retaliation through a corporation versus being locked up due to the government) or worse simply conflate them and their associated arguments.
> There is a huge difference you're ignoring... Snowden, however, violated numerous amounts of laws
The difference that you are ignoring is that it's in the government's power to legalize or even incentivize whistleblowing on a company while at the same time it's equally easy for the government to outlaw whistleblowing on the country. The government of a country sets the laws. It defines what's lawful and what's not.
Therefore when it comes to whistleblowing on a country it becomes borderline irrelevant whether some laws are broken or not as long as the whistleblowing otherwise aligns with universally accepted human values and ethics.
Loyalty to your oaths is part of "universally accepted human values and ethics".
The problem is that loyalty to your team (Team NSA, say), and loyalty to your oath, may sometimes conflict with loyalty to your country, which may itself conflict with loyalty to the human race. When that happens, you have to decide which loyalties you hold higher. Snowden did, and I can't say that he chose wrongly. But there are no "universally accepted human values and ethics" that determine what to do in that situation. It's often the stuff of literature precisely because the normal values and ethics are at war with one another.
I would argue that Snowden acted in a manner completely loyal to the United States and the Constitution, though disloyal to the NSA. If one believes the oath of allegiance (or the constitution) is more important than an employment arrangement, Snowden seems to be in the right.
Snowden didn't break an "employment arrangement", he knowingly broke the law that everyone with a TS/SCI clearance is given. This isn't a one-liner you sign and date the day before you start. Getting a TS/SCI clearance is a long process, and you very clearly know you are not supposed to talk about it, no matter what you hear or see.
Now, Snowden might have still be right, I'm not debating that, but chalking it up to a breach of employment contract is naive.
Good point. The goal of a good propaganda systems is to make individuals believe that disloyalty to the team is disloyalty to the oath "you betray us, you betray your own country / Constitution / Foundng Fathers etc."
At some point people tell that story to themselves, because it makes it easier to function and reduces cognitive dissonance.
Often I think we take these oaths without full knowledge of what is happening. Would Snowden have taken an oath of loyalty if he knew everything the NSA was doing? Highly unlikely, that's exactly why he broke it.
I think that people are often too slow to break ties with their 'team' when immoral behavior is at play.
Snowden never took an oath of loyalty. He did swear an oath to of enlistment, which is to the constitution, but that's one of the few things that makes America actually exceptional vs many other countries. Now, when you get a security clearance, you sign what is basically an NDA with the gov.
To be clear, the oath to the constitution outweighs an NDA every time, due to the nature that the constutiton is the supreme law of the land.
> Loyalty to your oaths is part of "universally accepted human values and ethics".
Not at all. It's part of some human values and ethics, but definitely not universally accepted.
In fact, when I took an extra-curricular class in Ethics, it was literally the textbook example of a situation when Kantian and utilitarian ethics differ about what is right and wrong.
Does it complicate your scenario if the private information the whistleblower has illegally accessed was itself illegally accessed, as is the case in the Snowden situation? Doesn't it make the government's position ironically untenable, to want to prosecute someone for doing on a relatively small scale what they've been doing on a massive scale?
1. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.
2. Do unto others what you would have them do to you.
3. Never levy a punishment greater than the harm of the offense.
4. Avoid direct conflict with anyone who will kick your ass.
3. Never levy a punishment greater than the harm of the offense.
Incentivise hard-to-prove offenses that benefit the offender as much as they harm the victim (e.g. theft), because at worst they'll be back where they started...
If a thief takes your MacGuffin, and gets caught, he must return it to you to make you whole, and then might also be required to forfeit an amount up to its value as punishment for thievery.
At the point when the cops nab him, it may appear that he stands to lose double what he stole, but that's only because what he stole never belonged to him in the first place.
This is why "treble damages" are a big deal, as 3 times the provable harm goes beyond what Lex Talionis normally allows.
If you steal a loaf of bread and get sentenced to 20 years in the galleys (like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables), that is quite clearly an unethical punishment. Simple restitution would mandate that the thief produce no more than one loaf to make the baker whole, and Lex Talionis would mandate that if the punishment were not to produce another loaf of bread, it should still need to be a tenth the magnitude of the punishment for someone caught stealing ten loaves of bread, and that in turn would be a thousandth the magnitude of the punishment for someone caught stealing a car.
Murdering someone would prevent them from committing suicide. Being suicidal is not quite the same as wishing to be murdered.
As far as I know, suicide (or self-euthanasia) does not have a settled, common ethical ground. Some cultures abhor it, and some expect it. A few have some problems with the occasional suicide-by-murderous-rampage. Thus, any "universal" ethics would not be able to answer any questions about it in a consistent way.
Suicide is a corner case, anyway. The above 4 rules can probably handle at least 80% of ethical dilemmas without much additional thought.
Certainly, if you think you would like to know whether a government or multinational is acting against your interests, and you discover evidence of it in your employer, you should sever your relationship by rule #1, blow the whistle by rule #2, and try to remain anonymous by rule #4. Additionally, the worst retaliation you should fear is to have your own bad behavior outed to the public, by rule #3. But you already know your employer is unethical, so who knows what they might do to you?
The world would probably be a better place without rule #4, but that's describing what we are, not what we wish to be.
Those rules are more commonly known as the silver rule (rabbi Hillel Sr.), the golden rule (Jesus), Lex Talionis (Hammurabi), and an amalgamation of appeasement, deterrence, and mutually assured destruction. That one hasn't been around quite as long, and isn't quite as glamorous, as it covers the value of bullying and cowardice, so might be debatable as to how pervasive it is. But it is the ethical basis for both the weaker-side tactics in asymmetric warfare and nuclear deterrence, so is followed more by national military policy than by religions. It might have been first put into print by Sun Tzu, maybe?
My personal ethics are far further from universal than the list I proposed.
Rabbi, Jesus, Hammurabi doesn't look very universal to me. All three are based on the same tradition of Abrahamic religions and looks mediterianian centric to me.
Universal for me would include people in Asia, Australian Aborigines, South America, Inuit etc.
Those are just the references I am most familiar with.
The Wikipedia page [0] shows many other references, but unfortunately does not currently distinguish between silver rule (don't be a hypocrite) and golden rule (be an exemplar of your own virtues).
The limited, proportional punishment maxim also has a page [1]. The origin is undoubtedly Middle Eastern, but migration, empire-building, and colonialism has spread it around the globe. It is not quite universal, but it may have more adherents than any other incompatible principles regarding punishment and revenge.
It is not surprising that concepts originating in the Middle East have spread far and wide. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the #1, #2, and #6 religions. Religions from India are #3, #4, #5, #7, and #9. Confucianism is #8, and Shinto #10. In addition to the religions, there have been at least a dozen empires that spread from or through that region.
Universal, for me, is a supermajority (>= 80%) of the economic power on the planet, which also makes a supermajority of the military influence. It's nice to throw non-influential cultures a bone every now and then, out of charity, but their children will be influenced by the cosmopolitan, global-market culture to a far greater extent than they will influence it in return. The cosmopolitan culture pushes itself into every corner of the globe with its mass-market broadcast media, and only pulls out the stuff that can be sold. It's like a "greatest hits" compilation album of every culture, heavily weighted by the history of world conquests.
The Australian Aborigines, for example, got to export the boomerang and the didgeridoo. South America gave everyone chocolate, cocaine, and samba. Jamaica gave everyone ska, reggae, and jerk chicken. If you wanted to get your core ethics in there, you should have built your empire sooner, or maybe invented the printing press or radio first.
this implies the government is a monolithic entity that decides everything.
This is why we have elections and a separation of legislative and executive branches. This is why Congress holds hearings on intelligence. The Church Committee happened, after all. And the courts can tell the NSA to not do things, and it (mostly) happens.
The incentives are mostly aligned, but the people being voted in seem to disagree with the idea that government whistleblowers need as much protection.
I'm not sure where I'm ignoring any of that but you seem to be saying that because a country can make laws preventing you from whistleblowing that therefore it's borderline irrelevant whether you're doing something illegal or not in order to whistleblow.
That is far too general of a position than what I'm comfortable with. Seems somewhat anarchist to me.
The reason the government incentivizes whistleblowing and protects those that do so is because without those laws there is a legitimate fear of retaliation. In order to protect itself, the government makes sure that that fear is actualized when whistleblowing on it.
I have to agree with the GP that when pointing out breaking the law is breaking the law, there is a loss of legitimacy.
When the system becomes so corrupt that people who would be hurt by whistleblowers can control legislation, the test of "legality" doesn't hold as much meaning anymore.
Snowden violated laws in order to reveal government violations of the law, as confirmed by a panel of judges on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals who declared that the NSA's bulk telephone data programs were not legal.
Snowden did however try to run it up the chain of command, and was told to sit down and shut up. Once all legal means have been exhausted, going illegal is generally acceptable, IMO
> Snowden did however try to run it up the chain of command, and was told to sit down and shut up
Not really and a bit hyperbolic. According to Snowden he went to 10 "district officials" of which none of them took action. The NSA as well as other DoD agencies have a channel for complaints like this to go through where they're seen by a group of people, not a district official. Snowden never made reference to filing one of those as far as I can find. All we have is his word he told someone relevant but completely skipped the appropriate channel for such reporting. So I'm not sure he actually exhausted his legal means.
I just don't have the data to say either way. But I'm still not sure I'd go with the "going illegal is generally acceptable" even after that; that's a risky judgement call that I think always has to be contextual.
Even if he didn't report to anyone, what he did would still be ethical. There is a big risk that your report will be ignored or even punished, considering that the illegal programs were explicitly and purposely approved and implemented by upper management. That's like reporting to your school principle that your school principle is embezzling school funds.
There were other NSA whistleblowers before Snowden, but they tried to go the legal route and were punished for it. It was only Snowden's illegal sharing of information that made sure the real story got out.
The chain is still complicit all the way to the president, who took no action against the NSA after their actions were publicly revealed, or against Clapper after he lied to Congress. Taking action in those instances is the least the President could have done; he should have been a vigilant defender of the people, who eliminated the programs before they are even disclosed.
> protecting someone who had to break the law in order to whistleblow versus someone who did not are two very different things and I worry mixing the topics may become confusing
"Confusing" is such an odd term to label this as. It's not confusing at all. It's pretty clear from your comment you just plain don't think they're the same and you don't want anyone else to either. Furthermore, your whole argument is based on an assertion which is based on no evidence.
I would happily wager that Monsanto's employee agreement strictly forbids sharing trade secrets, private financial information with third parties, etc.
Which is, by kind of a long ways which makes your valid point sort of amusingly understated, the least of the legal injustices that black people in America have been subject to.
Declaring whistle blowing illegal is nothing but an evasion of the checks & balances that belong in a democracy. Whoever declares whistle blowing illegal belongs in jail for a long time.
Unless it's used to shut him up about other things, like perhaps the fact that they may end up "settling" with Monsanto, rather than take them to trial.
EDIT: HA! I honestly didn't read the article before I commented, and then I saw this in it:
> The award of $22,437,800 was tied to an $80 million settlement between the SEC and Monsanto in February, according to the lawyer, Stuart Meissner in New York, in a statement.
So yeah, it's very likely a way to shut whistleblowers up, while also making themselves look good that they "reward" whistleblowers. But sure, I guess it could've been worse, like banishing him to Russia or whatever. But I doubt it's a 100% altruistic act, too.
I generally agree with your sentiment, but I think there's a fault in any logic that tries to correlate behaviors of separate arms of giant bureaucracies.
In general, violations of your constitutional rights won't be ruled on before they happen. That doesn't mean violating your constitutional rights isn't wrongdoing.
"None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”
"The SEC had said that Monsanto lacked sufficient internal controls to account for millions of dollars in rebates that it offered to retailers and distributors. It ultimately booked a sizeable amount of revenue, but then failed to recognize the costs of the rebate programs on its books."
This is what happens when you take glyphosate and multiply the cost/production price by well over 50x and package it as some miracle product. If your marketing strategy is to mislead every single purchaser then it is no surprise that you lose sight of how many strands of bullshit marketing you are running.
Roundup is a great example of one of those products that are cash cows for companies that market themselves as "the best solution"
Every.Single.One of the roundup products is glyphosate, and that stuff will kill anything and is very very cheap.
Dear readers be aware - glyphosate is a chemical that is present in all weedkillers (except the really shitty ones) so buying the brand name is a total waste of your money, and the amazing people at Roundup HQ know it. Buy the no-name, unbranded stuff.
I can understand Coca Cola etc selling sugar water for huge margins, but I pull my hair out when it comes to something like glyphosate. That's how I get my roots under control.
Do you have any "roundup ready" chemical study that can determine, for example, what concentration of glyphosate (over the lesser killers) is in the commercial "Monsanto glyphosate ready" products?
I smell a rat here - perhaps they are selling glyphosate as a name on the product, but in reality there is so little of it compared to 'filler' weedkillers that they can profit from that too.
the whole world knows that glyph kills it all, so "glyph-ready" seems like a contradiction to me
source info comes from my time dealing with sugar cane producers who use pure glyph to increase the sugar content in the useful end of the canes they harvest
If you're looking for a contact weed killer, you're interested in only killing some perennials and if your seed has been genetically engineered to be Roundup resistant then it's a top choice. That's virtually all soybeans but still a minority of corn and no wheat or alfalfa.
I'm old enough to have been running a fertilizer plant here in Michigan when Roundup was first introduced back in the seventies. The cost was 4x what it is now and it was mainly used as a quackgrass killer back then.
There are companies like Novartis that are making glyphosate using the original now expired patent.
Monsanto has updated the product with a slightly improved formulation. I'm enough removed nowadays to be able to tell you if it's worth the slight extra money, but Monsanto still has the majority of the market.
I couldn't find reliable market share figures, but I think Monsanto has nowhere near a majority of glyphosate market. The patent expired 25 years ago and glyphosate has since been made by many American, European and e.g. Chinese manufactures (BASF, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, SinoChem, ChemChina, and whatever). I'm actually surprised if Monsanto's global glyphosate market share is a two digits percentage.
I worked in bigag for a while, quit on principle when I understood what Monsanto really was. They are super shady, and honestly they are very damage-control aggressive, so I'm surprised this actually happened, but it's a start. Now can we get SCOTUS to force Thomas to recuse himself from Monsanto cases? Can we also get the FDA to purge it's ranks of Monsanto formers that are subverting the FDA's mandate? How about we use some anti-trust laws to take care of the backdoor deals between them and Dupont?
Don't beleive for one second any of the people claiming Monsanto is a force for good in the world.
True, but imagine if you were one of the remaining executives. You just saw that guy rat you all out and run off with 22M$. I think that they're going to have to be on their toes, because now the rest of them know exactly what will happen if there's any malfeasance.
I'm a big proponent of GMOs and Monsanto has been making very good progress there. The controversy over them suing innocent farmers is exaggerated, IMO. Overall I think they are an undoubtedly hugely beneficial company to society.
The case is widely cited or referenced by the anti-GM community in the context of a fear of a company claiming ownership of a farmer’s crop based on the inadvertent presence of GM pollen grain or seed.[21][22] "The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence."
Maybe Monsanto is a great company because an $80 Million fine for accounting issues, and a $22 M whistleblower payment makes for great cover to distract everyone from the things Monsanto does that everyone should actually be paying attention to.
>A former Monsanto Co (MON.N) executive who tipped the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to accounting improprieties involving the company's top-selling Roundup product has been awarded more than $22 million from the agency's whistleblower program, the executive's lawyer said on Tuesday.
Yes, please -- Let this be the default way it works at the high executive levels of big corporations. The corp should be terrified of committing fraud because they should know that a whistleblower has every incentive to rat them out and walk away a millionaire.
The incentive is clear. Whistleblow and you get a reward.
The whistleblowers are humans who can't really wait until later and later. It risks being found out or losing the window of whistleblowing. Also, most people are not this analytical. If they have the balls to whistleblow, they will, usually right away (after some due diligence)
It seems like the incentive is to become an accountant and seek employment at the shadiest big company you can find in hopes of hitting a whistleblower jackpot.
That's a shitty bet to take in life, considering that the likelihood is as good as winning the lottery. At least the lottery ticket costs just $10 and not a few years of life.
The shareholders, by the act of buying and holding the shares, expose themselves to all risks of owning a piece of the company. That the company may engage in accounting fraud is one of those risks.
The shareholders also benefited from the overstated earnings.
In the 1970s the newly established EPA offered bounties to environmental whistleblowers, who dropped a dime on polluters and helped it make the case against them. It was an expedient way of detecting violators and enforcing the law, because it takes both knowledge of facts and expertise in science to do that enforcement. Engaging with whistleblowers helped the new EPA overcome their understaffing and inexperience.
For example, fact: "that pipe coming out of that factory puts polychlorinated biphenyls into the Housatonic River at night." science: PCBs concentrate in fish. They mess up the immune systems of mammals, including people, who catch and eat those fish.
The proceeds of these bounties early in the life of the Clean Water Act founded some long-lasting watchdog orgs, such as the Hudson Riverkeepers.
It is good for the government to create incentives for people with facts and expertise to help them prosecute financial crimes, for the same reasons. Hopefully some of these big bounties will go to establishing long-lived watchdog organizations to keep would-be fraudsters honest.
But did they? The company already had rainy day money set aside, so it was adequately priced in to the share price by now.
Did the executive wait till after the regulatory filing came out with the misstatement just so they could rat to the SEC? Maybe, there's no consequence in doing things that way.
In other more detailed cases, an employee tries to raise an issue internally and gets ignored or stonewalled by higher ups, and then eventually gets to the SEC. These things take time, so it would be equally as difficult to define 'bad incentive, too late', let alone being legally inconsequential from the government's perspective to the whistleblower
It's for accounting improprieties, not a drug hustle. The fine is proportional to the crime. Even if we charged $800 million for this, would we charge $800 million for them not having a handicapped parking space at one of their offices?
Comparing to overall profits is counterproductive and dishonest. The punishment should fit the crime.
Comparing to overall profits is necessary when the discussion is about whether the penalty financially screws Monsanto's shareholders over. Nowhere in the parent thread is there a discussion going on about whether this is an appropriate penalty, just whether or not it "screws" Monsanto - in the context of their 2015 earnings statement, it's obviously not.
Obama has not put any corporate whistleblowers in jail. We can debate the merits of prosecuting those who leak government secrets, but that is a separate issue from this one.
Settlements that are classified as penalties are generally not tax deductible. Settlements that are classified as remedial/restorative generally are.
This was no doubt a topic of discussion and planning before the settlement was entered into. The article repeatedly refers to it as a "penalty", but it's unclear if that's colloquial or specifically informed language.
I doubt Monsanto pays an effective tax rate anywhere close to 20%. Further the people who receive the settlement pay taxes on it thus the taxpayer is likely better of.
Yep. I'm already sour against the IRS from just doing some tax calculations, saw the article title, and didn't even read the article before commenting! Edited my comment.
This is progress, but we've got farther to go.