A whistleblower is a person working for an agency of government or a company who has the knowledge of inside illegal activities. A whistleblower may be any person ranging from a client, an employee, a supplier to even a contractor who has inside knowledge. A whistleblower comes forward with such illegal business activities of fraud or mismanagement and shares the knowledge of the same. A whistleblower may file a lawsuit or register a complaint with the authorities which leads to a criminal investigation against the company.
A whistleblower may be internal or external. An internal whistleblower is the one who reports activities of misconduct within the company, for example with the human resource department or the chief executing officer. An external whistleblower is a person reporting such activities from outside the company, such as the media or a public servant or any other government official.
The Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 in India helps to protect a person or a public servant who comes forward with knowledge of such wrongdoings of fraud or mismanagement within an organisation. However, the act needs more transparency when it comes to international or global corruption as India has still not criminalised foreign bribery and has no legal policy on the same.
An example of a whistleblower would be the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. Christopher Wylie came out with the details of how Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, was misusing the public’s Facebook data to trigger the election campaign for US President Donald Trump. Over 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested by the firm to influence the voting at the ballot box. These profiles were used to build software that could predict the choice of voting. This resulted in one of the biggest technological data breaches the world has ever seen.
A similar instance was when in 2013 when Edward Snowden had released files on how surveillance was being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor American Citizens.
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