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Big corporations have a history of bullying whistleblowers into submission. Photograph: Grant Faint/Getty Images

Corporations intent on blunting the whistleblower reforms embodied in the Dodd-Frank Act have long been muzzling their employees with non-disclosure agreements. Restrictive confidentiality agreements are nothing but corporate censorship - and it needs to end.

People working in big financial services industries need to be able to alert the public and the courts of questionable practices. Thats why President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law in July 2010: it was designed to address the fraud that contributed to the massive financial meltdown experienced in Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.

Its thanks to whistleblowers that we learned about illegal activity at Enron, Bernie Madoffs offices and Swiss banks like UBS and HSBC, resulting in the collection of billions of dollars in sanctions. Any doubt as to the importance of whistleblower protections in exposing corporate fraud was laid to rest in 2012 by the US Attorney General Eric Holder who described them as nothing short of profound.

No wonder that companies tried to undermine Dodd-Frank from the get go.

Numerous companies have developed broadly worded non-disclosure agreements that restrict the release of confidential information to the companys legal department as a condition of employment though the exact number is unknown. When leaving the company, employees who have threatened to file a whistleblower claims were also forced to accept non-disclosure requirements as a condition of a settlement or before they could obtain a severance payment after they were fired or laid off.

These agreements explicitly prohibit employees from communicating with anyone, except attorneys hired by the company. Some go as far as explicitly barring communication with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

We have seen numerous companies require employees questioned by the government to secretly provide them with insights into the scope of the investigation. These employees can then be effectively turned into informers against the government itself.

Whats even more Kafkaesque is that almost every non-disclosure agreement strictly prohibits the employee from telling the government of the existence of these secrecy agreements, and the restrictions placed upon them.

But thats about to change. On 1 April, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined the mammoth defense contractor, KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root), for requiring employees to sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements. It took the courage of a single whistleblower, Harry Barko, to get us to this point.

Continued here:
Corporations cannot muzzle whistleblowers with secrecy agreements any longer

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Last month, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto spoke at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference. While on stage, he told the audience that Twitter has a huge opportunity to organize and distribute its content in a better way. "We have the best aggregation of real-time content," he said. "And the opportunity we have is to organize that in a better way -- in a unique way -- and then bring the best of Twitter to where people want it, when they want it, and how they want it. And we've only scratched the surface."

Last week, Twitter publicly launched Curator, a new product that lets publishers and media organizations filter and display tweets on any screen in real time. By having Twitter do the compiling, Curator gives Twitter more control over how its content gets syndicated, opening the door for potential monetization down the line. Twitter notes that "for example, you can find Tweets including #MarchMadness, from users with 100+ followers located in the US. You can then use Curator to display the best Tweets from that search into your mobile app, during a TV show broadcast, or on any screen regardless of size."

The Curator dashboard. Source: Twitter.

More control over syndication One of the things Noto pointed out at the Morgan Stanley conference was that "Best Tweets of..." articles are constantly popping up on sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post after big events like the Oscars or Super Bowl. He believes Twitter should have more of a hand in that content. Curator can do that.

More importantly, Curator makes it easier for publishers and media outlets to gather and organize tweets for just about any event. From a television broadcast to a concert to a sporting event, tweets are being sent out all the time. News broadcasters might use Curator to place tweets in their news ticker at the bottom of the screen.

This is all part of Twitter's effort to expand its audience, whether that audience is logged-in users or not. Even without log-ins, management believes the eyeballs it attracts to its content are worth billions. It recently started monetizing syndicated tweets, partnering with third-party apps and websites like FlipBoard to place ads in syndicated feeds. Down the line, Twitter may force ads into some uses of Curator.

Seeing what works The other benefit of Curator is that Twitter is simply providing some nice tools to filter its fire hose of data while media outlets are in charge of thinking about what their audience might want. Meanwhile, Twitter will be able to collect loads of data about what media outlets are using Curator for, and how the audience responds to it.

Twitter itself has started curating tweets around major events like the Cricket World Cup and NFL games. Management says it wants to do more of these curated timelines, and Noto believes he can ultimately monetize these curated timelines better than personal timelines. That's because the people viewing those curated timelines have expressed explicit interests.

While Curator content is hosted on a media outlet's website, Twitter will be able to find what works best and create its own curated timeline on its own website. That gives Twitter valuable content to feed directly to its users and direct visitors, and it can keep all of the ad revenue for itself.

All about the audience Twitter has no plans to charge for Curator or add premium features. Instead, it will capitalize on the additional exposure its content receives, and eventually cash in with advertisements or by migrating some curations to its own website. While many outlets already curate tweets by hand, the new tool will make it easier for outlets to gather tweets, and easier for Twitter to monetize its syndicated audience.

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Twitter Inc. Helps Itself by Helping Media Companies Comb Through Tweets

GWEN IFILL: Now the latest addition to the NewsHour bookshelf, Terms of Service. Its a look at the erosion of privacy in the age of social media.

Jeffrey Brown recently talked to author Jacob Silverman at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant and bookstore chain in and around Washington.

JEFFREY BROWN: Welcome to you.

JACOB SILVERMAN, Author, Terms of Service: Thanks for having me.

JEFFREY BROWN: The case youre making and its a strong case we dont know or we dont seem to care enough about what were giving away in our digital lives.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Right.

Well, the same systems that make it so easy to communicate with one another and live these lives where were essentially all public figures now also make it very easy tosort of spy on us, to collect personal information, whether youre companies or governments or other bad actors.

And I think that a lot of people dont really realize how much is being collected on each and every one of us, that there are big data brokers out there forming dossiers on hundreds of millions of people.

JEFFREY BROWN: Theres been a lot of emphasis on government surveillance. Here, youre really pointing to what we perhaps dont know as much about, corporate surveillance.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Right.

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How can we return privacy control to social media users?

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