Earlier this year we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the seminal moments in whistleblower history: the publication, starting on June 13, 1971, of the “Pentagon Papers,” a 47-volume top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, based on classified documents, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. Marine and military analyst for the RAND Corporation. The papers revealed that four presidential administrations had been lying to Congress and the American people for years about the country’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. The publication of excerpts from the secret report by the New York Times and other newspapers led to a landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court relating to press freedom, helped galvanize the Vietnam anti-war movement and, inadvertently, due to Nixon’s overreaction to Ellsberg’s act of civil disobedience, to the Watergate scandal and the downfall of an American president.
To mark the occasion, this past year The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, non-profit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world, organized a year-long public history project with UMass Amherst on the life and legacy of Ellsberg. A focal point of the project was an online conference in late April, co-sponsored by GroundTruth and UMass Amherst, featuring various historians, activists, journalists, and former government officials who reflected on Ellsberg’s daring release of the...
In the first enforcement case of its kind, International Business Machines (IBM) settled allegations that it violated the False Claims Act (FCA) by applying diversity hiring policies in federal con...