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Federal bureaucrats commuting to work in the nation’s capital are finding fresh food for thought as they wait for the bus — glossy six-foot posters with an open invitation to blow the whistle on bad stuff happening at the office. Daniel Ellsberg, the patriarch of whistle-blowers who outraged the Nixon White House with his mega-leak of the Pentagon Papers, is depicted on the posters with a plea to “tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers.”

Thirteen of the broadsides have been posted along public thoroughfares amid Washington’s workspace warrens, where thousands of employees and contractors toil, many in secrecy.



“Don’t do what I did,” Mr. Ellsberg warns of his days as a government worker turned Vietnam protester. “Don’t wait until a new war has started.”

The whistle-blowing campaign is the work of ExposeFacts.org, an off-shoot of the liberal activist Institute for Public Accuracy, which is promising more posters — for Wall Street and Silicon Valley workers, too — in an attempt “to shed light on concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war.”

One-stop whistle-blowing is part of the pitch for any bureaucrat who might take the risk. The website includes a software option for submitting documents through what is described as “the latest technology on behalf of anonymity” — to foil hackers and presumably government prosecutors. Assisting in this is the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by Mr. Ellsberg after the WikiLeaks disclosures of government secrets, with the stated goal of encouraging more whistleblowers and more news publication of secrets.

Last January, Mr. Ellsberg welcomed the foundation’s newest board member —Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now taking asylum in Moscow after leaking reams of secret documents. Mr. Snowden has been charged under the Espionage Act. But Mr. Ellsberg robustly defended him as the sort of person needed more than ever in Washington. “He is no more a traitor than I am,” Mr. Ellsberg declared.