~January 12, 2022~
Whistleblowers inform the public about the illicit behaviour or activities that they and the organization are doing. In other words, they speak out the truth. They are either regarded as heroes for speaking out the truth, or as a traitor who did not keep their mouths shut. Shoshana Zuboff, Brittany Kaiser, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are some examples of whistleblowers.
Shoshana Zuboff: She is known for making a book called "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," informing us about how organizations are taking our data and using us to make profit. We are the raw material that companies use to make money.
Brittany Kaiser: She is known for exposing Cambridge Analytica for influencing people's decisions in the 2016 U.S election. They collected data from millions of Facebook users and used the data to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 election.
Edward Snowden: He is known for leaking highly classified information from the N.S.A (National Security Agency). He explained how the U.S government was surveilling and listening to everybody through the cameras on people's phones, laptops, and microphones.
Julian Assange: He is known for creating a website called "WikiLeaks," a public website (accessible to everyone) where all Whistleblowers can leak or post any valuable information for the public.
Chelsea Manning: She is known for violating the Espionage Act for releasing a video on WikiLeaks, showing an Apache helicopter killing over a dozen of civilians on July 12, 2007 in Iraq. These civilians did not do anything to threaten the Apache helicopter, but the helicopter fired anyways. She was also imprisoned for seven years for being a whistleblower.
This ties in with my theme because they all had a choice to keep their mouths shut. However, all these people took the courage, risked their lives, and lost everything just for speaking out the truth. To me, a hero is someone who will do anything for the people, no matter how rough the situation is. These people embody what a hero means to me because they did all this for the public, letting them know what is happening behind the curtains.
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