The stunning "Climategate" embarrassment wasn’t broken on corporate news. No, it was thrust into the light of day by participants closest to climate change study, by scientists who were shouted down and exiled when they expressed anything less than full faith in the data.
As a Wall Street Journal piece puts it:
"This may be how information-based scandals play out in the future: A leak from a whistleblower directly onto the Web. Expert bloggers then assess what the disclosures mean—a Web version of peer review."
For once, I enthusiastically agree with the Journal.
But let’s not stop with the East Anglia data massagers. There’s larger, and often more important, areas to encourage whistleblowing via the web.
Let’s start with the banks and Wall Street criminals. With the way Wall Street has been decimated in the past couple years (Goldmann Sachs bonuses notwithstanding – but that’s the very reason it helped take down Lehman and others, for a bigger share of the remaining pie), there’s got to be TONS of disgruntled financial services employees out there with explosively damning emails from their former firms.
Sure, they’re not going to be in the senior, partner positions, but what about all the IT people that were shitcaned by Goldmann, Lehmann, Bear Sterns, JPMorganChase, BOA, etc.? There’s got to be a pretty good amount of damning executive emails these IT people have seen that would look mighty pretty sitting on the web right now.
Executive assistants? Consultants? Lawyers? Many must be sitting on "Climategate" bombs right now, nuggets of senior level dissembling and crime that just need posting on the web. And the Bernie Madoff fiasco – all you SEC and regulatory people who have damning emails detailing just how this former head of NASDAQ was able to conduct his multi-Billion dollar fraud while the SEC looked the other way for DECADES. Post those emails! And don’t worry too much that doing so will ruin your "career" or you chances for "advancement." You don’t have any.
It’s a new economic reality now (the "new normal," if you're a NY Times reader - and you have my sympathies), and many, many jobs and "careers" (and industries, for that matter) that took hits are gone for good. Americans are finally free of the shackles that held them from taking action and blowing the whistle – the self-delusional belief that instead of fighting the power, they somehow had a chance to step up to the ranks of the powered and would focus their energies there instead. As this nation has rudely learned over the past few years, if you have to work, you don’t have the power and you won’t become one of the powered cliques. Give up the ghost and post those damning emails instead!
But post them where? Well, here’s one good place. I’m sure there are many others – perhaps you have more you can list in the comments below? The main thing is not to send them to corporate cheerleaders like the NY Times, WSJ, Bloomberg, Washington Post, etc. Get them out to the web first – the only place real news is being broken. Don’t worry; corporate media can report the story a month later when it blows up so much its no longer containable.