By Tom Devine and Tarek Maassarani

Largely under the public radar screen, the last decade has seen a legal revolution in corporate freedom of speech. Ironically, private sector whistleblowers now have far stronger rights than government employees to challenge institutional abuses of power that betray the public trust.

The implications are significant from every direction. To illustrate, citizen groups can work more freely with whistleblowers as the public's eyes and ears. Corporations who cling to repressive traditions risk unprecedented consequences. And there will be new opportunities to prevent avoidable disasters and attack internal fraud for leaders who listen to their messengers, instead of professionally killing them.

The breakthrough in corporate freedom of dissent began in 2002 with the Sarbanes Oxley law ("SOX"), which protected shareholders of publicly-traded corporations from unscrupulous managers who risked their investments through fraud. It since has spread to ten other major laws, covering the vast majority of the labor force -- the financial, transportation, health care, defense contractor, nuclear and food industries, as well as all retail commerce. The laws consistently protect workers who publicly or privately challenge wrongdoing, provide recourse through fair rules of play, offer jury trials if there is no speedy administrative decision, provide compensatory damages to make reprisal victims whole, and shield against gag orders or the waiver of legal rights required by many firms as a prerequisite for employment.

The potential benefits to the public are staggering. Even without rights, courageous whistleblowers have forced the withdrawal of dangerous prescription drugs such as Vioxx, whose 50,000 victims rivaled America's casualties in the Vietnam War; shut down toxic incinerators burning dioxin, arsenic and other poisons next to churches and schoolyards; prevented countless food poisoning epidemics at the hands of a deregulated government inspection regime; and abated nuclear power plant accidents and massive releases of radiation into urban water supplies.

By Robin Paggi

While conducting harassment training at a client's facility recently, I noticed a poster on the wall encouraging employees to call a whistle-blower hotline if they had concerns about the ethical conduct of members of management or their co-workers.

What prevents employees from simply talking to their supervisors when they have these kinds of concerns? The answer is simple -- the fear of being retaliated against, and for good reason. In its 2009 National Business Ethics Survey, the Ethics Resource Center reported on the types of retaliation experienced by employees who reported misconduct, which included being:

* Excluded from decisions and work activity (62%)

* Given the cold shoulder (60%)

* Verbally abused by managers (55%)

* Almost lost job (48%)

* Not given promotion or raise (43%)

* Verbally abused by other co-workers (42%)

* Relocated or reassigned (27%)

* Other forms of retaliation (20%)

* Demoted (18%)

* Physical harm to person or property (4%).

Perhaps it is because whistle-blowing puts employees at risk of retaliation that the Dodd-Frank Act was recently passed. In her article "Whistle-Blowers: Threat or Asset?" Dori Meinert explains that the law "significantly increases rewards and protections to those blowing the whistle on securities violations (which) affects publicly held companies and their private subsidiaries and affiliates."

By Josh Gerstein

The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times — disclosures that Bush vehemently denounced as a breach of national security. They also stoked a congressional debate about whether the government had overstepped its authority as it scrambled to respond to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005, revealing that after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush ordered the interception of certain phone calls and email messages into and out of the U.S. without a warrant — a move many lawyers contend violated the 1978 law governing intelligence-related wiretaps.

The petering out of the warrantless wiretapping leak investigation amounts to a low-profile and ambiguous conclusion to an episode that dominated the headlines in the second half of the Bush administration. While Washington is immersed in the latest round of WikiLeaks revelations and the investigation into new disclosures of a trove of government secrets, the dropped wiretapping investigation amounts to the final chapter of the most significant leak of the Bush era.

The Justice Department would not discuss the current status of the probe, which began in late 2005 after the Times story was published with a formal leak complaint from the National Security Agency. However, Tamm’s attorney, Paul Kemp, told POLITICO he and his client were informed “seven or eight months ago” that the investigation into Tamm was over.

The information was relayed during a meeting with the prosecutor handling the case, William Welch, Kemp said. The Justice Department recently issued Tamm a letter, confirming that the probe had concluded, the defense attorney said.

Prosecutors also appear to have lost interest in a former National Security Agency official who also publicly acknowledged being a source for the Times on the warrantless wiretapping story, Russell Tice. An attorney for Tice, Joshua Dratel, said it has been several years since prosecutors contacted him about the investigation.

“I have not heard anything from them in a very, very long time,” Dratel said Monday. “I haven’t been concerned about it in a long time. … I never thought [Tice] had anything to worry about.”

Asked about the apparent move to drop the inquiry, Dratel said: “I think it’s the right decision.”

By Gloria Lau

Although CEOs have a reputation for being smart, they don't always know what's going on at their companies. By the time a person hits that level, many layers of management separate him from employees. Workers may fear jeopardizing their careers if they tell him the hard truth. This is where good whistle-blowers can help.

"If people have the freedom to warn, they can help their (employers) prevent avoidable disasters so things don't spiral into finger-pointing and litigation," said Tom Devine, legal director at the Government Accountability Project, an advocacy group in Washington.

In 2007, PricewaterhouseCoopers polled 5,400 execs about losses from fraud and reported that 43% of wrongdoing was learned via tips from folks inside and outside firms. In contrast, internal auditors found 19% of the deceit.

"Any corporate leader who silences or terminates the messengers . .. is attacking shareholders' investments," Devine told IBD.

WorldCom and Enron were among companies that didn't heed warnings. How can you encourage more honesty?