Rosenberg is executive director of Open the Government, a nonpartisan group advocating for government transparency and accountability.
It is hard to ignore whistleblowers these days. A whistleblower complaint about a controversial exchange between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky triggered the impeachment inquiry and subsequent trial that dominated the news for months. Even while it was focused on the impeachment trial, the Senate was also looking into reports from another whistleblower alleging that a Trump political appointee interfered with an audit of either the president or Vice President Mike Pence.
Even Hollywood cannot seem to get enough of whistleblowers. While movies and television shows about whistleblowers are not new, the theatrical and Netflix releases of several movies last year suggest a growing appetite for more insight into who they are and how their commitment to creating an accountable society benefits the greater good.
The protagonists' motivation in "The Report," "The Laundromat" and "The Great Hack" were the same: A desire to use access to information and free speech to expose abuse of power. They understand on a deep level, even in the face of formidable resistance, that transparency is the first step toward ensuring the accountability that can address societal ills. By exposing corporate or government wrongdoing, whistleblowers often face tremendous personal and professional risks.
In "The Report," Adam Driver plays Senate staffer Dan Jones, who doggedly dedicates several years to investigate the CIA's enhanced detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks. Jones uncovers that detainees were severely tortured — one killed — using waterboarding and other CIA interrogation techniques. The resulting 6,000-page torture report concluded that the program did not yield any significant intelligence breakthroughs. To date, despite years of litigation and advocacy by transparency and accountability organizations, only the executive summary has been released. More than 5,000 pages remain hidden from view, and those complicit in torture crimes have not been held accountable.
In "The Laundromat," Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep) gets the runaround after her husband dies in a tragic tour boat accident. She and the other victims of the accident never get the insurance payment they are entitled to because the company's liability coverage came from a shell company in the Caribbean being investigated by the FBI for fraud — a fact she uncovers while investigating the company's deceptive practices.
The fictional account follows the byzantine true story of the Panama Papers, the release of which uncovered a complex, massive tax evasion scheme. The 11 million documents a whistleblower provided to a German newspaper detailed the ways in which some of the wealthiest individuals in the world used offshore banks and shell companies to exploit the global financial system for personal gain.
The Netflix documentary "The Great Hack" explores how a London-based data company, Cambridge Analytica, scraped the personal information of millions of Facebook users and, unbeknownst to them, used the data to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the United Kingdom's Brexit movement and other elections around the globe.
The film's central figure, David Carroll, sued Cambridge Analytica demanding full disclosure of his data set profile (one of the millions the company created) and for details on how the company obtained it. The movie follows Carroll's attempt to reclaim his personal information by taking up the fight in Britain, where privacy laws are stronger than here. The movie also features interviews with Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the company, exposing the way it harvested and then weaponized data to influence elections and grassroots movements.
The fallout from the scandal and the lawsuit pressured Facebook into taking more responsibility for how it shares user data with third-party entities and has prompted Congress to consider strengthening federal privacy laws.
These three movies underscore whistleblowing as a right, not a crime, and debunk the misconception that whistleblowers act out of self-interest. Instead, audiences can see how all the characters are motivated to expose and correct unethical and illegal activity.
But to do so effectively, whistleblowers need the protection of stronger, streamlined whistleblower protection laws and a cross-section of experts in their corner — lawyers, freedom of information advocates, journalists and even members of Congress — to provide guidance on how to safely disclose wrongdoing.
The need for resources that encourage and protect whistleblowers is vital. As governments and corporations become less open, the role of whistleblowers as agents of accountability is increasingly important.
Hollywood's championing of whistleblowers as critical sources of information about wrongdoing and as pillars of an accountable and transparent society is a positive trend that must continue.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.