American government employees and contractors who go public with evidence of fraud and abuse form the spine of this film, and in every case the decision costs them their careers, their security clearances, or their freedom. The film tracks these whistleblowers through news interviews and personal accounts of what happened after they spoke, from professional blacklisting to criminal indictment. It sets their stories against the promise of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act and President Obama's early pledges of government transparency, then measures that promise against the record: the film states that the Obama administration pursued more national security whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than every previous administration combined. That gap between stated policy and prosecutorial practice is the film's central argument, told less through analysis than through the accumulated weight of individual cases, each one a person who tried to report wrongdoing through official channels first and only went to the media when those channels failed them.