Whistleblowers

"Big Tech now faces the Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth."

"The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation."

"Children of America are hooked on their product. There is cynical knowledge on behalf of these Big Tech companies that this is true."

"Facebook is not interested in making significant changes to improve kids' safety on their platforms, at least not when that would result in losing eyeballs on posts or decreasing their ad revenues."

"[ South Dakota and Nevada are among the U.S. states that have] adopted financial secrecy laws that rival those of w:offshore jurisdictions"

"The Blairs pay full tax on all their earnings. And have never used offshore schemes either to hide transactions or avoid tax."

"The ability to hide money has a direct impact on your life... it affects your child's access to education, access to health, access to a home"

"We're able to see how this parallel universe really works in a way we've never been able to before"

"[We would] crack down on the unfair schemes that give big corporations a leg up. It’s time to deal in hardworking Americans and ensure the super-wealthy pay their fair share"

"We're talking about presidents, we're talking about prime ministers. We're talking about rock stars. We're talking about porn stars and people that have been convicted of crimes all over the world"

"It requires an enormous amount of faith in the technology that you’re using. There’s countless instances where I’ve come across intelligence that was faulty... This outrageous explosion of watch-listing — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong..."

"I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain. Since that time and to this day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair... Not a day goes by that I don't question the justification for my actions. By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men—whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify—in the gruesome manner that I did."

"The first time that I witnessed a drone strike came within days of my arrival to Afghanistan... Early that morning, before dawn, a group of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika province around a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea. That they carried weapons with them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew up, much less within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the control of the Afghan authorities... Except that among them was a suspected member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his pocket... As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to place them under suspicion as well... Despite having peacefully assembled, posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been fulfilled..."

"Hale, thirty-three, believed the public wasn't getting crucial information about the nature and extent of U.S. drone assassinations of civilians. Lacking that evidence, U.S. people couldn't make informed decisions. Moved by his conscience, he opted to become a truth-teller... Had he gone to trial, a jury of his peers might have learned more details about consequences of drone attacks. Hale's honesty, courage, and exemplary readiness to act in accord with his conscience are critically needed. Instead, the U.S. government has done its best to silence him."

"Drone strikes are a form of extrajudicial execution that is illegal under international law... These antidemocratic impulses of the national security state are what’s actually harmful to our country — not a whistleblower who seeks to empower us to make democratic decisions about the crimes our government carries out in our name. Hale’s actions are both heroic and laudable. The fact that the government once again seeks to destroy a truth teller who exposed its crimes highlights the immorality of the system that Hale and others have exposed... The Espionage Act... has become the government’s go-to weapon against whistleblowers and journalists who challenge the US national security state. Hale conceded to giving documents about the US drone program to an investigative journalist (unnamed in court documents, but clearly Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept) and anonymously authoring a chapter in The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program. Far from a spy, Hale is a whistleblower — and a courageous one at that — whose actions have given us key insights into the unjust nature of US imperial power in the twenty-first century."

"On Aug. 8, 2014, the FBI raided Hale's home. It was his last day of work for the private contractor. A male and female FBI agent shoved their badges in his face when he opened the door. "Immediately behind them came about 20 agents, basically all of them with pistols drawn, some wearing body armor," he says in the film. "At this point I was extremely scared. By the time they finished his house was stripped of all electronics, including his cell phone. For the next five years he lived with the uncertainty of his fate. He struggled to find work, fought off depression and contemplated suicide. He was barred by law from speaking about his plight, even with a therapist. In 2019, the Trump administration indicted Hale on four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property. The thousands of targeted assassinations carried out by drones, often in countries that are not at war with the United States, are an egregious violation of international law. They are turning huge swathos of the planet against us. The secret kill lists, which include US citizens, have transformed the executive branch into judge, jury and executioner, obliterating the right to due process"

"There was an enormous amount of pressure on Joe Biden to keep the war in Afghanistan going from within his own party, certainly from the military brass... Joe Biden made clear when he announced his withdrawal from Afghanistan that the United States was going to still have the capability to strike remotely. It is a harrowing grotesque flashback to many of the incidents we saw during the Obama era where the Biden administration authorized a drone strike on what they claimed was a vehicle carrying ISIS operatives. And you just recently had this terrorist attack at the Kabul Airport during the withdrawal. On the surveillance feed that the drone operators were looking at, we now know that they saw clearly at least one child and still went forward with the strike. Seven of the ten people killed in that strike were children. Ten of the ten people were civilians. Joe Biden was part of the Obama administration, of course, which operated as a global octopus with lethal tentacles that could strike anywhere. Daniel Hale should be freed. He is an American hero for revealing what we now see continuing under Joe Biden."

"The people who defend drones, and the way they are used, say they protect American lives by not putting them in harm’s way... What they really do is embolden decision makers, because there is no threat, there is no immediate consequence. They can do this strike. They can potentially kill this person they are so desperate to eliminate because of how potentially dangerous they could be to the US. But if it just so happens that they don’t kill that person, or some other people involved in the strike get killed as well, there are no consequences for it. When it comes to high-value targets, every mission you go after one person at a time, but anybody else killed in that strike is blanketly assumed to be an associate of the targeted individual. So as long as they can reasonably identify that all of the people in the field view of the camera are military-aged males, meaning anybody who is believed to be age 16 or older, they are a legitimate target under the rules of engagement. If that strike occurs and kills all of them, they just say they got them all."

"Professor Miriam Rafailovich... told me ...that the contestants "get massive coaching from the schools"

"Project-oriented contests such as Intel aren't measures of scientific brilliance"

"Three of the president’s proposals target tech. This is especially true in that the foreign workers are overwhelmingly young, thus exacerbating the rampant age discrimination that we already have in the tech world"

"A past winner ... told the STEM education newsletter Metroplex Math Circle about choosing among projects offered by her university mentor"

"most top science and math students don't participate in such national contests."

"In case after case, we see tech titans and entrepreneurs misbehaving or breaking the law. They push the boundary of acceptable or ethical behavior that most of us have to play by. Even if some of them provide the technologies of tomorrow, it doesn’t mean they can operate under different set of rule"

"many contestants have immigrant parents"

"There is even a how-to book, "Success With Science: The Winners' Guide to High School Research,""

"The H-1B program authorizes non-immigrant visas under which skilled foreign workers may be employed in the U.S., typically in computer-related positions. Congress greatly expanded the program in 1998 and then again in 2000, in response to heavy pressure from industry, which claimed a desperate software labor shortage. After presenting an overview of the H-1B program in Parts II and III, the Article will show in Part IV that these shortage claims are not supported by the data. Part V will then show that the industry's motivation for hiring H-lBs is primarily a desire for cheap, compliant labor. The Article then discusses the adverse impacts of the H-1B program on various segments of the American computer-related labor force in Part VI, and presents proposals for reforms in Part VII."

"New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that the Intel competition "identifies and honors the top math and science students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems.""

"The contest doesn't rank talent in the same way we identify the fastest hurdlers or longest jumpers."

"We need to unleash the voices of the scientists in our public health system in the United States so they can be heard and their guidances need to be listened to."

"Republican lawmakers on the panel for the most part were careful not to attack Bright directly. But Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., slammed Bright for continuing to collect his $285,000 salary while first on sick leave for a spike in blood pressure, and now on vacation as he tries to straighten out his work situation. “You’re too sick to go into work, but you’re well enough to come here while getting paid,” said Mullin. “I have a hard time understanding that.”"

"Lives were endangered, and I believe lives were lost. Not only that, we were forced to procure the supplies from other countries without the right quality standards, so even our doctors and nurses in the hospitals today are wearing N95-marked masks from other countries that are not providing the sufficient protection that a US-standard N95 mask would provide them."

"I believe with proper leadership and collaboration across government, with the best science leading the way, we can devise a comprehensive strategy, we can devise a plan that includes all Americans and help them help us guide us through this pandemic. The window is closing to address this pandemic because we still do not have a standard centralized coordinated plan to take this nation through this response."

"Rep. Butterfield: How could we be struggling to get adequate supplies of simple supplies like swabs? What does this say about the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak? Bright: It says to me, sir, that there is no master coordinated plan on how to respond to this outbreak."

"We need to be truthful with the American people. Americans deserve the truth. The truth must be based on science. We have the world's greatest scientists. Let us lead. Let us speak without fear of retribution. We must listen. Each of us can and must do our part now."

"There's no one company that can produce enough for our country or for the world. We need to have a strategy and plan in place now to make sure that we can not only fill that vaccine, make it, distribute it, administer it in a fair and equitable plan. We don't have that yet and it is a significant concern."

"Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to improve our response now, based on science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged. There will be likely a resurgence of Covid-19 this fall that will be greatly compounded by the challenges of seasonal influenza. Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history."

"I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way."

"I’ve come to realize over the past decade or so that there are a lot of phonies among the Democratic Party’s elected officials — people who purport to be progressive, only to end up in the pocket of the big banks, the big environmental exploiters, or other vested interests. Early this month I was reminded of Democratic phonies in positions of authority, this time in Colorado... Polis is a former congressman who was elected governor in 2018 as a progressive Democrat... after campaigning on the goal of 100 percent renewable energy environmentalists have been restless for evidence of any serious commitment to that goal. So on Jan. 9, minutes before Polis took to the lectern... pro-environment protestors at the Colorado State Capitol hoisted signs reading “NO MORE SACRIFICE ZONES” and began shouting, “Ban fracking now!” Within minutes, state police arrested 38 protesters and charged them with multiple misdemeanors. Most were held in jail overnight and released the next day on $750 bond. Others... spent the entire weekend in jail... It’s the hypocrisy of politicians like Jared Polis... elected as an environmentalist. But as soon as he won his race, he reached out to the oil and gas industry and the frackers."

"So how do we trust our politicians? Consistency is probably the best test. Of all the Democrats running for president, only Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement of support for the Colorado protesters. Do we trust former Vice President Joe Biden with issues of war and peace when he supported every U.S. military intervention around the world since his election to the Senate in 1972? Do we trust Amy Klobuchar on prison reform issues when she spent so many years as a prosecutor? I wouldn’t."

"Had I known how things would turn out, I wouldn’t care if I got criticised. I would’ve told the whole world."

"I think many people believe that detaining him was stupid...and he did nothing wrong."

"I simply couldn't believe what I was seeing...All the doctors and nurses who saw yesterday's news were furious...Zhang Wenkang is ... abandoning even his most basic standards of integrity as a doctor."

"[I]f tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we'd live in a different country. Starting tomorrow."

"[F]orgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees."

"We have problems with illegal migration, we have the problem of the Caucasus, we have a problem of ethnic crimes... the fact that our authorities hypocritically pretend that such problems do not exist leads to people discussing them only in the street, at the Russian March."

"I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves. And it is the duty of every patriot and citizen of our country to make sure that this party is destroyed."

"No one should be beaten. [Instead,] everything that bothers us should be carefully, but unyieldingly eliminated by means of deportation... A tooth without a root is considered dead. A nationalist is he who does not want the root ‘Russian’ to be deleted from the word ‘Russia.’ We have the right to be Russian in Russia and we will protect this right."

"I had this cliché moment of a Russian émigré abroad: I really missed black bread. I know it’s stupid, but I really missed it."

"The inner compass of Alexei Navalny tells Alexei Navalny where to go. Everything else is uninteresting to me."