Thomas A. Drake
Thomas Andrews Drake is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency, a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010, the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project.
He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. Drake and his attorney, Jesselyn Radack, are the co-recipients of both the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award.
On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake 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. Radack called it an act of civil disobedience.
Biography
Drake's 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, becoming an Airborne Voice Processing Specialist, with a fluency in German, and went on ELINT missions. It was in that capacity that 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. Drake 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. According to The Washington Post, he also at one time worked with the CIA. In 1989, Drake began work as an NSA contractor, evaluating software. As a contractor, he worked on projects like JACKPOT and LIBRARIAN, becoming an expert in the quality-testing of software and working on a system for measuring the quality of computer code at the NSA. Drake also continued his academic studies.In 2000, he was hired as a software systems quality specialist and management and information technology consultant for Columbia, Maryland-based Costal Research & Technology Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Alexandria, Virginia-based Computer Systems Management, Inc.. In late 2001, he went to work at the NSA as a full-time employee at the Signals Intelligence Directorate at Fort Meade with his actual first day on the job as an NSA employee being September 11, 2001. 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. During the congressional investigations into 9/11, he testified about NSA failures. In 2006 he was reassigned to the National Defense University, where he became the NSA Chair and an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences within the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Drake was forced to leave the NDU in 2007 when his security clearance was suspended, and he resigned from the NSA the next year. Drake then went to work at Strayer University but was forced from that job after his indictment of April 2010. He found work at an Apple Store. He then founded Knowpari Systems, a consulting firm.
In 2011, Drake was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling and was co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award. Accepting the SAAII award he said, 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
Drake action within the NSA
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the NSA desired new tools to collect intelligence from the growing flood of information pouring out of the new digital networks like the Internet. Drake became involved in the internal NSA debate between two of these tools, the Trailblazer Project and the ThinThread project. He became part of the "minority" that favored ThinThread for several reasons, including its theoretical ability to protect the privacy of US individuals while gathering intelligence. Trailblazer required billions of dollars, dwarfing the cost of ThinThread. Drake eventually became "disillusioned, then indignant" regarding the problems he saw at the agency. Around 2000, NSA head Michael Hayden chose Trailblazer over ThinThread; ThinThread was cancelled and Trailblazer ramped up, eventually employing IBM, SAIC, Boeing, CSC, and others.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. 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.
He also kept in contact with Diane Roark, a staffer for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee of the U.S. Congress. Roark was the "staff expert" on the NSA's budget, and the two of them had met in 2000.
In September 2002, Roark and three former NSA officials, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Ed Loomis, filed a DoD Inspector General report regarding problems at NSA, including Trailblazer. Drake was a major source for the report, and gave information to DoD during its investigation of the matter. Roark tried to notify her superior, then-Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Porter Goss. She also attempted to contact William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court at the time. In addition, Roark made an effort to inform Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel David Addington, who had been a Republican staff colleague of hers on the committee in the 1980s. Addington was later revealed by a Washington Post report to be the author of the controlling legal and technical documents for the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, typing the documents on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk in room 268 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and storing them in a vault in his office. Roark got no response from any of the three men.
NSA own inquiry and acknowledgement
By 2003, the NSA Inspector General had declared Trailblazer an expensive failure. It cost more than 1 billion dollars.In 2004, the DoD IG produced a final report of its investigation that had been prompted by Roark and 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.
Eventual whistleblowing
In a 2011 New Yorker article, journalist Jane Mayer wrote 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. Drake 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.In November 2005, Drake contacted Siobhan Gorman of The Baltimore Sun newspaper, 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 around 2006. 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. 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".
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. Binney claims they pointed guns at his wife and himself. Wiebe said it reminded him of the Soviet Union. 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. The FBI tried to get Roark to testify against Drake; she refused. Reporter Gorman was not contacted by the FBI.Drake initially cooperated with the investigation, telling the FBI about the alleged illegality of the NSA's activities. 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 were also allegedly listed as "unindicted co-conspirators". In 2009 a new prosecutor, William Welch II, came on the case and changed the indictment. Some charges were removed, as was any naming of 'co-conspirators'. The new case only contained charges against Drake.
Prosecutors wanted Drake to plead guilty, but he refused. He believed that he was innocent of the charges against him. The government wanted him to help prosecute the other whistleblowers. He refused this as well. 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."