I try to avoid joining the Parade of the Front-Pagers, where everyone feels required to chip in on some crucial national issue like a congresspod’s twitpics, but the collapse of the government’s prosecution against whistleblower Thomas Drake seems like a big fvcking deal:
A former official with the National Security Agency who faced felony counts of mishandling classified documents pleaded guilty Friday to a misdemeanor in a deal with prosecutors. The deal avoided a trial that could have created political problems for the Obama administration and sent the official to prison for the rest of his life.
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Thomas Drake’s plea pleased civil-liberties advocates who are generally sympathetic to Obama, but is a setback for the administration’s effort to crack down on leakers. The administration is pursuing charges against four other accused government leakers under the Act, regarded by some lawyers as vague and overbroad…
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The government claimed in its indictment that he had secretly passed information from the documents to an unnamed reporter for a national newspaper. Court documents identified the reporter as Siobhan Gorman, who published a series of articles detailing management malpractice and dubious legal activities by the NSA in The Baltimore Sun in 2006 and 2007.
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The government never disclosed the contents of the highly-classified documents they accused Drake of leaking. But they are thought to be related to the NSA’s internal debate over TrailBlazer, an ill-fated project launched in 2002 to overhaul the agency’s vast computer systems that capture and screen information flooding into the agency’s computers from around the world.
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Drake and a small group of internal critics regarded Trailblazer as a billion-dollar boondoggle that benefitted defense contractors, and lost a struggle to get the NSA to adopt an internally-designed system called ThinThread at a fraction of the cost. Some of those critics claim that ThinThread might have alerted the U.S. to the 9/11 plot…
The difference between the NYTimes report John quoted earlier and the Washington Post story I’m quoting here is that the WaPo, in its role as the paper of record for the DC company town’s local industry, understands that such prosecutions involve not just some abstract vision of good government practice but the daily workdays of a significant chunk of its readers:
James Bamford, the author of “The Shadow Factory” and two other books on the NSA, says it is the country’s largest, costliest and most secretive spying organization. “And it’s arguably the most influential,” he said.
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He sat in on Friday’s hearing and said defense attorneys had asked him to testify in the trial as an expert witness. As far he knows, Drake was the first NSA official accused of leaking to the press.
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Bamford called the Drake prosecution “a very important case” because it set a precedent for the four similar Espionage Act trials to follow.
If you have any interest at all in civil liberties, much less this particular case, Jane Mayer’s NYorker article “The Secret Sharer” is an excellent weekend read:
… One afternoon in January, Drake met with me, giving his first public interview about this case. He is tall, with thinning sandy hair framing a domed forehead, and he has the erect bearing of a member of the Air Force, where he served before joining the N.S.A., in 2001. Obsessive, dramatic, and emotional, he has an unwavering belief in his own rectitude. Sitting at a Formica table at the Tastee Diner, in Bethesda, Drake—who is a registered Republican—groaned and thrust his head into his hands. “I actually had hopes for Obama,” he said. He had not only expected the President to roll back the prosecutions launched by the Bush Administration; he had thought that Bush Administration officials would be investigated for overstepping the law in the “war on terror.”
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“But power is incredibly destructive,” Drake said. “It’s a weird, pathological thing. I also think the intelligence community coöpted Obama, because he’s rather naïve about national security. He’s accepted the fear and secrecy. We’re in a scary space in this country.”…
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A Win (of Sorts) for Truth, Justice & the American WayPost + Comments (29)