 Hi, and welcome to this great, great part of the Ofsha 2017. We've got, at this moment, we've got three specialists on something that you absolutely have to know more about. And I'd say everyone has to know more about that. It's about whistleblowers, protection of whistleblowers, legislation on how to go on with that. So we've got the specialists here. And we've got specialists from all over the world for you, especially Sulek, who comes from Melbourne, from the university there. And so I think she has the longest commute to get to this festival here. So give her a big hand of applause. And if you want to know why she's here, well, there's things about hacking and about whistleblowing. But she wrote the book on hacking. She wrote the book with Julian Assange. So she's, I mean, she wrote the book. Come on. Yeah. Well, one of the other things is what she did is that she started, she founded Blueprint for Free Speech. And Blueprint is an organization that helps out with legislation for whistleblowers. And both Cannell and Veronica are both working for, working for, working for, yeah, working for Blueprint. So that, yeah, they do something. Cannell is working on a PhD on human rights and whistleblowers. Veronica is working on better legislation in Europe for whistleblowers. So please, people, give them all a big hand and the floor is theirs. So we're making this a bit of a panel conversation. And I will tell you a little bit about Cannell Levite and Veronica Nade. Cannell has a background as an anthropologist with a degree from, that's Veronica. Sorry, Veronica has a degree in cultural anthropology from a German university, which is really hard to pronounce. Also, it's in mine. Yeah, that one. And a massive degree from there. And anthropology is actually very important if you want to understand whistleblowers, how they think, what their needs are in organizations and how organizations respond to them. Cannell is doing her PhD in law at Bremen University and she's got a focus in her research on whistleblowing. I do research at the University of Melbourne. I'm interested in the technologies, particularly anonymity, anonymity, and technologies that affect whistleblowers. Whistleblowing and whistleblowers has been sort of a long-term topic here at this series of events. So if you think to two SHA equivalents ago, Julian Assange opened the proceedings. WikiLeaks was emerging as a major force, as a publisher, revealing things that whistleblowers provided to it on an anonymous basis through a, at that time, very innovative anonymous electronic dropbox. And then if we step forward to OHM four years ago, so four years beyond the one before that, we saw that we had Jesslyn Radick and Tom Drake, Colleen Rowley, who and other members of organizations that are secret by nature, whether they're the USDOJ or the FBI or the CIA or the NSA, and talking about their whistleblowing or the work that they do with whistleblowers. So there's clearly been a long and close relationship between the audience and the continuing audience at this event and whistleblowing. So we look at a world that has evolved very strangely since the last US election with President Trump in power, a changing of the guard, and perhaps a little bit of a sense of despair among some people about what does this mean for the future and what does it mean for the future of whistleblowing. We see an onslaught of offensive technologies, of methods of using metadata to track whistleblowers and find their identities. We see convictions of people like CIA whistleblower Jeff Lee Sterling that appear to be pretty much solely on the basis of metadata. And that raises questions about, is the world going to shit for whistleblowers? But we actually have a little bit of good news, not complete good news, but a little bit of good news about some progress that's been happening here in Europe around protections for whistleblowers that both of my colleagues here will speak to you about today. And the first person who's gonna speak Veronica will talk about three cases. We're gonna do three cases. Yes? Yes. Three cases. Around a case in Ireland, a case in Spain, and a case in... Bosnia. Bosnia, Herzegovina, yes, okay. And then Canel will come on and speak about the Lux-Leaks case, the Luxenberg case. And in a sense, her step will be a step from taking it to more country-specific whistleblowing to a broader pan-European whistleblowing topic. That is how whistleblowing in one country, particularly financial whistleblowing, then has tentacles that impact surrounding countries. And this will point the way to some discussion of what is currently now on the discussion agenda, which is a EU directive on whistleblower protection. So I'll lead you to jump in. Thank you so much. On that, Veronica, thank you. Okay, so just to start, and introducing you to the problem, what it actually means to be a whistleblower, I'm gonna let one of them speak for himself, who's Jonathan Sugarman from, well, Israel originally, but he blew the whistle in Ireland as a risk manager at the Irish branch of the Italian Bank Unicredit, if I can make this work, yes? Can we jump in and say, Veronica did this interview with Jonathan Sugarman, and it's part of a project that Blueprint for Sweets is part of a set of NGOs called Change of Direction in Europe Project. You can search for them and find terrific material on the site for whistleblowers and about whistleblowers. Exactly. And I've just realized we don't have audio, I think, on the video, so maybe the tech angels can help. Ah, now we do. We do. I saw a problem with the information that my department was producing almost from the first week I worked at Unicredit. Obviously, I was very worried about it. We're talking about billions. Once I reported a breach to the Central Bank of Ireland, and the breach was 20 times the permissible deviations of the losses, you're allowed to go up to 100 kilometers per hour. If there's a mistake, you can go to 101, but 101 is already a problem. And I walk in through the door and I said, I'm at 120. The reports were signed not only by my boss, but the other managers in the bank. They have to sign off every day to know that these are the risk figures for the bank. My CEO could say, no, no, no, you're new here, been here a long time. I used to be the head of trading, the head of treasury in this bank many years ago before I went back to Italy. And I said, it's okay. And I said, how do you know that it's okay? We're talking about a 30 billion bank. Are you running the balance sheet on the beer coaster? That was pretty much the moment of no return. When they rang me at home one evening and said, Jonathan, you told the regulator that you're at 120, but you're actually at 140. So I went in the next day and resigned. Because the law was quite clear, it said five years in prison. In banking, we knew already in 2006 that we're coming to the end of the party. And so effectively, Lehman collapsed over liquidity. They ran out of liquidity. And my whole issue with Unicredit is, we did not know our liquidity. Now it turns out everybody was short. And nobody went to jail, nobody. You didn't do anything. Obviously, I wasn't the flavor of the month with a lot of people in the bank. In terms of retaliation, yes, things got very bad. I found it effectively impossible to find another job. Effectively, I was put in a position where I, an employee of the bank, was forced to behave criminally. Now no employer on the planet should be allowed to force an employee to conduct a crime. And so when I started dealing with lawyers, with journalists, the bank started threatening me either directly or through the bank's own lawyers. Later on, people walked up to me in one of two conferences and said to me, Jonathan, 20 years ago, you'd be dead by now. I've been in hospital on more than one occasion, suffering from depression, from anxiety. I have lost everything that I ever had. Definitely, definitely. Because I get to sleep at night. So, yeah. That's the story of Jonathan, and I gotta, okay. And so it's in a way a very classical whistleblower story because Jonathan, so there was a wrongdoing. Jonathan made a report and that report was neglected. He lost his job, not because he was fired, but because he had to resign, as he explained. And up until today, he's without a job and was neither reinstated nor compensated for his actions. And that happening, regardless of the fact that he mobilized local Irish politicians, he took his story to Brussels. He wrote a book about his experience as a whistleblower and Ireland, in the meantime, even passed a law protecting whistleblowers that's not valid for him in retrospect. And so he's still depressed and without a job, as we already heard, and actually in need of health care support. So, other cases that we came across these past couple of years, and which are actually very interesting, is, for example, the case of Ana Anagarido to the left, who is a former local government employee in Buadía de Monta, in the Madrid metropolitan area, who disclosed information about a local mayor in her district that acted far beyond his remit, named Arturo González, who was actually later even named in the Panama Papers. And the investigations into her disclosures led to the unraveling of the Girtl case, which is one of Spain's largest corruption scandals in recent histories, and implicates dozens of officers of the conservative right-wing people's party, I think they're called, and the estimated money loss to public finances caused by the corruption that Ana revealed goes up to 120 million euros. And today, investigations and trials are ongoing, but Ana, at the same time, who got harassed for disclosing the information, she lost her job, got depressed, was even awarded 90, well, close to 100,000 euros in moral damages for workplace harassment that she never received because her former employer put in an appeal at the trial, and she won several whistle-blower awards and joined a platform that supports whistle-blowers in Spain called Plata Forma Polo Enesidad, but now lives in Palma de Mallorca and is selling self-made or handmade jewelry to tourists because she cannot work in her former working environment. And the third case I would like to talk about is the case of the employees of the Tuzla Quartz mining company in Bosnia, who, as we can see, dug their own graves in a response to the retaliation they suffered from the state of Bosnia. What happened was that the employees of the local mining company blew the whistle on a regional mining minister who had forced them to pay a bribe of 15,000 euros in order to obtain an extension on their mining license. And what followed was a systematic retaliation campaign against the employees and particularly the director of the family-run company that included seizing of company assets, freezing of bank accounts, and even the ransacking and burning of administrative offices of the company. And the employees even went on a hunger strike to protest against what happened to them. And only after 18 months and after a couple of them had actually threatened to jump off a 35 meter silo, the government finally granted their mining license. And now that minister is on trial. And this case sparked huge outrage in Bosnia the company is back in business and as I said the guy is finally on trial but still it's an ordeal that they had to go through. I mean it's still a slightly more positive outcome than for Jonathan or Anna. Maybe also due to the fact that they're in a bigger group and there's an entire company and there's involved and there's a village that's supporting their case but still though. So these are just a couple of consequences that people have to suffer when the law fails to protect people that are blowing the whistle which is why we're working to advocate for strong whistleblower protection laws. And as Sulej already indicated there was actually this positive movement on that in different European countries. These are the list of countries that have introduced legislation favoring whistleblowers or supporting whistleblowers in the past couple of years. Not all of them are actually dedicated or comprehensive whistleblower legislation. Some introduce the issue and part of anti-corruption laws. Some of them are even quite crappy. The French law for example is not supporting or like we're estimating that it's not gonna protect whistleblowers in practice because it still relies on whistleblowers to prove that they acted actually in good faith which is not always this easy to demonstrate. But at least we can see there's political will. There are other initiatives ongoing one which is very prominent and happening in Spain with a huge support of civil society which is actually quite impressive. And since we're already in Holland and you can see Holland on the list let me just quickly mention that the Dutch law which is called House of the Whistleblowers Bill and which was introduced in 2016 is actually one of the best whistleblower bills on the books worldwide because it mainly, because it includes two functions. No, sorry. It includes a dedicated agency for whistleblowers that has two separate functions. One would be an advisory center that takes in complaints from whistleblowers and supports them in their disclosure and the other being an investigation center that initiates investigations into the claims made by whistleblowers and co-operates with the authorities. So you have everything under the same roof basically. And there is, yeah, and just to finalize this as Sulejt already mentioned there is also finally movement on the EU level. The European Greens have presented the draft directive on whistleblower protection just to prove that it actually can be done. And there is also the Committee of Judicial Affairs in the European Parliament that recently presented the draft report that will be presented to the commission and which then will hopefully propose a draft legislation. The only problem is that we do not yet have a legal basis. So in case there is any smart lawyer in the room who would like to come up with a bright idea about this and knows his way around or her way around EU law, I'm happy to take in suggestions. And the other thing is that some MEPs have expressed the fear that the commission would propose legislation only on whistleblowing in the financial sector because that's pretty tangible and because you can't count the numbers of money that's actually been saved. But that would rule out protection for reporting any other wrongdoing and there is significant evidence for why whistleblower protection, if it's not comprehensive and not fully implemented, fully monitored and horizontal, mainly, can in some instances even be more dangerous for whistleblowers than no legislation. But skipping UK because we have to move on but Kanell will talk more about the setbacks of faulty legislation and I'm leaving you to that. So, okay, good. No, go. Sorry, sorry. Hello, everyone. So as Veronica mentioned, there are already quite a lot of laws in Europe that have been passed to protect whistleblowers but what you also saw was that, well, these were two videos showing clearly that these laws failed to protect whistleblowers but there are many, many more cases in these countries, Ireland, UK where there is also a great law, Spain, France, Ireland, who just failed to protect whistleblowers even though the law was here, quite reasonably good to protect whistleblowers but it didn't do such. So why do we have this lack of effectiveness for laws? And I think that it's important for this talk to focus on two elements. The first one is the public perception of whistleblowers. I'm pretty sure that if I ask all of you what is a whistleblower, I'll get almost as many different answers as many as you are because we can ask ourselves the question, is whistleblower someone who's linked to an organization or is he's just like someone who's emulated to an organization just seeing that something bad is happening somewhere and wants to disclose it? We can ask ourselves, are all leakers whistleblowers? Are whistleblowers all leakers? Are whistleblowers necessarily disclosing something in the field of corruption? All these kind of questions. And the problem with this lack of common public perceptions, perception of whistleblowers is that you cannot really get a lot like work properly if you don't have the breeding ground in the society that will support its effectiveness. Because law is here, as you know, to regulate our relationships in a society but society won't let itself be regulated like that if it doesn't agree with it. And the problem is that in so many countries in Europe, we still see very bad perceptions in the public of whistleblowers. In some countries whistleblowers are referred to by the term of denunciation. This is the case in Germany, so denunciator, sorry. In other countries, they're just referred to by the term snitch, which is even worse. It gives like a really bad, like negative connotation. And in some other countries who have taken step forwards, it is very neutral. They're called whistleblowers. So if you have no public perception and no public support of a whistleblower, you can have the best internal mechanism, the best law. There will be no one who will be there really and apply the law. Once you will knock at the door and say, hey, I'm a whistleblower, I have something to disclose. There will be a whole mechanism with no one to apply it because either they won't know about it, they won't even know that you are a whistleblower, or they just won't, don't have this reflex or this willingness to protect you or just to take care of the disclosure and stop the malpractice that you have witnessed. The second reason that could explain this lack of effectiveness of the laws is the fact that also in law, we have no common legal definition of whistleblowers. It's like if you take all the countries and even in international law, the definitions are always different. And that comes mainly from the fact that there have been several approaches to whistleblowing that we could summarize like that. So the first one was whistleblowing as fighters for the fight against corruption. When whistleblowing has been introduced in the law the first time, it was in the US and it was in this frame exactly to stop corruption in companies because corporate social responsibility wasn't enough because people were from the inside, so there were too many conflict of interest. That was the corruption approach. And this approach is still visible in many countries who have adopted law that only deal with whistleblowing who will disclose facts against corruption. But all the others disclosing facts about violation of rights that will be put in danger the environment or violations of our privacy won't be protected. The second approach has been the labor law approach which is why countries like the UK only have laws who will protect private employees. This is the approach that is now being a bit set aside but still it has been quite an important approach and it has generated a lot of laws that today remain very focused and therefore narrow on this topic of protecting private employees when they witness something in their organization. The third approach is the one that we found in the wake of whistleblowers like of course Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg which is fighting against the abuse of secrets within governments. And this approach is today still very strong but still it's not enough because you have a lot of collisions with rights like national security and you also won't be able to include in that whistleblowers who will witness things about multinational corporations who are violating human rights. This is completely different as abusing a secret from the government. So this is also too narrow. So we had to come up with a fourth approach which is coming up really recently with a case, the Lexlik case that I will present you in a few minutes. It's the approach based on human rights and mostly freedom of expression. And under this background, against this background, we see whistleblowers not only as witnessing and disclosing violations of human rights but also whistleblowers being at the same time victims of violations of human rights because their free speech is not respected and we also become victims of these violations of human rights because our rights as a public to receive the information that we need to know is also violated. So the presentation of Lexlik's, I think I know that's the right slide, perfect. So Lexlik's took place in 2010 and it involved two whistleblowers and one journalist who have been condemned, two whistleblowers have been condemned in March, in Luxembourg, March 2017, to suspend its prison sentence as well as fines. The journalist has been relaxed. This case involves more than 580 confidential tax agreements that have been concluded between the state of Luxembourg and corporations be corporations like McDonald's, IKEA, the Deutsche Bank, that were leading them to pay sometimes even less than 1% of taxes, even though the official rate in Luxembourg for corporate taxes is 29%. So I think it's very important to mention this case for two reasons, laws that don't take into account a growth approach to protect whistleblowers and laws that also are combined with a bad or a too or an existence public perception of whistleblowers will just, they won't work. And second reason, because this is the case that has been most obvious in bringing us the vision of whistleblowers as holders of free speech and therefore developing for them new rights or new ways of protection that we will see in the third part. So first reason why it was the law and adapted to this case. Well, what they disclosed, these two whistleblowers were actually tax agreements that are legal in principle. The only limit to these tax agreements is that they don't have to create distortions in the EU markets, which means in turn that you have to prove that these agreements haven't been granted to other companies, therefore these companies are paying the official rate of 29% and others are paying only 1% that creates a distortion, but otherwise they are totally legal. And the law in Luxembourg says that if you're whistleblower and you disclose something that is opposites, that is, sorry, a violation or the commission of a crime in the field of white collar crimes, corruption, money laundering, influence pitting, you will be protected only if what you have disclosed was illegal. But now a lot of commission of infractions or a lot of acts that are contrary to the public interest go through tax optimization, which is a very gray area and which is really, really hard to prove that something is gonna be illegal and Luxembourg doesn't take that into account. So it has been stated by the courts several times when they were the hearings for the Lexley case. Yes, these are whistleblowers. Yes, this is totally contrary to the public interest. The public interest of that disclosure has been mentioned several times by the EU parliament as well. It is like everyone said it, but still the law doesn't protect it because it isn't legal. Good to mention as well is that the EU parliament also made a quick estimation, I mean a quick broad estimation of the amount of money that has been lost through this scheme of tax avoidance. Only between 2005 and 2010, and it continued after that and it still goes on. 60 billion euros per year were lost because they were not paid as taxes. So now going to the facts, how did it happen? So Antoine Deltour was an employee in this accounting, so one of the big four, Pricewater Coop House, a company who was acting as a consultant for big law firms who would just go there and say, hey, take care of my taxes, yeah, my corporate taxes. And he wanted to leave this company because he didn't feel that he was so, anyway, like in line with what they were doing because he felt that he was doing too much optimization. And before leaving, he decided to copy a few documents from the company, which is something that everyone does. This has been also acknowledged by the court for his training and to apply to other jobs. He did that, and by doing that, he was in a file that was completely public, opened. Only thing is that someone who is scanning, the person who was scanning the tax, secret tax agreement, from into a file actually forgot, instead of doing cut and paste from the scanning folder where they go when you scan them and putting them, so cutting them from the folder and putting them in a secure folder, this person did copy and paste. So these secret tax agreements, they were all there in this public folder. So Anton Deltour saw that. He said, okay, this is big. This is definitely contrary to the public interest. I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna see what I do with it. He took that, he started to read it. He didn't really understand what it was, but he understood that something big was happening. And he started to write in comments on blog, commenting on the fact that the Luxembourg was just like allowing massive tax evasion. And his comments were various circumstance. He seemed to be a guy who had actually facts. And the journalist saw his comments. He contacted him and then they agreed together that the journalist would be doing a documentary on tax evasion in Europe, in Luxembourg specifically, but he was also agreed at the request of Anton Deltour that he wouldn't disclose the name of the companies that were paying this amount of taxes. So that, first of all, his company, his former employer, wouldn't be identified. And secondly, of course, he wouldn't be identified. Journalists still did that. He revealed everything, everything, the name of the company. So it took maybe 48 hours for the company to track down the activity. And so that Anton Deltour had taken these documents. And that was it. He just got into the court and he tried to, of course, justify himself by the fact that he had really tried to think about what he could do with these documents without putting in danger, without just throwing them everywhere to the public. No, he just wanted to raise awareness. And when we look at this, we just see, I mean, I think when we get rid of all these functions and questions that we connect to, we sublore as functions of, are you disclosing against corruption? Once we get rid of all of that, the only thing that we see or that I see is freedom. It's just freedom of expression and our freedom and their freedom. And the good thing is that if you start thinking about whistleblowing with the lens of freedom, then you get access to human rights. And human rights, even more than national rights, are meant to evolve with society, are meant to be the space, there's a lot of space when you look at the European Convention of Human Rights or the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. They can all be interpreted broadly so that they can apply to society even when it changes. So two examples for that, that can represent and that represents today clear new avenues for whistleblowers. First one is asylum law. Whistleblowers and asylum, I should switch now. What's that? Other way. All right. The United Nations Convention of Geneva protects refugees following this definition. Refugees and individuals who outside of his or her country of nationality or habitual residence is enabled or unwilling to return due to the well-funded fear of persecution based on his or her race, religion, nationality, political opinion and membership or membership in a particular group. And this definition at the beginning was meant to be used in times of war, but then it has been extended, for instance, under the group of membership of a particular group. You can find now the homosexual community. You can also find child soldiers and these are all the fruits of evolution of the society and they were not thought at all by the drafters of the convention. So we have to ask ourselves, can we actually say that whistleblowers when they disclose something are holding, expressing a political opinion? Well, the UNHCR comments on the convention say that the notion of political opinion need to be understood in a broad sense in order to encompass any opinion and any matter in which the machinery of the state, the government, society or policy may be engaged. And this has led already to a few cases, I mean more than a few cases in the US and also in Canada where whistleblowers were considered as being persecuted by whom by the state, because they were holding a political opinion which was disclosing corruption or disclosing the misuse of power of secrets, thank you, in the government. So we see here that it's really, if we get this approach for whistleblowers as holders of freedom of opinion and holders of human rights, then you use human rights in a way that you're gonna protect them like that instead of just trying to apply fragmented laws that mostly gonna fail because there's no public perception. And in the cases of Julian Assange and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, we also saw that countries who offered them protection even though we know that there's a lot of political game behind this, but they were Ecuador, Bolivia, these countries in South America, they have in their constitution, it's written that asylum, they give it for people who flee persecution and account of their fight for freedom, for democracy or for the rights of others. So this is how the Geneva Convention is gonna be interpreted and is being more and more interpreted. And very quickly, so that we still have time for questions, the right to encryption as well is being now officially recognized by the UN rapporteur on freedom of expression as a component, as a new way of exercing free speech. Well, before free speech would be, you just say something in a suit, you yell it, then this is free speech. And then in extended to newspapers and then recently to bloggers because they were not bloggers before, but now they're also expressing their opinion by your blogs. And now whistleblowers are using anonymity and encryption and this is being recognized as using your free speech. So I'll leave it here. So that's all it can beg for. Thank you. So... Thank you. Thank you very much. Hopefully I can figure out how to use Robin's flicker here. So I'm gonna talk very briefly. I think Canella has introduced very well the idea. There's this sort of swirling point of convergence between what we think about is human rights and the area of anti-corruption fighting and the area of free speech. I like to think in my studies of whistleblowing as an evolving human right and that evolving human right of free speech is the right to dissent from wrongdoing. The specific right to speak out and dissent from wrongdoing. And the reason the word wrongdoing is important is because a lot of the whistleblowing legislation that currently exists today in some countries says specifically illegality or waste. But so much of the whistleblowing that's been high profile and the reason it's been high profile is not just because it's wrongdoing. Perhaps it wasn't illegal in Luxembourg to be involved in such a giant tax evasion scheme that was robbing neighbour countries of their rightful income in tax. The tax that supports the fantastic bike laneways here and the great public transport in the Netherlands and schools for everybody. But rather, it's something that offends the public idea of what's right, what's reasonable. Is it illegal that a ambulance in Germany should be dirty? Maybe not. Do people find it kind of wrong? Yes. Do people find abusing people who are frail and in old person's homes through neglect and other things offensive? Yes, maybe it's not illegal, technically. But it offends our morals of what's right and wrong in society. And that's why it's so important to protect whistleblowers. Now, just before I go on to Ukraine, where there's some interesting evolution happening there, I also want to just mention that one of the key elements, there are a number of key elements of what makes a good whistleblower protection scheme. If you go to the Blueprint for Free Speech website, you will see we've got a set of blueprint principles, this little booklet we've put together over time from our sort of knowledge base of experience with dealing with whistleblower laws and regimes in different countries. But one element of it that's been emerging as particularly important is the provision of an anonymous channels for whistleblowers to use, whether that's when they blow the whistle inside, and by the way, academic research may be surprising to some people in that most whistleblowers, by far in some surveys, 90 plus percent of them would rather blow the whistle internally in their organization first. That is their first preference. But whether they blow it internally or to a regulator or externally to the media or an NPE, for example, what they really want is the option of anonymity. This is critical, and this is where all of you engineers who Phil Zimmerman identified when he asked for you guys to put your hands up in the opening speech here at SHA is so important, because that anonymity is best protected through technology. We've got the confidentiality side of it, pretty well down pat, there's some problems with endpoint vulnerabilities, but we know from Ed Zoden that encryption done properly gives you pretty good confidentiality in the pipeline, okay? But what we don't have is great technologies that provide easy to use and terrific anonymity, and that is the crucial area, that is the thing that whistleblowers need, and it is one thing to provide it in law and policy, and that's really where we work, and it's essential, but all of the protection in laws aren't gonna matter if you don't have the tools to ensure it. So, that's a task for all the tech people out there who actually wanna jump into it. Now I wanna talk about, just briefly, is not LuxLeaks, is Ukraine. Now the reason Ukraine is interesting, it's obviously at this dexist point between East and West, it's a kind of a turf war between US interests and Russian interests, it's a real war on the front in the South, in the East, and there are all sorts of other proxy wars being fought in the country. Amid all of this is a really interesting evolution of a set of civil society organizations, grassroots activists, many of them lawyers who have sprung up who are trying to fight the endemic corruption, who are not wanting to be owned by one master or the other. They have brought in a law, which is the Access to Public Information Law, several years ago, and as part of this, there was mention in it of whistleblower protection. So, this group has gotten together, we've been involved in working with them to try and draft the first whistleblower protection law, standalone law in Ukraine. If you go to initiative11.org, you'll be able to read about it in English and in Ukrainian. That draft law, which is a very good draft law, is sitting in the Ukrainian parliament right now. It has gone through one committee, it's got a long way to travel yet, there's resistance from a number of sectors of society, including the corrupt sectors, but also the intelligence community and other areas. But it has some elements in it that make it a standout. And if it goes ahead, it will be a core pillar of trying to rip out the corruption that has been plaguing people in Ukraine for so many decades. And it will create a transparency, we hope, that will actually allow people to make more informed choices and not just be buffeted like a sailboat in a storm between two sides, two global powers who want to control it. Elements of it that are particularly important, it includes a wide range of international standards, it has references public interest, it extends protections to journalists, so one of the best things you can do is to actually make sure that your whistleblower law or regime includes a kind of protective umbrella. And that umbrella is not just around protecting the point at which you reveal the wrongdoing, it also has to extend to the point where you may have to go to third tier whistleblowing that is going externally, and then all the way to the point of the publisher and the publisher being able to publish that wrongdoing in order to be a corrective mechanism in society. So this is a little bit about, these are just some of the activists, they're young, they're enthusiastic, and they've got a sign in Cyrillic that I can't read, because I don't speak Ukrainian, nonetheless, I do know some of these guys, they're really, they're actually terrific. So it's a country to watch, we don't know whether or not the law will get up, I hope that it will. It's sort of in the best interest of the people, but not necessarily in the best interest of the power players. That's just a bit of that. Now, the other thing I wanna touch on very briefly, one of the things I've done in my academic life at the University of Melbourne is been involved in a long ongoing piece of work, studying public attitudes to whistleblowing in different countries. We've done it in different pieces over time with partner organizations. The original survey, which had 44 questions, was designed at the University of Melbourne, Georgetown University, Griffith University, and has since had support from Greenwich and a set of other organizations along the way. We actually took eight of those questions and surveyed them across a set of countries over time, including Australia, the UK, Iceland, and more recently, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovia, and Croatia. This is gold standard surveying. This is not, you're on the internet, someone click it. This is like a political surveying, gold standard, go out, get your representative sample, 1,000 people, 1,200 people in Australia, 2,000 people in the UK. So this is the standard that would be used for a proper public poll. And what we found with one of the questions that was asked, which of the following best describes what you think should happen in your society? And we ask, people should be supported for revealing serious wrongdoing. We never use the word whistleblower because it might be laden with meaning. Even if it means revealing inside information, so we tried to contrast, you know, there's a cost there, or people who revealed inside information should be punished, even if they're revealing something seriously wrong, serious wrongdoing, or neither or I can't say. And what we found is not a blank wall. Let's see if we can get that back, there we go. Okay, so here is the people should be punished, here's an amalgamation of neither can't say, and that's people should be supported. Now here's what's interesting. You see Australia and the UK are almost the same, very high support for whistleblowers, effectively. People should be supported for revealing it. And we use the word inside information to explain information that comes from being part of inside of an organization without using the word whistleblower. Albania drops down a bit, Croatia and Albania about the same, still high at 68%. Kosovo very close again at 65%. Bosnia-Herzegovina drops down to less than 50%. People who reveal the information should be punished, very low numbers in the UK and Australia, six and 9%, going up, doubling 16%. Albania, Croatia around 18%, Kosovo 22, Bosnia 18. So you can see a bit of a difference. Perhaps there's some correlation with levels of corruption, not very clear exactly what the answers are on that, but very interestingly in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the category of neither or I can't say, a third of the people, a third of the people said neither. What they meant was they don't know. The other thing that I would point out from this survey is we asked in different studies, the different views on the most effective way to take action to stop serious wrongdoing, which one of these do you think is the most effective way in your society? We asked them, reporting it to people in authority, official channels, reporting to journalists or news organizations, reporting it to Twitter, Facebook or online blogs, some other way, none of the above, those are actually two separate questions. Number two was two separate questions. None of the way, there's no effective way in my society or can't say. And here is the interesting data. So reporting it to people in authority, by official channels, very high in Australia at 56%, close to UK 51, Albania at 43, Kosovo also very high at 61, interestingly, and Bosnia and Albania dropping much further down to 24 and 43. Reporting it to a journalist, here we see the numbers are a bit closer to each other across the country. So Bosnia, Herzegovina at 12, Kosovo 17, Croatia 20, Albania 22, Australia 17, UK 19. So not so very far from each other, which is kind of interesting. But the really interesting data is reporting it directly to the general public via the internet, Twitter, Facebook or online blogs. So these figures were quite close. All of them are in the four to 7% range. Now we know that Facebook penetration in these countries is a whole lot more than four to 7%. So in Australia, five years ago it was about 69%. Some other way, exceedingly high in Bosnia and Herzegovina or I can't say 60% and dropping down lower in some of the other countries. Why are these figures so low? We don't know the answer to that, but my hypothesis is this. This category of reporting via social media or some other methods such as a blog directly to the public is the most personally identifying category. It is a completely non-anonymous option. So if you go via internal channels or if you go via a journalist, you at least presumably might have the option of going anonymously. But in this, you specifically won't. So despite the fact that there's huge penetration of social media in these countries, these figures are so low, I suspect, because it is an indicator of the fact that if people were gonna whistle blow, they want the option of doing it anonymously. And that I think is a very key indicator of what the desires are from the public for protections for whistle blowers. Now I'll just see if there's anything else I need to cover on this before we nick off. Takeaways. Couple of takeaways. Pleus and citizens prefer internal and official channels that they can trust, preferably. Although we do find recommendations, for example, Brian Martin, a University of Wollongong from Australia's academic, retired academic, has written a wonderful book, handbook for whistle blowers. We're thinking of blowing the whistle. He's not a big fan of going internally, with good reason. That even in corrupt, prone, corruption-prone countries, people are reluctant to use social media or the internet for whistle blowing, probably for the non-anonymity issues. And self-publishing usually means your identity is being revealed. A seemingly low percentage of people who prefer to contact the media, why is it because people don't trust the media? Is it because they think the media can't actually give them the security even if they want to? We're not sure of that. Significant questions and uncertainties remain about the media options. But one of the projects that we're working on at the moment at Blueprint is to try and develop a code of conduct for journalists in the digital age dealing with whistle blowers. Because most professional codes of conducts for journalists deal with things as if it was before the internet, as if it was before anonymous drop boxes, as if it was before metadata crumbs being hoovered up by every law enforcement agency who wants to put their paws on it. And that right being enshrined in law often without a warrant requirement. So those are the key things I wanted to say. We should leave a little bit of time for questions. Take my seat. But I'm wondering if you guys have particular questions that you'd like to ask my colleagues or me? I'll just go back to that. But first, before the questions, may I start with a huge applause for these three specialists? Mm-hmm. Thank you. What? What's this thing? I'll put that up after. Yes. I would not let you go without a quick Q&A. So please, Mr. Engineer. Sorry, I was late in coming here, so I maybe missed something. But there's this tiny thing of the truth. The truth. The truth, yeah. The whistleblower should signify something, signal something, which is true. Mm-hmm. Instead of gossip or ruining other people's careers, it should be... And how do you establish that? It is... So it's a very good question. One of the most important things that we've recommended when we've spoken to organizations that are supporting at a grassroots level the idea of whistleblower protection in their country is there should be a dedicated agency for dealing with whistleblower complaints. And one element of that is an investigatory power to try and verify the accuracy of the information. Not every whistleblower's information is going to be accurate or fully accurate, but many will have elements of truth in them. And the most critical thing for people to think about when you're thinking about information whistleblowing is not what is the motivation of the whistleblower, whether they have green hair or blue hair or bad breath, who cares? What matters is, is what they reveal in the public interest about some wrongdoing that needs to be fixed. Mm-hmm. Oh, thank you for... I'm going to install Global Leaks and SecureDrop in a French... for the benefit of a French newspaper. And my question is, where should the server be where it would be the safest in Europe? Should it be in France? Should it be in a data center? Should it be in the newsroom in France? Should it be abroad? So, from a legal standpoint, what would you advise? So, I'm not a lawyer. And I'm not an expert on the safest places. For servers, although one strategy is to locate your servers in a country that is not friendly with who your likely enemies will be. So, if you're doing a lot of reporting on corruption in the French government, having it outside France may be a good strategy and having it outside France in a country that doesn't get along that well with the French government is not perhaps a bad strategy. But, yeah. So, that, I mean, that's country-specific according to who doesn't play well with whom and, you know, and therefore what it is, but I don't know that any country will give you ironclad protections. I think if anything, there has been a push in the last probably eight years. I know some actual examples of how some of these changes were made that was designed to harmonize the ability for requests, for example, of extradition, particularly motivated by some of the whistleblower cases, particularly for the US to ask for extradition, attorney generals in other countries have less leeway in saying no. And based on those, in a sense, tentacles going out, you'd have to research pretty thoroughly. I know there were moves in Iceland for a while to try and set it up as a safe haven with the election that occurred not long ago. Perhaps that will happen again. They were certainly considering whistleblower legislation on top of that, but other than that, I don't have easy answers for it. It's a good question. Could you stand closer to the microphone, please? I have it in my mouth now. It was turned off. Oh, but still stand closer to the microphone, please. How can I stand any closer to the microphone? I'm touching it. You would want to eat it. I was. Great. Thank you. I have a question for the slide we saw just a second ago, where you have the very low scores on, yes, that one, saying the most effective way to stop wrongdoing and going on a blog or on social media, and you jumped to the conclusion. My thought when seeing that question was, of course not because nobody reads what I tweet. Have you any more questions into your conclusion? So we didn't have the ability to drill down any more. Part of the reason is that doing public polling is incredibly expensive. So for example, we looked at potentially doing it in Germany, and it was going to run $10,000 to $15,000 US just to do eight questions. It's very quite expensive to do. So we didn't have a drill down on that, but when I said most effective way to stop wrongdoing, the question was actually longer in the actual thing. And we made a real point with the question to, we circled it very widely to, there's an international whistleblowing research network of people from South Africa to Portugal, researchers in this field. We threw all the questions at them, we trialed it, we revised it, we trialed it some more, we revised it, and we came up with something that's actually a pretty neutral set of questions. It doesn't, that's why it doesn't use the word whistleblower, but it tries to actually force the viewer to weigh up a little bit in their mind the idea of there is some cost to violating the trust of an organization. There is some cost to reveal private information from inside an organization. You must weigh that little bit in your mind for the issue of wrongdoing to think about whether you would cross that line. We don't know for sure, yes, is this an issue of anonymity, it might not be. But on the other hand, it seems to be the only thing that is so consistent between countries that are so very different from each other in history, in politics, in economics, in language. Their numbers are so close and yet they are all so very different from the penetration of social media applications in those countries. Any other questions? One more question, because we are already late. Well, never mind, just do the question. That'd be great. It's just a small question, full disclosure, I'm Dutch. You said the Dutch law was a gold standard. Do you have any Dutch people in your team? Because we have a strange way of making laws in the Netherlands, that is the law is perfect, but the executive is seriously lacking on purpose. So they say we're going to enforce these laws and they put two people on it. Do you want to answer? Yeah, I'm happy to. Well, so what is your question? No, we do not have any Dutch. Do we have Dutch people on the team? No, we don't. So I think what you're talking about is the problem, the dichotomy between, you pass a really great law, but then like it doesn't get implemented so well. Is that what you mean? Exactly, so it's nice calling it a law that's the gold standard, but all the Dutch know that it doesn't work. Okay, so the thing is that, I mean, you've seen that this law, or you probably know that this law has been introduced like not very long ago. So in any case, and in fact, we didn't talk about the UK today, where 10 years ago as well, we had something that was called a law on gold standard that just now proves to be only semi-effective actually. So the point you're raising is pretty good, but on paper, it is actually one of the best laws that there is, and I mean, I'm sad to hear that implementation might not be great. I mean, apart from the House of the Whistleblower Bill, before that, the Netherlands already had a much better set of different pieces of legislation that allowed leaking, or like not on the one full of umbrella, but at least compared to other European countries, you were pretty much on the forefront of this. So, and just looking at the piece of legislation that's out there right now, we're happy to see that legislators are actually introducing this kind of laws, but obviously you're right, we're off to see where this is gonna go in the next couple of years. So one thing that's happened is, the UK legislation was some of the first in the world, some of the first in the world, particularly to apply the private and public sector, which made it very special. As of next year, it'll be 20 years old. So this is a relatively young thing in the era of laws and society and the balance between the individual and the state responsibilities and powers. Part of why we've published the blueprint principles and other organizations have principles as well is as we've kind of clawed our way forward in whistleblower protection, we've been figuring out how do we actually make governments do what they say they're gonna do in terms of protecting whistleblowers. So for example, establishing an independent agency that's dedicated to it turns out to be a really good way to do that. So will the Dutch law work? Well, time will tell, it's only very new, but having a couple of these key components in it will actually make it more likely to work than version 1.0, if that makes sense. Have you tried getting in touch with them? That would be, oh, sorry. No, but I think I'll end this one with a typical Dutch thing and it is, we made some great words in the Netherlands. For example, Polar is an international word now. Apartheid is an international word and the next one will be gedogen, which is unpronounceable by anyone apart from Dutch and Scottish people, but gedogen is typically something which we do in Holland. We make a law and then... A good word. And then we don't, well, we do nothing with it. That's what we do here. You should study that. It's excellent. It is one of the best things we do here. It's really good. The French have the most beautiful word, well, for most things really, but for whistleblower. So whistleblower has a kind of negative connotation. It's like you're a collaborator in Eastern Europe. It's thought so very badly, but the French word is perfect. But the law is shit. Yeah, okay, the law is shit, but their word is perfect. What's the word? Canel will be the native French speaker, pronunciator, so I don't garble in. So it's gonna be the end, the final word? Yes, you have to find a word. A lancer d'alerte. There you go. A lancer d'alerte. The early warning system. We throw the alert. Yeah, which is a great word. The great word. Ladies and gentlemen, fantastic. Thank you so much for this excellent presentation.