What’s the safest country for a whistleblower?

I don’t know what life is like as a whistleblower anywhere else, but I can tell you quite a bit about what my life as a bank whistleblower living in the United States has been like…

When I left Bank of America, they went on an immediate smear campaign against me I was not prepared for, with their corporate security team calling the Chandler, AZ police department to report a bomb threat on my facebook page. In my blog, The Night My Whole Life Changed… I described what happened the night the police surrounded my house in front of all my neighbors and accused me of calling in a bomb threat.

I was calm and intelligent enough to stay out of jail, but I had been effectively blacklisted, and while I filled out paperwork to obtain unemployment and other government assistance, the bank was hard at work sending adjusted income forms to the IRS and collecting any and all information they could on me.

The only reason I was able to survive any of this long enough to speak to a regulator (at the time, the State Attorneys General Coalition, who was pursuing the largest bank settlement to come out of the housing crisis) is because I went public via Anonymous and the internet. If not for Anonymous and the internet, I would be dead like the countless other whistleblowers who make “Whistleblower found dead” the top auto-fill suggestion on Google.

Not only did speaking to the Attorneys General Coalition not affect anything, but I found myself with nothing. Nearly everyone around me cut me off as I was no longer climbing the ladder with them; I was now labeled a problem…a snitch…a whistleblower…

It was while laying on rock bottom, on the precipice of overdosing on spice (synthetic marijuana that was ironically legal in AZ at the time), losing my house, my car, and my entire world that I pondered how this could happen to a man whose only crime was in telling the truth. I realized for every Bradley Manning we hear about, there are thousands who were silenced. That’s the thought that led to me building my blog and becoming a writer.

As a free man who blew the whistle on a civilian corporation in the United States (the supposed beacon of human freedom), I would say the only safe place to seek asylum is on the internet…that’s where I’ve been hiding…