> On the simplest level, a whistleblower is someone who reports waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, or dangers to public health and safety to someone who is in the position to rectify the wrongdoing. [0]
So, you'll still be protected as long as you took the right steps. These usually include oral reports btw. There's no condition that prevents you from writing some tell all later. In fact, it's not that uncommon. Especially given that if you're a whistleblower you might end up making yourself unemployable. So personally I'm fine with making money from a book deal and speaking deals. Their time is still as valuable as anyone else's, right? What matters is if procedure was correctly followed. IMO it's like people making money filming themselves doing charity. Yeah, I'm not sure that's the greatest thing but at the end of the day the charitable actions are performed, right? May not be the ideal case, but I'd rather someone do something good for the wrong reasons than for them not to do good ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'll also add that there's many whistleblower programs that will pay you to blow the whistle. Usually it'll be in the form of a percentage of the fine issued against the offending entity. The IRS offers 15-30%[1].
Making anyone free to reveal anything without consequences even after entering into an agreement about it isn’t going to work. You’re probably thinking only about the narrow case where a company is wrong and the employee is whistleblowing, but that is protected when done through the right channels.
However this wasn’t really whistleblowing. This was someone trying to make profit on her own book and sell more copies by sharing info she agreed not to.