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| ALEXANDER HIGGINS - A MALCONTENT OR GREAT AMERICAN? |
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| NSA HEADQUARTERS NSA IS BUILDING STATE OF ART GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE CENTER IN UTAH |
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| TERAFLOPS OF DATA TO SIFT THROUGH |
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| “The damage to our national security caused by leaks won’t stop until we see a couple of perpetrators in orange jump suits,”SENATOR KIT BOND R- MISSOURI right wing republican, teller of lies, keeper of secrets Secret grand jury and indictment of Julian Assange on horizon. |
Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, computer software expert, linguist, management and leadership specialist, and whistleblower. In 2010 the government alleged that he 'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. His defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project.[4][5][6][7][8][9] He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.
On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. He rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pleaded to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer;[10] Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped represent him, called it an act of "Civil Disobedience"[11]
Contents
- 1 Biography
- 2 Whistleblowing on Trailblazer, and government response
- 3 The Espionage Act and whistleblowing
- 4 See also
- 5 Notes
- 6 External links
-
Biography
His father was a World War II veteran and his mother a secretary for Pearl S. Buck. He entered the U.S. Air Force in 1979. He became an Airborne Voice Processing Specialist, with a fluency in German, and went on ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions.[12] There he encountered the surveillance state of East Germany and the Stasi, which informed his worldview and to which he compares developments in the United States since the September 11 attacks.[13] He left the Air Force in 1989. He was also in the U.S. Navy, where he analyzed intelligence for the National Military Joint Intelligence Center.[14] According to the Washington Post, he also at one time worked with the CIA.[15] In 1989 he began work as an NSA contractor, evaluating software.[4][15] He worked on projects like JACKPOT and LIBRARIAN. He became an expert in the quality-testing of software and worked on a system for measuring the quality of computer code at the NSA. He also continued his academic studies.[16][17]
In 2000 Drake was employed as a software systems quality specialist and management and information technology consultant for Columbia, Maryland, based Costal Research & Technology Inc. (CRTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Alexandria, Virginia, based Computer Systems Management, Inc. (CSMI).[18][19] In late 2001 he went to work at the NSA as a full time employee at the Signals Intelligence Directorate at Fort Meade, Maryland.[8][20] In 2002, he became a Technical Director for Software Engineering Implementation within the Cryptologic Systems and Professional Health Office. In 2003, Drake became a Process Portfolio Manager within NSA's newly formed Directorate of Engineering. He held a Top Secret security clearance.[8] During the congressional investigations into 9/11, he testified about NSA failures.[15] In 2006 he was reassigned to the National Defense University,[15] where he became the NSA Chair and an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences within the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF)[8] He was forced to leave the NDU in 2007 when his security clearance was suspended and resigned from the NSA the next year.[5][8][21] He then went to work at Strayer University but was forced from that job after his indictment of April 2010.[21] He found work at an Apple store.[15][21] He then founded Knowpari Systems, a consulting firm.[22]
In 2011, Drake was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling.[2] and was co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award. Accepting the SAAII award he said,[13] with references to an 1857 speech of Frederick Douglass:
"Power and those in control concede nothing ... without a demand. They never have and they never will. ...each and every one of us must keep demanding, must keep fighting, must keep thundering, must keep plowing, must keep on keeping things struggling, must speak out and must speak up until justice is served because where there is no justice there can be no peace."Whistleblowing on Trailblazer, and government response
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the NSA required new tools to collect intelligence from the growing flood of information pouring out of the new digital networks like the internet. Drake become involved in the internal NSA debate between two of these tools, the Trailblazer Project and the ThinThread project.[9][21] He became part of the "minority" that favored ThinThread for several reasons,[21] including its theoretical ability to protect privacy while gathering intelligence.[15] Trailblazer, on the other hand, not only violated privacy, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, USSID 18, and other laws and regulations, it also required billions of dollars, dwarfing the cost of ThinThread. Drake eventually became "disillusioned, then indignant" regarding the problems he saw at the agency.[15] Circa 2000 NSA head Michael Hayden chose Trailblazer over ThinThread; ThinThread was cancelled and Trailblazer ramped up, eventually employing IBM, SAIC, Boeing, CSC, and others.[23]
Drake worked his way through the legal processes that are prescribed for government employees who believe that questionable activities are taking place in their departments.[21] In accordance with Whistleblower protection laws such as the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, Drake complained internally to the designated authorities: to his bosses, the NSA Inspector General, the Defense Department Inspector General, and both the House and Senate Congressional intelligence committees.[24]
He also kept in contact with Diane S. Roark, a staffer for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee of the U.S. Congress (the House committee responsible for oversight of the executive branch's intelligence activities).[21] Roark was the "staff expert" on the NSA's budget;[9] they had met in 2000.[15]
In September 2002, Roark and three ex-NSA members, Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis,[25] filed a DoD Inspector General report regarding problems at NSA, including Trailblazer.[15] Drake was a major source for the report, and gave information to DoD during its investigation of the matter.[15] Roark also went to her boss at the House committee, Porter Goss.[7] She also attempted to contact William Rehnquist, a Supreme Court justice.[15] She got no response from either.
By 2003, the NSA IG[15] had declared Trailblazer an expensive failure.[26] It cost more than 1 billion dollars.[9][24][27][28]
In 2004, the DoD IG produced a final report of its investigation that had been prompted by Roark & the others in 2002. The report basically agreed with their assertions and found very serious flaws at NSA. For a time, the NSA was even banned from starting projects over a certain size, for fear it would waste the money. However, there were no plans to release this DoD IG report to the public at the time.[25]
Jane Mayer, in her New Yorker article of 2011, writes that Drake felt the NSA was committing serious crimes against the American people; on a level worse than what president Nixon had done in the 1970s. He reviewed the laws regarding disclosure of information, and decided that if he revealed unclassified information to a reporter, then the worst thing that would happen to him was probably that he would be fired.[29]
In November, 2005, Drake contacted Siobhan Gorman, of The Baltimore Sun newspaper.[9][21] Drake began communicating with Gorman, sending her emails through hushmail and discussing various topics. He claims that he was very careful not to give her sensitive or classified information; it was one of the basic ground rules he set out at the beginning of their communication. This communication occurred circa 2006.[30] Gorman wrote several articles about waste, fraud, and abuse at the NSA, including articles on Trailblazer. She received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her series exposing government wrongdoing.[9] Judge Richard Bennett later ruled that "there is no evidence that Reporter A relied upon any allegedly classified information found in Mr. Drake's house in her articles".[31]
2007 FBI raids
In July 2007, armed FBI agents raided the homes of Roark, Binney, and Wiebe, the same people who had filed the complaint with the DoD Inspector General in 2002.[25] Binney claims they pointed guns at his wife and himself. Wiebe said it reminded him of the Soviet Union.[29] None of these people were charged with any crimes. In November 2007, there was a raid on Drake's residence. His computers, documents, and books were confiscated. He was never charged with giving any sensitive information to anyone; the charge actually brought against him is for 'retaining' information ().[20] The FBI tried to get Roark to testify against Drake; she refused.[29] Reporter Gorman was not contacted by the FBI.[15][21]
Drake initially cooperated with the investigation, telling the FBI about the alleged illegality of the NSA's activities.[29] The government created a 'draft indictment' of Drake, prepared by prosecutor Steven Tyrrell. It listed charges as "disclosing classified information to a newspaper reporter and for conspiracy". Diane Roark, Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis (the complainants to the DoD IG in 2002) were also allegedly listed as "unindicted co-conspirators".[25] In 2009 a new prosecutor came on the case, William Welch II,[15][29] and changed the indictment. Some charges were removed, as was any naming of 'co-conspirators'. The new case only contained charges against Drake.[25]
Prosecutors wanted Drake to plead guilty, but he refused. He believed that he was innocent of the charges against him.[15] The government wanted him to help prosecute the other whistleblowers. He refused this as well.[29] He later explained his motivations to the Ridenhour Prizes organization:
“I did what I did because I am rooted in the faith that my duty was to the American people" . . . "I knew that you did not spy on Americans and that we were accountable for spending American taxpayer monies wisely."[32]Indictment
In April 2010, Drake was indicted by a Baltimore, Maryland, grand jury on the following charges:[4][5][6][8]
- Willful Retention of National Defense Information (5 counts)
- ( 793(e) is a modification of the Espionage Act of 1917 made under the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 )
- Obstructing justice (1 count)
- Making a False Statement (4 counts)
The 'Willfull retention' charges are regarding five documents allegedly 'related to the national defense' that were found at Drake's residence. The five documents in question are referred to as "What a Success", "the Regular Meetings", "Volume is our Friend", "Trial and Testing", and "Collections Sites".[34] "What a Success" was declassified a few months after Drake was indicted. "Regular Meetings" was marked "UNCLASSIFIED" and posted on NSANet but prosecution argues the defendant should have known it was really classified. Drake's team also argued that the latter 3 of the 5 documents were part of a collection of thousands of unclassified papers related to the DoD Inspector General Report (mentioned above). Defense argues this means the defendant brought home the material accidentally, not 'willfully'.[35]
The obstruction charge is related to allegedly deleting documents while knowing the FBI was investigating leaks to the media, and that it was contemplating investigating leaks to the aforementioned reporter.[8] The false statements charge come out of the FBI's questioning of Drake without a lawyer present, in the initial stages of the investigation when he was cooperating with them. One count is for alleged statements made by him regarding whether he had willfully taken certain documents home. Another count is for allegedly lying about allegedly giving classified information to Gorman.[6][29] Drake's defenders point out that the government's own expert has found that he did not destroy any evidence. They also point out that he was careful not to give any classified information to Gorman, and that many of the documents in question were 'retroactively classified' after they were seized from his home by the FBI.[29][36]
Offices involved in the indictment included the DOJ Public Integrity Section, DOJ Criminal Division, DOJ National Security Division, the FBI, and the NSA Office of Security & Counterintelligence.[6] Drake is being represented by James Wyda and Deborah Boardman, federal public defenders.[7][37]
Drake is a client of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower non-profit. Jesselyn Radack, director of Homeland Security and Human Rights for GAP, worked with Drake. Author James Bamford was a consultant for Drake's defense as well.[38][39]
Government prosecutor William M. Welch II (previously charged with contempt and removed from the Ted Stevens case[40][41]) is the government's Senior Litigation Counsel on the case. John P Pearson of the DOJ Public Integrity Section is the government's Trial Attorney.[42] Lanny A. Breuer is overseeing the prosecution.[29]
Judge Richard D. Bennett is handling the case.[43] Trial is scheduled for June 2011.[44][dated info]
The Drake case has been written about in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Agence France-Press, Newsweek.com, Wired, the Washingtonian.com, the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News, Politico, and elsewhere.[45] Jesselyn Radack, of the Government Accountability Project, has also discussed the case.[46][47][48]
Court proceedings
In the spring of 2011,[when?] the prosecution made several moves to restrict the normally open proceedings of a jury trial in a United States courtroom, as reported by Gerstein at Politico and others. This is done per the Classified Information Procedures Act, which attempts in theory to prevent the release of classified information during open trials. The prosecution also moved to use the controversial 'silent witness rule', in which exhibits are hidden from the public by the use of 'code words' in court. The government has only attempted to use the rule a handful of times; its legality has been challenged under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.[49] The government also moved to restrict cross-examination of witnesses,[50] to restrict jurors from reading the Siobhan Gorman Baltimore Sun articles about problems with NSA and Trailblazer,[51] and to prevent the defense from making arguments or introducing evidence to the courtroom about whistleblowing or overclassification.[52]The prosecution also attempted (successfully) to seal two exhibits the defense had published in one of their public court filings, which listed various documents the prosecution would try to use at trial.[53][54]
The prosecution has also argued that the CIPA applies to non-classified information and has attempted to redact unclassified information at trial.[55]
Government arguments
The government claimed the "newspaper articles are unduly prejudicial. The only purpose for the admission of these newspaper articles is to put NSA on trial." It also believed that it "does not have to prove that defendant intended to harm the country" under the specific part of the Espionage Act that Drake is charged with; . As for the 'overclassification' defense, the government has argued that it is 'confusing to the jury' and irrelevant to the charges.[56] The government argues the whistle-blower defense is irrelevant to the charges as well.
Final Disposition
In early June, shortly after the May 22, 2011 6:00 PM broadcast of a 60 Minutes episode on the Drake case, the government dropped all of the charges against Drake and agreed not to seek any jail time in return for Drake's agreement to plead guilty to a misdemeanor of misusing the agency’s computer system. Drake was sentenced to one year of probation and community service.
At the July sentencing hearing the judge, Richard D. Bennett of the Federal District Court, issued some harsh words for the government, saying that it was "unconscionable" to charge a defendant with a list of serious crimes that could have resulted in 35 years in prison only to drop all of the major charges on the eve of trial. The judge also rejected the government's request for a large fine noting that Drake had been financially devastated, losing his $154,600 job at the NSA and his pension. Drake is now working at an Apple Store in the D.C. area.
The Espionage Act and whistleblowing
Drake is one of four individuals in the history of the United States who has been charged specifically with "willful retention" of "national defense" information under . Most prosecutions are for 'delivery' of classified information to a third party - something that Mr Drake was not charged with. This particular portion of the Espionage Act was created in 1950 during the Second Red Scare, as part of the McCarran Internal Security Act.[24] Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg were the first to be prosecuted for the 'retention' of what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers (which he gave to The New York Times, eventually resulting in another landmark Espionage Act case in 1971, New York Times Co. v. United States). The prosecution of Russo and Ellsberg was dismissed in 1972 because of government misconduct. The second prosecution was of Samuel Loring Morison in 1985, a Navy analyst who sold satellite photographs to Jane's Defense Weekly; he was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton. The third was the AIPAC case in 2005 (United States v. Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman).[4]See also
- Russ Tice (NSA), Thomas Tamm (NSA), Mark Klein (AT&T) (warrantless wiretap whistleblowers)
- Whistleblower Protection Act
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External links
- USA v. Thomas A. Drake: Selected Case Files, from the Federation of American Scientists
- Thomas Drake speaking after sentencing, Baltimore Sun website, 2011
- No Jail Time in Trial Over N.S.A. Leak, New York Times website, July 15, 2011
- By Drake
- Measuring Software Quality: A Case Study, IEEE Computer (journal), Nov. 1996
- Why are we subverting the Constitution in the name of security?, Washington Post, 2011 Aug 25
- SOURCE WIKIPEDIA
NSA Official Faces Prison for Leaking to Newspaper
- April 15, 2010 |
- 12:47 pm |
- Categories: Coverups, Crime, NSA, Sunshine and Secrecy, Surveillance
- A former senior National Security Agency official was slammed with a
10-count indictment Thursday after allegedly leaking top secret
information to a reporter at a national newspaper.
Thomas Andrews Drake, 52, was a high-ranking NSA employee with access to signals intelligence documents when he repeatedly leaked classified information to the unnamed reporter, who ran stories based on the leaks between February 2006 and November 2007, the indictment alleges.
Fox News is reporting that the journalist was Siobhan Gorman, who worked at the time for the Baltimore Sun and is now a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, which is published by Fox parent corporation News Corp.
According to the indictment, Drake exchanged hundreds of e-mails with the reporter, and the two met in the Washington, D.C., area half a dozen times. Drake also researched stories for the journalist, sending e-mail to other NSA employees asking questions, and accessing classified documents to obtain information.
Drake even “reviewed, commented on, and edited drafts, near final and final drafts” of the reporter’s articles, according to the government.
He later allegedly shredded documents and lied about his activity to federal agents investigating the leaks.
Articles Gorman published at the time dealt with the threat of cyberattacks and the NSA’s struggles to modernize its data collection and sifting technology. A February 2006 article discussed the failure of a $300 million NSA project management system and other mission-critical software programs the agency needed to combat terrorism and attacks.
Another article published in May 2006 discussed a collection program called ThinThread that was abandoned in favor of another program called Trailblazer. Privacy safeguards that were inherent in ThinThread and not in Trailblazer were dropped as a result. Gorman wrote:
NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and “humiliated,” an intelligence official said.
Gorman attributed information in the articles to anonymous sources and, in at least one article published in March 2007, said the source was given anonymity because the document discussed was “classified” in nature.
Without ThinThread’s data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.
Sources say the NSA’s existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.
Drake was charged in the U.S. District Court of Maryland with five counts of willfully retaining classified national security documents, as well as obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI.
“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer in a statement.
Drake’s attorney did not immediately return a call for comment.
“The damage to our national security caused by leaks won’t stop until we see a couple of perpetrators in orange jump suits,” said Senator Kit Bond (R – Missouri), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a press release praising the indictment. Bond called on the Justice Department to prosecute other whistleblowers, such as Thomas Tamm, whom Bond said should be following Drake to federal court.
Tamm is a former Justice Department prosecutor who revealed in 2008 that he was a source for a story the New York Times broke in December 2005 about the warrantless wiretapping program the NSA was conducting with authorization from the Bush administration.
Drake’s leaking to the Baltimore Sun began around November 2005, according the the indictment, when a former congressional staffer who had a “close, emotional friendship” with Drake asked him to speak with the reporter, now identified as Gorman. Drake had provided the congressional staffer with classified and unclassified information while the person worked for Congress, and after the staffer retired in May 2002.
Drake opened a Hushmail e-mail account to contact Gorman, and volunteered to provide information about the NSA. Drake instructed the reporter to open her own Hushmail account so they could communicate covertly.
Hushmail is a Canada-based encrypted e-mail service that allows account holders to communicate securely with a client-side Java encryption applet. But Threat Level previously reported that the company has subverted its own encryption to help U.S. and Canadian authorities gain access to customer e-mail, in response to court orders. It’s unclear if the FBI used that capability in investigating Drake.
Gorman agreed that information gathered from Drake would be attributed in articles to a “senior intelligence official” and that Drake would never be her only source for information.
Drake worked as a contractor for the NSA in 1991 until August 2001 when he became an employee in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate as Chief of the Change Leadership and Communications Office. A year later, he became technical leader in the Directorate of Engineering.
His work focused not on signals intelligence itself, but on developing efficiencies in the agency. In November 2007 the agency suspended his security clearance, and in April 2008 he resigned in lieu of termination, according to court records.
When government investigators searched Drake’s home computer in November 2007 they found copies of classified documents, including internal NSA e-mails headed “Volume is our Friend,” “Trial and Testing,” “the Collections Sites,” and “What a Success.”
Updated 15:00 to identify the reporter who allegedly worked with Drake.
Photo courtesy NSA. SOURCE -WIRED THREAT LEVEL
SOURCE: INFOWEBSTORM
On Thursday, the New York Times attacked the Obama Administration for its misuse of espionage laws to target news media disclosures of government waste and abuse; and on Friday,
Thomas Drake, the recently-exonerated victim of the Obama Administration’s evil crusade, published his first op-ed exposing what he called the Bush-Obama Administration’s “vicious campaign against whistle-blowers.” The New York Times reported that a former top official “in charge of ensuring that real secrets are kept secret,” J. William Leonard, who headed the Information Security Oversight Office during the George W. Bush Administration, “has delivered a stunning repudiation of the Obama Administration’s decision to use the Espionage Act against a whistle-blower attempting to expose government waste and abuse.” Leonard was willing to testify on behalf of whistleblower Drake, until the Justice Department dropped all ten felony charges against Drake last month. The Times correctly points out that the Obama Administration has used the Espionage Act in five case of news media disclosures, whereas there were no more than four in all previous Administrations. Additionally, the number of documents classified by the Obama Administration jumped by 40% last year. While Obama had originally promised more declassification, “the Administration’s emphasis since then has all been in the opposite direction,” concludes the Times. “Treating potentially embarrassing information as a state secret is the antithesis of healthy government.” Drake’s op-ed in the Washington Post cites the judge’s reference to British tyranny, and recounts that his own dispute with the National Security Agency (NSA) started when he heard about secret electronic surveillance and data-mining after 9/11, that bypassed the 4th Amendment and FISA. Later, he became aware of, and tried to expose, massive fraud involving private contractors, illegalities, and intelligence failures on the part of the NSA. As a result, Drake says, he was targeted “in a multi-year, multimillion dollar federal criminal ‘leak’ investigation as part of a vicious campaign against whistle-blowers, that started under President George W. Bush and is coming to full fruition under President Obama.” Drake notes that this country used to recognize the importance of free speech and privacy; but if we sacrifice these liberties in the name of security, “then we transform ourselves from an oasis of freedom into a police state that crucifies its citizens when they step out of line or speak up against government wrongdoing.” ”These are the hallmarks of despotism, not democracy,” Drake concludes. “Is this the country we want to keep?”
T. Drake - TERAFLOPS, SEE;FLOPS
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| THE PATRIOT AND GREAT AMERICAN, PROTECTING US FROM INTRUSIVE BIG GOVERNMENT AND ILLEGAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL ACTS BY AN OUT OF CONTROL FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, NOT ANTI- GOVERNMENT, JUST ANTI AMERICAN! WHOSE BEHIND THIS ONSLAUGHT? RIGHT WING REPUBLICANS OF COURSE! |
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