> The Signals Network, the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that compiled these legal considerations, is one of these actors. The Signals Network enables whistleblowers and international journalists to work seamlessly together to hold powerful interests accountable
A word of advice: Don't get your legal advice from the same journalists that want to use your story, and maybe also your name, to further their own career.
There's an inherent conflict of interest between someone who wants to use your leak to further their own agenda (be it activism or simply writing a juicy news story) and your own interests as someone with potentially massive legal liability. When the legal wheels start turning, it's not the journalist who is putting their finances and freedom at risk. It's the employee.
Leaking company documents or even violating NDAs you signed as part of your employment should not be taken lightly, no matter how friendly sites like this make it sound. Always engage with legal representation that is not affiliated with the journalists who want your story. Never let a friendly journalist talk you into divulging information that could expose you until you've worked through the legal ramifications, no matter how much they encourage you to push forward.
To be fair, some have said this leaker from Facebook is quite vulnerable to being sued or even prosecuted and are probably wondering why Facebook is not taking legal action against her. The most obvious guess is that she is effectively protected by the press that Facebook is receiving at the moment. Without that publicity, i.e., the help of "conflicted" journalists, her legal arguments for protection seem rather weak.
This seems pretty fluffy. I read through the "Legal Handbook" and it doesn't seem as much like a handbook as it does a long article about what it's like to be a whistleblower, along with some very high level stuff about what it's like to engage a lawyer.
Like, a really basic thing here is that the legal advice starts by asking people to evaluate whether the misconduct they're thinking about violates laws. But it provides little guidance on what those laws might be. Obviously, they'd say that the first step here is to retain counsel. But that's an expensive and difficult first step, and more workers will need to qualify what they're observing carefully before taking that step.
Did anyone else read this more closely and reach a different conclusion?
The security stuff seems especially weak. Like, basic things you'd want to see headlined are the types of corpsec measures that large tech companies have deployed to trace leaks, and what they're likely to find if they image all the devices your contract with them allows them to image.
A much more fundamental problem I have with this "handbook" is that it seems geared towards getting people to leak things to the press and regulators. But that's not the limit of what tech workers can do to respond; a simple thing that the handbook doesn't talk much about is "when to quit", let alone when and how to engage in concerted action with other team members, and what the risks/benefits of that are.
> I read through the "Legal Handbook" and it doesn't seem as much like a handbook as it does a long article about what it's like to be a whistleblower, along with some very high level stuff about what it's like to engage a lawyer.
I looked through the "Media Handbook" and had the same conclusion: The advice doesn't really seem to be written with the tech worker's best interests in mind. It's more of an advertisement for journalists to collect stories.
The Media section reads like a promotional piece for a media platform called Lioness ( https://www.lioness.co/ ) and its founders. Instead of providing actionable advice about how employees should protect themselves, it mostly glorifies past whistleblowers and encourages the reader to do the same.
A truly worker-focused handbook would begin with a long section about whether or not going to the media is a good idea as well as propose some anonymous alternatives. Traditional whistleblowing may not involve the media at all, especially when government intervention (and the resulting rewards if fines are collected) are at stake. Encouraging employees to go straight to the media is reckless, IMO. There is a time and place for whistleblowing, but this is clearly written as a feeder publication for journalists.
The more I read this website, the more it feels like a promotional piece for the authors and their budding media outlets than an actual advice book for workers.
> a simple thing that the handbook doesn't talk much about is "when to quit", let alone when and how to engage in concerted action with other team members, and what the risks/benefits of that are.
That may be because often trotted out as a convenient solution to any sort of wrongdoing by a lot of privileged people who themselves have their pick of jobs in US companies.
It's a convenient null hypothesis that could be the substitute for any remedy in this guide. Harassed by your boss? Quit. Company you work for is engaging in wildly illegal stuff? Quit. Facing racism? You guessed it.
That's not to say that quitting is not a convenient and probably the easiest option for a lot of people. I have used it myself. It's just not the one this guide is meant for.
So I think that asking for a "when to quit" part of this guide would be like asking for a "when to know you should just give up and buy a new car" section in a car repair manual [1]. But if you want a lot of people to be good at repairing cars, I would hazard that including a "when to quit and just buy a new car" section wouldn't be high on your list of things to add.
As for the concerted action bit, I have to agree - adding them would be good. My guess is that it would be unionization lite, and those are a non-starter in the US for a million reasons.
--------------------
[1] I have to admit I am not particularly clear on this point in reality, because I have never seen a car repair manual. Ouch. Anyone here who has actually seen one? Make me eat my words!
Looking around the site, the handbook is by Ifeoma Ozoma, one of the Pinterest "whistleblowers" who went on a raging PR campaign and (seemingly) has now parlayed it into this consulting company. And here's what they're doing.
It's utterly unserious content by a grievance-driven person.
Regulating big tech is a democratic issue. It’s not up to the individual tech worker to do so, and I’m not convinced that all these movements aren’t “soft-solutions” organised by big tech to avoid people working on real solutions. Solutions like legal intervention from the EU and whatever government you are under.
Poor working conditions are solved by forming unions. In Denmark we have strong unions, and while their power is weaning (in parts thanks to big tech platforms jbecoming the middle men and taking 25-50%) our unions are the sole reason we have some of the best working conditions in the world.
Because here’s the secret to good working conditions. If you and everyone else in your line of work stops working, along with anyone working jobs that somehow support your lone of work, things change overnight.
Just ask MCD why they pay the now famous $22 and hour (or however much it was) when they initially didn’t want to. It’s because it’s hard to sell burgers when the dock workers refuse to unload your bread and the truckers refuse to deliver it.
So I’m all for the ideals behind these things, but they need to think bigger if they want to change anything. We shouldn’t need whistleblowers and bad PR to keep Facebook away from our children, it should simply be illegal with mega business ending consequences. When that happens you can be fairly sure that business will start to actually regulate itself, because if there is one thing enterprise businesses care about it’s actual risk.
That example of dock workers striking or truckers stopping work to support McDonalds workers is outlawed in Australia. It is called industrial pattern bargaining. So it is not that union can do much always, depends on the country.
Whistleblowing seems to be where everyone's faith is these days. Training people on whistleblowing is supposed to be an internal matter. By that I mean companies can have whistleblowing programs to identify problems proactively. This is generally how the US military (and the government more widely) use theirs. This should shield the company from responsibility if they at least attempt to act, not to mention it would probably buy trust from the public.
I've worked in big tech for a bit now and I've seen a lot of open door policies, but never a whistleblower program.
Whistle-blowing and public pressure does help in improving working conditions for all workers at tech companies.
Example
Article highlighting lack of benefits for contract workers at Google https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...
Result- Google instituted new policies for contractors who now get full-time like benefits including healthcare, sick and parental leave https://www.wired.com/story/google-require-suppliers-give-be.... That's 120,000 workers that didn't have benefits now get benefits.
That's great, but these benefits shouldn't come from the workplace.
> sick
As a contractor, you don't need to report time to the company you didn't work due to being sick. If Google is requiring this, they are statutory employees. That is the real problem. Providing 'benefits' to 'contractors' is just a bandaid. Either the benefits ought to be provided through other means, or the contractors are really employees and that needs to be fixed.
Not sure if anyone related to the Handbook are here, or posted this, but if you are you is there a way to download material covered in the Handbook? A git repo, torrent, etc.
It's good of you to inform users
> That said, I do NOT advise accessing this from a company device. Your employer can, and will likely, track visits to a resource like this Handbook.
But something even better than that would be facilitating a way to ingest the data or consult it without having to access the site each time.
Since the title is not particularly informative, I'll share the first paragraph:
> The Tech Worker Handbook is a collection of resources for tech workers who are looking to make more informed decisions about whether to speak out on issues that are in the public interest. Aiming to improve working conditions, direct attention to consumer harms, or otherwise address wrongdoing and abuse should not be a solo or poorly resourced endeavor.
Yeah I’ve gotta say the naming choice is not very good. It looks like they’ve put quite a bit of effort into this, but I’d never have guessed that it is what it is based on its name.
> ... So-called “employee handbooks,” provided to workers at the beginning of employment, are ubiquitous within the tech industry. They are filled with the information an employer wants a worker to know, but are void of the content workers need to protect themselves.
The Tech Worker Handbook is not a how-to, set of instructions, checklist, or call to action to whistleblow. Whistleblowing — the act of speaking up in order to improve a situation for others — is an individual decision that should be made after a careful consideration of risks, options, and intended outcomes. My hope, though, is that those who do decide to take great risks in coming forward — for all of us — are better prepared and supported.
^ Excerpt from TFA. IMHO it's a good idea, cool resource. Not everyone has Frances Haugen's gumption and foresight.
I don't really understand why we keep being told that these insiders who got rich at surveillance-tech companies are the ones we now have to rely on to fix the monster they've belatedly come to fear.
What is there to learn from these so-called "whistleblowers"?
A lot? I personally don’t remember a major whistleblower—in the legal usage of the term—who asked to be the sole savior who can fix the problem they identified.
It’s quite easy to lose sight of the whole picture while you are siloed working on a portion of the whole. I commend anyone who makes the public aware of bad corporate or governmental actors, even if it took them a while to come around to making their decision. That they may have profited in the past is immaterial. That’s an ethical dilemma they will need to resolve on their own.
I mean, if a company is doing bad things, and particularly if it's breaking the law, it is not usually going to announce the fact to the world. Whistleblowing is very often how the truth gets out; how many more people would have had junk medical results if not for the Theranos whistleblowers, say?
Perhaps in an ideal world, the government would have perfect clarity on the bad things that companies were doing through regulatory oversight. But in practice we're not in that world and a nefarious company can quite effectively hide all sorts of wrongdoing for a long time.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
A word of advice: Don't get your legal advice from the same journalists that want to use your story, and maybe also your name, to further their own career.
There's an inherent conflict of interest between someone who wants to use your leak to further their own agenda (be it activism or simply writing a juicy news story) and your own interests as someone with potentially massive legal liability. When the legal wheels start turning, it's not the journalist who is putting their finances and freedom at risk. It's the employee.
Leaking company documents or even violating NDAs you signed as part of your employment should not be taken lightly, no matter how friendly sites like this make it sound. Always engage with legal representation that is not affiliated with the journalists who want your story. Never let a friendly journalist talk you into divulging information that could expose you until you've worked through the legal ramifications, no matter how much they encourage you to push forward.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|4 years ago|reply
Like, a really basic thing here is that the legal advice starts by asking people to evaluate whether the misconduct they're thinking about violates laws. But it provides little guidance on what those laws might be. Obviously, they'd say that the first step here is to retain counsel. But that's an expensive and difficult first step, and more workers will need to qualify what they're observing carefully before taking that step.
Did anyone else read this more closely and reach a different conclusion?
The security stuff seems especially weak. Like, basic things you'd want to see headlined are the types of corpsec measures that large tech companies have deployed to trace leaks, and what they're likely to find if they image all the devices your contract with them allows them to image.
A much more fundamental problem I have with this "handbook" is that it seems geared towards getting people to leak things to the press and regulators. But that's not the limit of what tech workers can do to respond; a simple thing that the handbook doesn't talk much about is "when to quit", let alone when and how to engage in concerted action with other team members, and what the risks/benefits of that are.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
I looked through the "Media Handbook" and had the same conclusion: The advice doesn't really seem to be written with the tech worker's best interests in mind. It's more of an advertisement for journalists to collect stories.
The Media section reads like a promotional piece for a media platform called Lioness ( https://www.lioness.co/ ) and its founders. Instead of providing actionable advice about how employees should protect themselves, it mostly glorifies past whistleblowers and encourages the reader to do the same.
A truly worker-focused handbook would begin with a long section about whether or not going to the media is a good idea as well as propose some anonymous alternatives. Traditional whistleblowing may not involve the media at all, especially when government intervention (and the resulting rewards if fines are collected) are at stake. Encouraging employees to go straight to the media is reckless, IMO. There is a time and place for whistleblowing, but this is clearly written as a feeder publication for journalists.
The more I read this website, the more it feels like a promotional piece for the authors and their budding media outlets than an actual advice book for workers.
[+] [-] quadrifoliate|4 years ago|reply
That may be because often trotted out as a convenient solution to any sort of wrongdoing by a lot of privileged people who themselves have their pick of jobs in US companies.
It's a convenient null hypothesis that could be the substitute for any remedy in this guide. Harassed by your boss? Quit. Company you work for is engaging in wildly illegal stuff? Quit. Facing racism? You guessed it.
That's not to say that quitting is not a convenient and probably the easiest option for a lot of people. I have used it myself. It's just not the one this guide is meant for.
So I think that asking for a "when to quit" part of this guide would be like asking for a "when to know you should just give up and buy a new car" section in a car repair manual [1]. But if you want a lot of people to be good at repairing cars, I would hazard that including a "when to quit and just buy a new car" section wouldn't be high on your list of things to add.
As for the concerted action bit, I have to agree - adding them would be good. My guess is that it would be unionization lite, and those are a non-starter in the US for a million reasons.
--------------------
[1] I have to admit I am not particularly clear on this point in reality, because I have never seen a car repair manual. Ouch. Anyone here who has actually seen one? Make me eat my words!
[+] [-] elefanten|4 years ago|reply
It's utterly unserious content by a grievance-driven person.
[+] [-] l33tbro|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure there will be more versions of the handbook over the years.
[+] [-] project2501a|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moksly|4 years ago|reply
Poor working conditions are solved by forming unions. In Denmark we have strong unions, and while their power is weaning (in parts thanks to big tech platforms jbecoming the middle men and taking 25-50%) our unions are the sole reason we have some of the best working conditions in the world.
Because here’s the secret to good working conditions. If you and everyone else in your line of work stops working, along with anyone working jobs that somehow support your lone of work, things change overnight.
Just ask MCD why they pay the now famous $22 and hour (or however much it was) when they initially didn’t want to. It’s because it’s hard to sell burgers when the dock workers refuse to unload your bread and the truckers refuse to deliver it.
So I’m all for the ideals behind these things, but they need to think bigger if they want to change anything. We shouldn’t need whistleblowers and bad PR to keep Facebook away from our children, it should simply be illegal with mega business ending consequences. When that happens you can be fairly sure that business will start to actually regulate itself, because if there is one thing enterprise businesses care about it’s actual risk.
[+] [-] softveda|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btheshoe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Correct! The handbook puts all focus on the individual and "forgets" to recommend collective action. I wonder why.
[+] [-] ipaddr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aspieandproud|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ghasm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
I've worked in big tech for a bit now and I've seen a lot of open door policies, but never a whistleblower program.
[+] [-] _alex_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4303|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iammisc|4 years ago|reply
> sick
As a contractor, you don't need to report time to the company you didn't work due to being sick. If Google is requiring this, they are statutory employees. That is the real problem. Providing 'benefits' to 'contractors' is just a bandaid. Either the benefits ought to be provided through other means, or the contractors are really employees and that needs to be fixed.
[+] [-] pajamaw|4 years ago|reply
It's good of you to inform users
> That said, I do NOT advise accessing this from a company device. Your employer can, and will likely, track visits to a resource like this Handbook.
But something even better than that would be facilitating a way to ingest the data or consult it without having to access the site each time.
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Scattering the text across many little articles discourages a comprehensive reading.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xpe|4 years ago|reply
> The Tech Worker Handbook is a collection of resources for tech workers who are looking to make more informed decisions about whether to speak out on issues that are in the public interest. Aiming to improve working conditions, direct attention to consumer harms, or otherwise address wrongdoing and abuse should not be a solo or poorly resourced endeavor.
[+] [-] dinkleberg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hikerclimber1|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisweekly|4 years ago|reply
The Tech Worker Handbook is not a how-to, set of instructions, checklist, or call to action to whistleblow. Whistleblowing — the act of speaking up in order to improve a situation for others — is an individual decision that should be made after a careful consideration of risks, options, and intended outcomes. My hope, though, is that those who do decide to take great risks in coming forward — for all of us — are better prepared and supported.
^ Excerpt from TFA. IMHO it's a good idea, cool resource. Not everyone has Frances Haugen's gumption and foresight.
[+] [-] walshemj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fidesomnes|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ForHackernews|4 years ago|reply
What is there to learn from these so-called "whistleblowers"?
[+] [-] makeitdouble|4 years ago|reply
Whistleblowers become these little Prometheuses bringing out some fire to fight the giants.
I deeply disagree but can empathize with the pessimism, given how dire the situation has got.
[+] [-] Mtinie|4 years ago|reply
It’s quite easy to lose sight of the whole picture while you are siloed working on a portion of the whole. I commend anyone who makes the public aware of bad corporate or governmental actors, even if it took them a while to come around to making their decision. That they may have profited in the past is immaterial. That’s an ethical dilemma they will need to resolve on their own.
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps in an ideal world, the government would have perfect clarity on the bad things that companies were doing through regulatory oversight. But in practice we're not in that world and a nefarious company can quite effectively hide all sorts of wrongdoing for a long time.