This is the Cano Daily Podcast for Monday, October 21st, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

What makes a whistleblower? Is it taking the heat that often comes with revealing

information the government would rather not get out.

In the 1990s, the Cato Institute's Patrick Edington and his wife Robin put themselves

at the center of important revelations about Gulf War Syndrome.

Facts, the Pentagon and the CIA

would have rather remained covered up.

He's now a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

We spoke last week.

Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone writes this piece talking about this latest intelligence

whistleblower, the person who wrote this letter and has since sort of launched this what's known as Ukraine gate

or just add a gate to whatever the relevant facts are, but he says this person probably isn't a whistleblower

and part of the reason that he seems to lay out here is that this whistleblower, whoever he or she is, we don't know who it is, and their

lives as far as we know have not been ruined.

And that seems to be sort of a it's a key element of

of being a whistleblower is that it you take a lot of heat so what's wrong with that

thought? Well that the problem with it of course is that

number one the law the whistleblower the intelligence community whistleblower

protection that does not require that your life be destroyed in order for you to actually be considered a whistleblower under the law.

And neither does, excuse me, the existing regulations that govern how the inspector general, the intelligence community handles these claims.

And we also don't know because this person continues to work in the classified world, just exactly

how much heat they may already have in fact taken.

...