When Thomas Drake, then an official at the National Security Agency, realized that the agency\u2019s decision to shut down an internal data analysis program and instead outsource the project to a private contractor provided the government with less effective analysis at much higher cost, he tried to do something about it. Drake\u2019s decision to join three other whistleblowers in asking the agency\u2019s inspector general to investigate ultimately made him the target of a leak investigation that tore his life apart.<\/p>\n
In 2005, the inspector general of the Department of Defense, of which NSA is a part, confirmed the whistleblowers\u2019 accusations of waste, fraud and security risk.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, former NSA Director Michael Hayden even conceded that TrailBlazer, the program for which the NSA paid over $1 billion to the Science Applications International Corporation, had failed. The agency, after killing its own program (called ThinThread) \u201coutsourced how we gathered other people\u2019s communications,\u201d he said in response to a question from investigative journalist Tim Shorrock. \u201cAnd that was a bridge too far for industry. We tried a moonshot, and it failed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Drake\u2019s efforts to expose that waste and abuse would ultimately lead to his being charged under the 1917 Espionage Act — a law intended for the prosecution of spies, not whistleblowers.<\/p>\n
Drake, a subject of a new documentary, War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State, could have been put away for the rest of his life. \u201cSpeaking truth to power is now a criminal act,\u201d Drake told filmmaker Robert Greenwald.<\/p>\n
The investigation that would ensnare Drake began in 2006, under the Bush administration. But he wasn\u2019t charged until 2010, when the Obama administration accused him of providing information to Baltimore Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman. In 2006 and 2007, she wrote a series of articles on NSA inefficiencies sourced to as many as 18 people, including Drake, who contends that he did not provide any classified information to her.<\/p>\n
Rather than charging him with leaking classified information, the government charged him with retaining classified information. Over the course of the investigation, however, the government admitted that some of the documents in question had subsequently either been declassified or were never classified to begin with. Between that embarrassing revelation and the attention of good government groups, the case against Drake fell apart. <\/p>\n