This past weekend, over 11 million confidential documents, christened the “Panama Papers,” were published within articles by multiple news outlets. The documents, which came from a private law firm located in Panama, linked many of the world’s most powerful people to an offshore bank that they used to to conceal their wealth and illegally evade taxes. The leaking of these confidential documents has implicated more than just celebrities — multiple world leaders, such as the Prime Minister of Iceland, were affected by the leak and have since been implicated in illegal wealth offshoring. With each new scandal, the role of the whistleblower becomes more and more prominent, and their importance grows more and more evident.

Whistleblowers have been at the center of numerous scandals in our generation. Assange, Snowden, Greenwald and Ellsberg — they’ve all had a huge effect on our society and government, bringing governmental abuses to light in a way no one else could. However, the first reaction of many public figures is to blame, blame, blame. In the case of the Panama Papers, the high-profile figures who were named should be more worried about fixing their country’s economy than they are about finding and outing the unnamed leaker. All this whistleblower did was air out dirty laundry, exposing truths that deserve to be exposed. Blaming the blower seems to be the only response that cornered government officials know: nevermind that the leaks simply resulted in a more knowledgeable society. Whistleblowing is the most effective enforcer of one of the highest-held government standards of our legal system: strict scrutiny.

A lot of very important and powerful people have a lot to gain by keeping the public in the dark. Between political vilification and company punishments, it’s no wonder that there needs to be legislation that offers whistleblowers protection. A single person deciding whether or not to share confidential information holds tremendous power, especially when that decision could lead to grave repercussions for a nation’s government.

But this power is nothing compared to the threat that unchecked authority provides. Without whistleblowers, we wouldn’t know about the privacy abuses of the NSA or the in Vietnam. We wouldn’t have a democracy. The real threats to democracy are the power-hungry CEO cheating his way out of paying taxes and the government official trading Americans’ privacy for more security programs. Whistleblowers are just world citizens keeping in check the powers that be. We need them now more than ever.

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Email Ana Lopez at [email protected].