The name comes from the referee's whistle, blown to stop foul play. The people who blow it on powerful institutions have changed history, and often paid a heavy price for it.
A whistleblower is an insider who exposes wrongdoing, illegality, fraud, abuse, or danger, within an organization, usually by reporting it to authorities or the press. The term evokes a referee or a police officer blowing a whistle to halt a foul or sound an alarm.
Whistleblowers occupy a precarious place. They often know things no outsider could, which makes them invaluable to the public, but exposing those things can mean losing their job, their career, even their freedom. The messenger frequently pays for the message.
America has a long tradition of valuing them. The very first whistleblower-protection measure was passed by the Continental Congress in 1778, after sailors reported the torture of British prisoners by a naval commander and were themselves arrested for it.
Modern law offers various protections, and figures from Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg onward have forced public reckonings by going public. Yet protections are uneven, and the personal cost of blowing the whistle on the powerful remains real.
