High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights 718
iminplaya writes "In yet another blow against free speech rights, the Supreme Court decided that government employees who report wrongdoing do not enjoy 1st Amendment rights while on the job. From the article 'The Supreme Court scaled back protections for government workers who blow the whistle on official misconduct Tuesday, a 5-4 decision in which new Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote [...] The ruling was perhaps the clearest sign yet of the Supreme Court's shift with the departure of moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the arrival of Alito. [...] Stephen Kohn, chairman of the National Whistleblower Center, said: "The ruling is a victory for every crooked politician in the United States."'"
Unfortunate (Score:4, Insightful)
If TJ was brought to the future, he'd hate the government as it stands in this point in time, but then again, he'd hate alot of other things with the government now too, like how damned big it is.
America is changing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Was it just that I was young and naive and believed in a good country that stuck to its principles? That principles meant something to this country?
The real shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Headline Is A Little Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about free speech is this. Your words have consequences, which might include you losing your job. There is no first amendment guarantee to others not taking action against you because of your words.
Re:America is changing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the surface this ruling might seem bad too, but I'm not so sure. From what I read it means that government employees can be fired for what they say at work. Just like me in my private sector job. This seems like a no brainer to me.
Freedom of speech (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunate (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is moving towards a police state, which China, to a large degree, already is. The US is more capitalistc than ever (capitalism is the opposite of communism).
Article summary is flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
"We reject, however, the notion that the First Amendment shields from discipline the expressions employees make pursuant to their professional duties," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said if the superiors thought the memo was inflammatory, they had the authority to punish him.
"Official communications have official consequences, creating a need for substantive consistency and clarity. Supervisors must ensure that their employees' official communications are accurate, demonstrate sound judgment, and promote the employer's mission," Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy said that government workers "retain the prospect of constitutional protection for their contributions to the civic discourse." They do not, Kennedy said, have "a right to perform their jobs however they see fit."
Should government workers really be able to pass around accusatory memos with no ability to be fired? I thought it was already enough of a joke that if you worked for the government you were in for life. Do we not want government employees to be accountable for what they say if it is false?
Speech will still be protected if it is truly whistleblowing, and not just bitching.
This has nothing to do with the first amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
Alito and the "deciding vote" (Score:3, Insightful)
The Supreme Court scaled back protections for government workers who blow the whistle on official misconduct Tuesday, a 5-4 decision in which new Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote...
So did the other eight vote, and then hold off for Alito, or what? How can you definitively say that Alito cast the deciding vote?
This seems like anti-Alito flamebait to me.
Re:Headline Is A Little Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
The quote from the article is:
This is the beginning of the situation where a whole society sees a terrible wrongness and no one will say a word because they are terrified of reprisal. Eventually, even the people that have the job of punishing those that speak out are too terrified to not punish. And then you have a society of good people that are locked into a happy cycle of evil that they do not even want to be part of.Anyway, that's the reason some people are saying this is so wrong. Whether it's a big jump from this to what I described or not, I do not know. Usually bad things are not nearly as far away as we think. And usually that's because we try to keep those bad things as far from our thoughts as possible, :-).
Re:Headline Is A Little Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, and think about it, your words have consequences, which might include you being jailed. There is no first amendment guarantee to others not jailing you because of your words.
There's *legal* whistleblowing and illegal (Score:2, Insightful)
If you really think the whole system top-to-bottom is so corrupt that *none* of the proper channels for internal government revue can be trusted, well, then I guess you have a choice to make. Practice civil disobedience (by going to the press) and (possibly) go to jail like a man, or not. See, people want to be all "I'm practicing civil disobedience" without *actually* breaking laws.
People might think this sounds crass, but what I'm saying is, in most cases, whistleblowers *can* and *should* work within the system, the legal framework, for whistleblowing without going to jail. If that is not possible, then by going to trial and going to jail, you will be shining a big old spotlight on the problem, and that too can serve the public good. But, if we said that anybody who claims to be whistleblowing can leak anything to the press, then we will be inviting an ever escalating flood of leaks.
National Whistleblower Center (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Congress (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand that they brought this about to try and reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits, but this is really throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater here.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunate (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
It's like this country is moving to a pseudo-communist form of government
No, the thing is that China is becoming more and more capitalistic (despite the communist talk), while the US is becoming more and more repressive. Therefore both are becoming capitalistic, repressive regimes.
Article Itself is Misleading! (Score:4, Insightful)
All the Court seems to say here is that the memo that Ceballos wrote was not something he wrote as a civilian to "whistleblow," he wrote the memo as part of his job and could indeed be fired for it.
It'd be like getting fired for writing bad software...programmers can't claim their software is a communication protected by the 1st Amendment and then claim they can't be fired for it!
I suspect that one could still write "memos" and send them to journalists as a civilian and have those writings protected.
Re:America is changing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's worth noting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's worth noting... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Headline Is A Little Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that is the quote from the article. The article is only very loosely connected to the actual ruling.
It's a newspaper. If you have ever read a newspaper article on a subject you are intimately familiar with, you would have found that they got most of the major facts wrong. The thing is, they do this to every story. Newspapers are just hopelessly inaccurate, not necessarily due to bias, but because reporters are incredibly lazy. And sub-editors - who have the job of creating the headlines - care about catching your attention, not about accurately summarising facts.
Tomorrow morning all the law-professor blogs will have picked the ruling apart line by line, and then you'll be able to see what it actually means. Or, as the parent poster did, you could read it yourself. But if you are going to announce the end of the world based on one line from an AP wire article, don't be surprised if everyone ignores you.
The best summary of what's happening (Score:4, Insightful)
"We're legislating ourselves into becoming a third world nation."
Sadly, this applies far beyond this particular case, or even the original discussion on chemistry discussion at the other site.
Re:Unfortunate (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.law.harvard.edu/alumni/bulletin/2006/s
(An Evangelical Christian sounding off about the ID/evolution debate and the problems for evangelicals)
Re:Unfortunate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:mod parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)
That all so called communist states where police states too is pretty much a result of "to fight a monster, you have to become one". This is no excuse of course, but rather a sign that they were't really communist in the first place.
And oh
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Is anyone actually reading the decision? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it make it a little harder to define something as legitimate "whisteblowing"? Probably. Is it the end of the world and the begining of an American police state? Probably not.
The decline of the United States (Score:3, Insightful)
I truly hope the economic and political abomination which is now emerging falls much faster than Rome. I have little hope that the American people will do anything, or will even try. They are too sucked in by the corporate happy-face, too poorly educated in the true nature of the world, and too overwhelmed with fear at the hand of the war-maker's spin.
There was a time when I aspired to live in the United States. A land of opportunity as they used to say. Now it's the land of the spied upon, the land of continual corporate, military and religious conquest, the land of the un-free, the land of delusions.
Re:The real shame (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a two time Bush voter. Even with his shorcomings(and he does have many), the other candidate in the general election was even more unpalatable to me.
LK
Re:The real shame (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Pseudo-communism (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither country listed above employs communism in any form. Look at marxist theory and you can see that neither the USSR nor China were anywhere near a communist state (except maybe china during the days immediately after the revolution.
China ended up as more of a capitalist/faschist hybrid state posing as a communist nation. That's almost where we are headed now.
Re:America is changing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell this to the thousands of dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of the "crap he's pulled" can not be undone, not even in 20 years. Please don't underestimate Bush's crap, even with the damage to the "inalienable rights".
I sometimes wonder "how they sleep at night". Is it easy to tell yourself that the thousands of people killed where all for the best, and it all had to be done? I guess the world has known far greater evil, and they all slept well.
Re:The real shame (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The real shame (Score:1, Insightful)
When most of the electorate quits deciding which person to vote for based on their rather limited knowledge of how much fun it'd be to have the guy over for a BBQ and beer the country will be a lot better off. This is how many people decide who they'd vote for. There are, of course, also the people who voted for Bush because "he's Christian" -- without any elaboration on why that should make someone an inherently more competent and effective chief executive, nor why an outward peacock like cloak of piety makes him better than his Christian challenger at anything other than looking pious. And finally there were a few people voted for him because they figured he'd make them rich beyond their wildest mortal dreams. Fortunately the second two groups are smaller, so it's the first set that are the real problem. Now they're getting what they deserve as their government rapes them, and they're making the rest of us endure it as well.
It is extremely difficult for me to imagine how almost any challenger in either presidential race could have possibly been even a fraction as incompetent, insulated, intellectually dull, ineffective, reckless, corrupt, or expensive as this one has been, is, and will continue to be as its walking-dead legacy lumbers on, zombie-like, for the next several decades.
Mod parent down; -1, Mentally Ill (Score:4, Insightful)
By comparing the savage inequalities of power and wealth in communist nations such as Cuba and North Korea with "income inequality" non-issues of freer nations, I can only conclude that you're mentally ill.
Iraq sure doesn't look very "conquored" to me.
Where's all the oil we have supposedly "stolen"?
Re:America is changing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to be young and inexperienced to be idealistic. Having high ideals and living up to them is harder when you are grown up and experience the real world, but it can be done. Only lazy and intellectually dishonest people do things that are morally/ethically/idealistically wrong and blame it on "the real world".
To let America slide from a beacon of hope in the world to a distrusted mad dog because it's too hard to do the right thing is frankly disgusting.
Or so I believe.
Re:The real shame (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Headline Is A Little Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:America is changing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that big a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Even apart from enshrining racist forgeries as official government memos, not being able to restrict official speech makes it virtually impossible to enforce any sort of protocol. Without established, enforced, and respected protocol the entire chain of command, unity, and general discipline will break down and the organization will founder. The ability to restrict official speech is critical to this.
This ruling strikes a good balance. Makes it clear that you can't simply say anything *in an official capacity*, where you should be representing the interests of those who hired you, while leaving your rights to speak as your own person untouched.
Re:Tell this to the thousands of dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Article summary is flamebait (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, you're either being extremely disingenuous or simple minded here. You think that this ruling will help with governmental accountability? It will do the opposite.
Imagine a governmental employee sees something shady, but isn't positive of their interpretation of the event, so they send an email to a coworker discussing the incident. Under this ruling, they could be fired for the email!
Yes I'm assuming that email can be counted as an official communication. I'm sure that an attorney could successfully argue the case that an email sent from a governmental account, or even from any account during working hours could count as an official communication.
My point is that if employees are unable to discuss such matters with their coworkers to clarify things without fear of losing thier jobs, then they are much less likely to bring their concerns public. This ruling will decrease governmental accountability, not increase it as you seem to argue.
Re:The real shame (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither can fetuses that get aborted!
But seriously, anyone being executed has already been isolated from the rest of society for a long time, with little danger to the public, so life in prison is clearly an option. You can't really call yourself a "pro-life" person if you chose death over life when you have a real choice.
FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
It sure seems like this guy was reprimanded for crossing the line between responsibility and advocacy. It is very common that a "situation" looks different at one level than another. This person was an employee of the DA's office and actively subverted that office. It's not his role or perogative to take this type of action. Had he quit his job and then pursued support of the defense, it would have been legal.
This guy's action would be very similar to tipping off drug dealers about impending raids if the guy thought hte drug in question should be legal.
There's no surprise here and the SFGate article is monstrously misleading.
There is no such thing as First Amendment protection for government employees on their job or related to knowledge they've gained on the job. There never has been. Ask anyone who has been in the military.
"Whistleblower" is a very specific case of protected speech. This guy wasn't a whistleblower. He didn't follow the proper channels and actively helped the opposition of the office where he was employeed.
Re:Feudalism (Score:4, Insightful)
As the recent events in France show, the European population still believe the state is obliged to take care of them and no European politicians have the guts to stand up and explain that this simply is not possible.
Re:Tell this to the thousands of dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Clinton went over to China, lessened tariffs and gave them favored trading partner status, which hurt our economy. He also took campaign money from Chinese officials which was against the law, and then a Chinese official was found buried in Arlington National Cemetary. The guy sold out our country to one of the worst regimes on the planet.
That was a direct decision on Clinton's behalf. Under Bush's presidency, some soldiers attempting to gather information that may be necessary to save lives humiliated Muslim men by interrogating them nude in front of women.
Is that torture? Were they permanently injured? Are scare tactics truly torture? Where do you draw the line? How would you interrogate people and obtain information if lives were on the line?
Which is the worse situation?
We exist in a land of hyperbole. Everyone swears the world is ending. Every civil right is gone. These are the darkest days.
As a fellow liberal, I say bullshit. Read about the reconstruction of the South sometime. Have you seen how Russia responded to terroism? Do you want to talk about rolling back the clock on civil rights? In England, they shoot innocent civilians on the street because they ran from the cops. No evidence, no problem. We're not talking about holding prisoners, they shoot people just for running and Blair said it was okay. He said national security trumps everything, and if the cops have to carry guns and shoot potential suspects, then so be it.
The truth is that our civil rights haven't greatly been rolled back. This particular decision in the article is sad to see. But let me ask you, what damage to our civil rights actually occurred over the past few years? Do you know, or are you regurgitating media hype?
Re:Not slander though (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, why can they not consolidate laws? For example, would people want one law against murder that listed all the punishments or would they prefer many laws with one for each type of punishment? Lawyers/politicians seem to prefer a greater number unfortunately. Of course the cap I mentioned would at least force consolidation.
To prevent them from combining non-related laws together, public stonings (non-California style
Re:Tell this to the thousands of dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Aghanistan. You can look it up.
The countries that are at odds with the US have been for a long time. Many people just didn't realize it. Americans are so self-centered it barely occured to them that people might resent our power, wealth and politics.
If you think people in the Middle East only started to hate the US recently, then perhaps you can explain the past 30 years of terrorist attacks, or the people who spend millions to fund terrorist camps.
You still stated that we are currently living in the darkest days since Jim Crow laws. I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).
But stripping a guy down in front of a woman trumps that in your book.
The primary motivator behind much of the Muslim/American conflicts stems over Israel, which isn't exactly a new issue.
You're not biased or partisan in the least.
Re:Unfortunate (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:America is changing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because you assumed the principles believed in were the ones they said they did.
I think this is exactly right. Things aren't so much different than they were 20, 30, or even 50 years ago now. The fundemental failing of this administration is their inability to hide it. Their mistakes, miscues, and lame attempts at misdirection have been so poorly managed that the corruption inherent in the system is now obvious. And it is so obvious that the "government" has lost even plausible deniability.
Re:This has nothing to do with the first amendment (Score:2, Insightful)
Good job. Lets punish people for doing the right thing. We should also arrest the tipsters that let the police know where a known felon is.
From Webster's Unabridged (Score:3, Insightful)
1. We're not a dictatorship
2. Bush certainly isn't forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism
3. We're a capitalist society. The government doesn't control industry.
4. Nationalism isn't necessarily bad, unless it goes to extremes, which we haven't
5. I haven't seen any signs of racism in the current administration
Re:Unfortunate (Score:2, Insightful)
Ass
Re:Not pseudo-communism. Fascism. (Score:3, Insightful)
Points 1 - 10 are dead on for that period of time.
11 and 12 pretty much describe the 1950s in America and the West.
13...That's how the Democrats got all their money...Can we say Joe Kennedy?
14...Well, that's the specialty of the Dems also. They invented election fraud in the modern era.
Re:Tell this to the thousands of dead (Score:4, Insightful)
"Is that torture?" [newyorker.com]
Rape, according to a military investigation [findlaw.com]
>How would you interrogate people and obtain information if lives were on the line?
I'd try something that works. Look at what John McCain, a torture victim, has to say on that subject. Torture does not get you information to save lives, it gets you whatever you want to hear.
Stop and think that a lot of police departments hire former MPs. These people maybe, the ones who weren't caught for sure, will be questioning Americans in a few years.
>But let me ask you, what damage to our civil rights actually occurred
USAPATRIOT section 215, searches without warrant, review, or opportuity to challenge after the fact. "Free speech zones" surrounded by barbed wire. Open ended detention of US citizens without legal counsel or court review. Not all under the current administration but all within the last few years.
Re:Unfortunate (Score:4, Insightful)
Restricting some anti-social activities of individuals for the benefit of a group is called a "society". There is no way, under any conditions, to create a society without some restrictions and compromises that have to be enforced on its members in some way. Period.
It may be limited by a responsible government, but it asserts that right and uses it. If allowed to grow unchecked, it will eventually become totalitarian in nature.
True. But this is also true of any government, and thus of any society. Power corrupts. Governance requires power. Ergo, governance, of any kind, corrupts. That is why there is a need to create a system of checks and balances to control and restrict that power. The Grand United States Experiment, although pretty much completely failed by now, was very successful for a period of time, showing that such a system is possible, although Version 1.0 has clearly failed to withstand a concentrated assault of elements present in any society: those motivated by greed and lust for power (read: Evil) who always, since the dawn of history, seek to subjegate their respective societies for their own gain, quite irrespective of their political and economic structures at the time.
The government eventually finds that it must monitor it's people in order to produce what it considers an ideal economy.
Or "security". Or "moral values". Or "one and True Religion". Etc and so on. See above. All forms of governance, and thus all societies, are subject to the self-corrupting nature of that governance. The answer is to create a system where that governance is under control, not abandoning the governance and thus in effect the society itself. Anarchy is a state where the strongest wolves hunt the sheep and kill their competing wolf challengers with impunity. Anarchy is what all societies of the world have evolved to avoid, even at the cost of monarchies and tyrannies, as even those were empirically proven to be preferrable to Anarchy.
Asserting that there is no link is as absurd as asserting that socialism always and inevitably leads to a police state, but not quite as abusurd as claiming that they are fundamentally incompatible.
There is a link between any form of governance and thus any sort of enforcement of a particular economic model and a possibility of a tyrannical government. Simply, every government, and thus every society, carries with it its own seeds of tyranny, abuse and self-destruction. And they will carry those seeds indefintely into the future, as long as greedy and sociopathic individuals keep getting born. The trick is in not allowing those seeds to germinate.
Re:Unfortunate (Score:3, Insightful)
We'd like to take a moment to thank the Democratic Party for knuckling under and refusing to fillibuster the nominees which have now shut down a citizen's right to report a crime. As Justice Steven says, there is no difference between professional and non-professional speech. What we have here is the the ability of an employer, the federal government AKA Bush, to imprison people who report crimes.
We've now broken the fourth seal of totalitarianism. We cannot discuss governmental crimes with reporters. This will go along with not being able to assemble peaceably to redress grievances, to view the actions of the goverment and past governments, and the use of the free press to ferret out news from a government. Now we cannot speak, as well as not being able to hear.
This is serious. The curtain is coming down here and all across the world.
Re:Tell this to the thousands of dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk about hyperbole.
This is just a smokescreen.
Bush created a situation to REMOVE OIL PRODUCTION FROM THE MARKET.
This drove up speculative investment, which, in turn, jacked up the price of oil from $20/bbl in 1999 to over $70/bbl today. Who profits? Exxon/Mobil sure as hell did. Nobody disputes that, it's in their SEC filings.
Who suffered? The same idiots who bought H2 Hummers and slapped a yellow-ribbon magnet and a "kick their ass, steal their gas" bumper sticker on it.
Did you know we've spent near $200 billion of our dollars on Iraq?
Try $300 Billion.
But Iraq, and Iraqis aren't getting this money. Crooked defense contractors, their bribery recipients, and CPA officials did. Are you aware that over $9 Billion went missing in Iraq in 2004, just plain lost - by sloppy CPA accounting practices. That money almost certainly went into somebody's pocket, and nobody is investigating it. That money was borrowed. The recent decline in the value of the US dollar is the result of this "Borrowing" - and all Americans, except those few with a net worth over a few hundred million, are going to suffer for it - yet they're happy, because they got their $300 tax-refund check.
I also believe that arrogance in our military leaders prevented them from forseeing the outcome of the scenario.
Then you are gullible.
Our military leaders did forsee this, and did know that we would need 300-500 thousand troops to provide security in post-invasion Iraq. Those leaders were told to shut up, and being good soldiers, they shut up, or even publicly claimed that they agreed with Rumsfeld, because they were afraid of the consequences of dissent (suffered by Shinseki and others).
The goal of this plan, was not to liberate Iraq, or protect the US from WMD, or fight terrorism, or even protect oil resources.
The ONLY way that this war plan makes any sense, is if the intent was to generate a conflict, that destabilized the region, caused oil prices to spike, caused a political split that would prevent an organized government from ever arising in Iraq within the next century, and funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars from a strong American middle-class, to wealthy investors in the oil industry, defense industry, and precious metals, and provided a propaganda mill with plenty of material to propagate the meme in the minds of Americans that government is always bad, and can never solve problems, and is unredeemably corrupt.
In the end, all this does is establish and strengthen a permanent American Aristocracy, and weaken the middle class, and undoes all the gains made since the New Deal. Which has pretty much been the goal of Neoconservativism since Hoover's time.
Give me a fucking break. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please. At least a dozen people were KILLED [salon.com] as a result of torture in Abu Ghraib. The pictures of our soldiers posing with the bodies were all over the internet. Do you really mean to tell me you didn't notice that?
You have got to be fucking kidding me. The Chinese crimes were committed by... wait for it... that's right, CHINA. A country we have very little ability to influence. No matter how you twist it, Clinton is not to blame for what the Chinese government did. On the other hand, the crimes in Abu Ghraib were committed by, yes, that's right, agents of the US GOVERNMENT, who were acting on legal advice provided by the Secretary of Defense.
So please spare me the argument that Clinton's trade liberalization with China is somehow morally equivalent to US Government-conducted torture of prisoners.
Sean
Re:Not pseudo-communism. Fascism. (Score:1, Insightful)
It ain't politics when a group takes over a government by stealing at the very least two elections, the data on the Florida election is by now self-explanatory, while half the Ohio state elections board is under indictment.
Duuuuuhhhh.....when they have rolled back workers' rights, human rights, women's rights, labor union rights, we's truly and totally screwed. They will continue to dissolve the socioeconomic middle-class until there is absolutely nothing left. This is called neofeudalism.
Either you one of them are you are hopelessly clueless.....
Re:Not pseudo-communism. Fascism. (Score:3, Insightful)
The United States clearly shows your signs 1, 3, and 7.
The United States less clearly shows signs 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14
The only signs I'd say that the United States isn't showing at all are 5, 8, and 11 - and the current president has tried really hard for 8.
Re:Unfortunate (Score:2, Insightful)
Communism requires the destruction of private property rights in the means of production, which in turn requires unrelenting violence, constant terror and mass-murder, as was predicted [bastiat.org] in the 19th century, as was repeatedly demonstrated [hawaii.edu] throughout the 20th.