Why all these whistleblowers recently?

Whistleblowing, this obscure practice discussed in most business ethics textbooks (we do so in Chapter 7), has become a big topic of discussion these days. The latest incident is Edward Snowdon and his revelation about the ongoing surveillance of phone and internet usage of American citizens by the US government. But he is not alone: currently on trial is Bradley Manning, who provided Wikileaks with the material for exposing the diplomatic correspondence of the US government.

The general contention with whistleblowing is becoming clear in both cases: are these individual traitors who defaulted on their duties by breaching the rules and codes they had agreed to abide by when entering their job? Or are they ‘heroes’ whose behavior is governed by higher, more general, and persistent ethical standards than their day-to-day job environment would allow them to follow?

It is useful to look at some historic cases of whistleblowing – and indeed cases, where certainly by hindsight the general agreement seems to be that the whistleblowers are in the second category of ‘ethical hero’. Think of Jeffrey Wigand, the executive of tobacco company Brown&Williamson who exposed the practice of enhancing the addictive potential of cigarettes of his employer (famously turned into the movie The Insider). Or think of Sherron Watkins, who initially blew the whistle on the practices at ENRON and contributed to the uncovering of the scandal in 2001. Turning to the political sphere, currently many references are made to Daniel Ellsberg who in 1971 leaked the ‘Pentagon Papers’ disclosing that the US government for years had systematically mislead the public about the impact, casualties and costs of the Vietnam war.

Whistleblowing commonly seems to occur in a situation where the moral status of organizational practice – be it a private company or a public institution such as the NSA or the Pentagon – deviate from the wider moral values which society deems appropriate. And crucially, it has to be added, these actions also deviate from the professed moral standards of the organization against which those individuals blow the whistle.

This is rather evident in the case of Ellsberg: by the early 1970s, the public in the US all long thought that the war in Vietnam had lost its moral cause; his revelations proved that the US government, too, was all along aware that what it did in Vietnam no longer could live up to the public mission and norms according to which the American government professed to act. Similar are the cases of Wigand and Watkins: in the same way the Tobacco industry outwardly professed that they were not aware of the addictive impact of cigarettes, ENRON had always claimed to be an ethical company. The same applies to the current Manning and Snowdon cases: Obama ran on the promise to stop the abuses by the previous Bush administration and to restore basic civil liberties – and is now found out to do the same or worse.

The dilemma of whistleblowers all points to the fundamental differentiation established by Max Weber a century ago: Members of a social group (incl. an organization) can act according to an ethics of responsibility or according to an ethics of conviction. The first looks at the consequences of an action and basically suggests that a virtuous individual is one that lives up to the expectations of all who are affected directly by the consequences of an action. In practice, this boils down to abiding by the rules and procedures of the organization. The main arguments against whistleblowing then all come in the shape of what the effects of the revelations are on other people (that was the big argument against Wikileaks) or how it affects the general functioning of a secret service where everybody potentially can leak anything (the current debate on Snowdon).

What justifies whistleblowing then is Weber’s ethics of conviction according to which an individual makes an ethical choice based on personal moral convictions. The act is based on principles, rather than anticipated consequences. In most cases whistleblowers refer to general principles of either good business practice regarding customers (the tobacco case) or shareholders (ENRON) or good government based on some basic democratic principles (such as the Ellsberg, Manning or Snowdon case).

Historically, such reasoning based on an ethics of conviction always becomes more relevant at a time when fundamental values of society are in question and challenged. The Vietnam war raised basic questions about the moral limits of the cold war; the tobacco scandals exposed the lack of basic moral rules of consumer protection; ENRON initiated the ongoing moral scrutiny of a shareholder value dominated form of capitalism; the Manning and Snowdon cases now raise fundamental moral questions about civic liberties, civic rights to privacy and protection of personal data and the appropriate powers of the state in protecting these liberties.

It is somewhat tragic – as probably the cases of Ellsberg and Wigand best illustrate – that whistleblowers are mostly recognized as moral, conviction-driven human beings quite some time after the events. At the time of the whistleblowing defenders of the status quo always wield two crucial tools: they can either invoke arguments following an ethics of responsibility and point to the potential harm and the anarchic nature of the act; Bradley Manning’s trial can be followed as a textbook example of this reasoning.

Or, they can try to discredit the ‘convictions’ of the whistleblower. Since these often reflect a wider moral consensus in society it is hard to attack those principles or norms directly. More effective seems to be an approach that discredits the whistleblower on a personal level. In Ellsberg’s case the CIA broke into his psychiatrist’s office to obtain information on his mental health and love life; in Wigand’s case a similar smear campaign was initiated. Currently with regard to Edward Snowdon, it is conspicuous how the entire political spectrum in the US is more or less embarking on this trajectory. From Bill Maher’s jokes last Friday night on Real Time to David Brook’s notorious profile in the New York Times - most seem eager to present him as some sort of self-aggrandizing nerd.

Whistleblowers turn up at a time when societies or organizations are deviating from commonly accepted and widely shared moral values. Whatever our concrete judgment about individuals and their motives - the fact that whistleblowing occurs at this point in history clearly points to a wider epiphany. Ironically, Snowdon relocated to the very country which for so long has been accused by the West of not respecting the human rights of their citizens in exactly this issue arena – much to the distress of Google, Yahoo or other companies. It looks like Obama currently has a bit of a hard time to explain to China, Russia or even his European allies, how his approach to privacy and data protection still reflects basic values of liberal democracies.

Picture by DonkeyHotey, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.

Five things we've learned about social responsibility in the media this month

If the WikiLeaks embassy cables saga that kicked off at the end of last year wasn't enough, the first month of 2011 has seen media organizations facing a whole slew of social responsibility issues. The Guardian newspaper has been breaking a major phone hacking scandal at News Corporation; a sexism case at Sky Sports in the UK has been championed by those bastions of political correctness, the UK tabloids; and the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera was identified this week by the New York Times as a major force behind the spread of riots in the Arab world. Not only this, but earlier in the month, Al Jazeera was involved in publishing the leaked 'Palestine papers' about the Middle East peace process, which immediately inflamed tensions in the region and, according to the Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair had destabilised the peace process.

Meanwhile, back at WikiLeaks, Rudolf Elmer was convicted of breaching Swiss banking secrecy laws when he handed over client information to Julian Assange, pledging to make public the confidential tax details of 2,000 individuals and companies,which he claimed revealed instances of money-laundering and large-scale illegal tax evasion. Oh, and some of the WikiLeaks supporters that attacked the websites of Mastercard, Visa and other companies last December after the firms withdrew their services from WikiLeaks were arrested. Phew! These are just some of the headline grabbers in what has been a month to remember for corporate responsibility watchers in the media sector.

Talking of which, we are also expecting to see any day now, the release of the Global Reporting Initiative's final draft Media Sector Supplement ready for a last round of public consultation. This supplement is intended to offer specialist guidance for media organizations 'measuring and reporting on the economic, environmental, social, and governance dimensions of their activities, products, and services'. Judging by the events of the last month, they'll have their work cut out.

So what then have we learnt about social responsibility in the media this past month? And how prepared will the GRI guidelines make media organizations who want to report on all this stuff?

1. The media sector might have to start thinking harder about product responsibility
There has been a gradual acceptance that media organizations have to take some regard for the impact of their content, as well as for the actual physical media they use. From protections for minors from adult content, to recycling of newspapers, there are a whole host of product responsibility issues for the media to consider. The GRI guidelines are generally suitable to cover these. But recent events suggest a shift in the conversation about the impacts of publishing controversial political content. When news organizations become complicit in political unrest and pose threats to peace, the standard response of "publish and be damned" comes under increasing scrutiny. By the same token, stories that help forge greater democracy in repressive states should be held up for praise. Organizations such as The Guardian and the New York Times have been leading the way in accounting for the positions they take on such issues with their commentary around the Embassy Cables and the Palestine Papers. The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, also recently published an interesting commentary on this (and points 2 and 3 below) in an extract from his forthcoming book about WikiLeaks. But a serious question mark remains about whether and how media organizations should consider the social impact of their version of the news - or like tobacco companies before them, lay the responsibility squarely in the hands of the consumer.

2. News organizations are being held to higher standards for how they gather information than they hold their own sources to.
The phone hacking scandal at the UK Sunday tabloid the News of the World demonstrates the importance of news organizations subscribing to legal and ethical standards in how they generate ‘news’. Illegally accessing the private voicemails of royals, film stars and other celebrities is simply unacceptable by normal standards of journalistic ethics. The Guardian newspaper has rightly been pursuing this story over the last few years. The resignation of Andy Coulson, the Government’s Director of Communications (and former editor of the News of the World) and Ian Edmonson, the paper’s Assistant Editor, show just how significant a story this is turning out be. On the other hand, the Guardian (and other news organizations) have decided to run stories based on illegally hacked emails, and no doubt will also do so using stolen financial information and other data gleaned by dubious means by intermediaries. Although there is a difference in the public interest component of these stories, the main distinguishing factor is that in one case the news organization is doing the dirty work, and in the other a third party is and the news organization simply takes advantage of it.

This has been a common ethical position adopted by news organizations, but as organizations in other sectors have learnt to their cost, the claim that the actions of those further back in the supply chain is not their responsibility doesn’t always convince – nor does it pacify their critics. News organizations will probably need to take a closer look at their policies and practices regarding the news supply chain. And the GRI should ensure that reporting on these policies and practices is part of their guidelines.

3. The fight between transparency and privacy is only going to get nastier.
Privacy and transparency are two fundamental principles frequently at odds with one another. The events around WikiLeaks have shown that much of the momentum is towards the latter, but the arrests of Elmer and the Anonymous hackers who supported WikiLeaks, not to mention mounting pressure on Assange and the travails of the original source of the Embassy Cables leak, Bradley Manning, are a warning that the proponents of privacy (or secrecy as their rivals put it) are not going to let the balance change without a fight. Media organizations need to articulate clearly where they stand on these critical issues for their business.

4.  Diversity issues affect media organizations in quite unique ways
The GRI guidance is quite clear on the need for media organizations (like all other organizations) to respond to and report on diversity issues. But the media actually has particularly acute responsibilities here because of its critical role in influencing public attitudes. So it's good to see the guidelines also cover diversity issues in media content. The Sky Sports case, which has seen one leading presenter fired and another resigning over sexist comments delivered off-air (but with the microphones still on), demonstrates just what a lightening rod the media sector can be for diversity issues. After all the presenters were off-air and would normally have expected their comments to go unreported and unheard by the public. Still, public they became and because this was a media organization and not say a bank or a real estate office, a couple of dodgy comments led to a firestorm of publicity. For Sky, sacking some star presenters isn't a bad way of advertising their commitment to diversity in such a context. But there's also a case for seeing the developments as an attempt by Sky to find a couple of scapegoats for what would appear to be something of a culture of institutionalized sexism at the organization - and not just a couple of off-message old dinosaurs.

5. Media organizations need other media organizations to make them act more responsibly.
Finally, for all the concerns about social responsibility in media organizations, the past month has also made it clearer than ever that the media plays a critical role in ensuring the accountability of powerful interests, whether those are governments, corporations .... or even media organizations. For this policing of the media by the media, we of course need plenty of plurality in the sector. Unfortunately, as far as powerful media players go, this is actually on something of a decline. And social media, for all its worth, simply doesn't have the research and reporting depth to do the core of that 'fourth estate' job as well. But that's a debate for another month.  

Photo by Caro Spark. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 

Top 10 Corporate Responsibility Stories of 2010

Mermaids protesting the BP oil spill. Photo by Johnathaneric.

 It's been a big year for corporate responsiblity. A huge oil spill, continued ructions in the financial sector, landmark decisions in the courts, and a new dawn for online companies around human rights issues. It is never easy to pick the most important stories of the year. Some get huge coverage simply because they feature big brand companies. Some hardly even scratch the public consciousness despite having major implications. In other cases, it can be difficult to determine accurately what their long-run significance will be.

But here in the Crane and Matten control room, we've put our heads together to come up with what we regards as the top 10 corporate responsibility stories of the year. These are the events that we think will have the most lasting impact on the field. But it was a hard choice - narrowly missing the cut were the 10 year anniversary of the Global Compact, the FIFA World Cup corruption scandal, Unilever's "Sustainable Living" plan, Apple's labour violations, Wal-Mart's latest announcements on sustainable agriculture, Jerome Kerviel's massive fine, and American Apparel's rollercoaster ride through 2010, among others.

But, hey, not everyone can be a "winner". So if you think we're worng, or if we've missed off your biggest story of the year, do let us know. And while you're at it, take a moment to complete our poll on the right to help us find the top stories according to our readers.Here, though, is our top 10.

1. BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
Deepwater Horizon was one of the world's largest ever oil spills, and understandably this story absolutely dominated 2010. Not only did it put a final nail in the coffin for BP's once vaunted sustainability reputation, but it heralded a major rethink about the viability of deep sea drilling. BP didn't cover itself in glory by failing to come up with a realistic remedy until far too late - and ended up picking up most of the tab, thereby putting paid to the usual assumption that pollution is simply an 'externality' of business. Really, this was the mother of all corporate responsibility crises in 2010.  

2. Google's battle for free speech
Google's withdrawal from China at the beginning of the year was a landmark decision in the battle for free speech on the web. A real clash of titans, no other story this year illustrated better the clash between government and big business around human rights issues. But Google's subsequent legal problems in Italy, where senior executives were convicted of privacy violations, demonstrated just how complicated this battle is going to be. 

3. WikiLeaks publication of the embassy cables
Who knows where this one will end up, or just what its long term significance will be for corporate responsibility? But it's hard to deny its significance as a major turning point in the fight for greater government transparency, and the contested role of the media and NGOs in bringing confidential information into the public realm. Heralded by some as the first great cyber war, the WikiLeaks maelstrom inevitably catapaulted online companies into the fray with predictably unpredictable results.   

4. Citizens United decision
The only court case to make it into the Top 10,  but according to President Obama the 5-4 decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizen's United vs Federal Election Committee "reversed a century of law" and "opened the floodgates" for corporations to play an ever greater role in US politics. According to the ruling, companies and other special interests can now spend as much as they like on influencing the outcome of elections. And why? Because despite their vast resources, companies should have rights to free speech on political matters the same as any other citizen. An historic ruling.

5. Toyota’s product safety recall
This case grabbed a lot of headlines in 2010, mostly because of the very scale of the recall and Toyota's previously unblemished safety reputation. This was a huge embarrasment for the Japanese car maker and showed up serious problems in the firm's management culture.

6. Bank bonuses 
Bank bonuses stayed in the headlines during 2010. Despite continued economic problems, huge public bailouts in Greece and Ireland, persistent unemployment, and widespread austerity measures, some banks managed to award bigger bonuses in 2010 than ever before.  No surprise that the public stayed angry with a bonus culture apparently so far removed from their day-to-day problems. But European regulators finally seemed to get the message with new guidelines released at the end of the year that looked set to dramatically change the bonus landscape across the entire continent.

Butcher in Haiti with food vouchers used to stimulate trade. Photo by DFID

7. Corporate response to the Haiti earthquake 
Few stories better illustrated the precarious role of business in international development than the corporate response to the Haiti earthquake back in January. The arrival of cruise ships full of vacationers represented for many the unacceptable face of corporate insensitivity and amoral consumerism. Yet, few denied that business had to be an essential ingredient in getting the stricken country back on its feet again. 

8. Greenpeace campaign against Sinar Mas palm oil 
Greenpeace won Ethical Corporation's campaigner of the year in 2010 for its work in combating deforestation. This was exemplified in the NGO's campaign against Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas which saw them force Unilever, Nestle and others to cease buying from the company during the year. Greenpeace's spoof ad on YouTube for the Nestle chocolate bar Kit Kat went viral demonstrating how campaigners were effectively harnessing social media for anti-corporate protest. 

9. HP's termination of CEO Mark Hurd
Hewlett Packard has had its ethical ups and downs over the years, but few expected the company to follow through quite so severely when CEO Mark Hurd was found to have made fraudulent expense claims to cover up a relationship with a female contractor. Rejecting Hurd's offer to pay back the $20,000 he'd received for the claims, the highly regarded leader was ousted by the board for failing to live up to the company's code of conduct. This was an impressive commitment to ethical rules by anyone's standards. However, it angered many who thought the company was shooting itself in the foot. A tumbling stock price and Hurd's instatement at competitior Oracle showed how much pain there could be in doing the right thing.

10. India's 2G licence scandal
OK, so actually this happened in 2008, but it was only in the closing months of 2010 that the full extent of the 2G telecom spectrum licences scandal began to be revealed. In what some have called India's biggest scandal since independence, Telecommunications Minister Andimuthu Raja was forced to resign over allegations that he lost the Indian Government some $38 billion in revenues using an opaque permit system that was riven with corruption. Leaked tapes of secret phone calls with corporate lobbyists have poured oil on the fire. This could yet become India's Enron moment.

So that's our Top 10 for 2010. Doesn't make for particularly edifying reading, but it hasn't been all bad. In amongst the scandals and corruption there have been some genuine cases of ethical leadership in 2010, where companies like Google and HP have had to make some hard ethical choices that have cost them dear. No ne said corporate responsibility was easy.

Is too much transparency a bad thing?

It’s been quite a week or so for transparency. The incendiary WikiLeaks release of almost a quarter of a million classified cables from the US diplomatic service has set news media across the world alight with daily revelations that have acutely embarrassed politicians everywhere. Last week also saw the FIFA bribery scandal reach new heights with the screening of the BBC Panorama program alleging corruption, followed by last Thursday’s selection of Russia and Qatar as the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively. Yes, that’s Russia, the country labeled a “virtual mafia state” in one of the WikiLeaks cables. Both cases involve a whole host of ethical issues, but perhaps more than anything they pose critical questions about the appropriate limits of transparency. How much should we know about what goes on behind the scenes in organizations such as the US diplomatic service or a global sporting body such as FIFA? And can too much transparency really be a bad thing?

WikiLeaks is clearly the most significant case of the two, and it looks set to be something of a landmark on the ethics of transparency in the digital age. On the one side, high profile rightwingers in the US, including Presidential hopeful Mike Huckerbee, have responded by suggesting the source of the leaks should be tried for treason. “Anything less than execution is too kind a penalty,” he commented. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under investigation in the US and Australia, wanted for questioning in Sweden (for an unrelated charge), and on Interpol’s red list – not to mention being cast by Sarah Palin as an “anti-American operative” who should be pursued with “the same urgency [as] al Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. Bradley Manning the army private who is supposedly the original source of the material is sitting in a military jail awaiting court marshal and a possible 52 years in jail. US internet companies Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS, meanwhile, have responded to pressure by US authorities and ceased supporting WikiLeaks by allow it to use their servers, domains, and payment services respectively. As a result, the organization has been forced offline several times in the last week.

On the other side of the debate, five respected news organizations – the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, and Der Spiegel – received prior access to the cables and have shown little hesitation in splashing front page stories over the past 10 days. Various commentators, hackers, and net activists have heralded the leaks as a new phase in the radical transparency of digital information. Columbia, meanwhile, has offered Assange immunity, whilst Amazon has been touted as a boycott target for caving to “censorship” and political restrictions on “free speech”. Clearly, things are complicated, to say the least.

The publishing of the embassy cables by WikiLeaks is in many ways a more ethically ambiguous act than many of their previous leaks, most notably the well known Iraq and Afghanistan war logs which detailed the hidden impacts of US military action. Other WikiLeaks though have also won acclaim focusing on documents alleging political and corporate corruption, public interest media reports suppressed by injunction, and secret Congressional research reports. The embassy cables, just by their sheer volume, represent a less focused campaign.

Yes, there are clearly some important public interest revelations in the material that has come to light. These include: the exposure of a US spying campaign targeted at UN leaders; the naming by US diplomats of China’s propaganda chief Li Changchun as the orchestrator of the Google hacking late last year; and disclosures that the Brazilian government deliberately covered up the existence of terrorist suspects within its borders to protect the country’s image, to name just a few. Oh and of course claims that the media organization al-Jazeera is heavily influenced by state foreign policy in Quatar, where the 2022 World Cup is going to be held. But it has to be said that many of the big news stories are no more than allegations by diplomats in what they thought were confidential dispatches rather than necessarily well-founded or verified facts. There is also a whole lot more material that is just plain gossip and rumor-mongering rather than what you might genuinely call ‘intelligence’.

All this makes the WikiLeaks cables less clear cut in terms of making the hidden “truth” public. They provide us with a unique insight into how international diplomacy works, and what emerges is hardly pretty or a paragon of honesty and integrity. But it is hardly the case of a whistleblower bringing a miscarriage of justice to light or an exposé of corporate malfeasance or political corruption, except in the very broadest of terms. Sure the material in the leaks is incredibly interesting, but how we have to ask how much of it is genuinely in the public interest. If it doesn’t pass this test, then why should supposedly classified information become public?

On the other hand, the arguments emanating from the US that the release of the cables has injured the national interest and put lives at risk is also rather flimsy. Yes it has embarrassed the government, but then who hasn’t it embarrassed? Putin, Burlosconi, and others have been just as much the target as those in the US. And no one yet has managed to unearth anything that has genuinely put lives at risk even if it has probably hampered US diplomatic efforts in general. This of course begs the question of why so much information should be classified in the first place if it’s not actually protecting anything.

It is this – the transparency versus confidentiality issue – that is at stake here. Some would clearly like to see all but the most critical security information made public so that the state can be held to account. Others believe that a communication made under the presumption of confidentiality should remain that way unless there is a clear public interest reason for disclosing it. In the FIFA case, there seems little doubt that the BBC was right to go public with its allegations of corruption, even if some commentators were unhappy that it potentially hampered England’s bid to host the 2018 tournament. And even if FIFA President Sepp Blatter complained of “the evils of the media"

The WikiLeaks cables though are so indiscriminate as to fail the public interest test, at least when considered as a whole. However, with appropriate sorting and contextualizing (which the newspapers appear to be doing a pretty good job of), this changes the complexion somewhat. Newspapers like the New York Times and The Guardian have given a good account of their motives and methods. As the New York Times editor says:

"The more important reason to publish these articles is that the cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations — and, in some cases, duplicity — of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name."

With appropriate journalistic selecting and framing, there is little doubt that there is an important if rather delicate media task at work here. This doesn’t condone the release of the cables en masse, though, which in our opinion is harder to defend from an ethical point of view, unless one’s view is that all government should be 100% transparent.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of WikiLeaks in this particular case, though, the broader lesson seems to be fairly clear. In business ethics, one of the standard rules of thumb is the New York Times test – if you wouldn’t want your actions to be reported on the front page of the newspaper then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. No doubt US diplomats didn’t expect this to so literally come true, but in a digital world, the prospects for doing so are increasing exponentially. And if you don’t want to be a news star, then you’ll need to work a lot harder than the US government in making sure what is said in confidence stays that way.



WikiLeaks graphic by Anna Lena Schiller reproduced under Creative Commons Licence
America Shhh image reproduced from Boycott Amazon for Dumping Wikileaks