IPFS News Link • Whistleblowers
IPFS News Link • Whistleblowers
On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named
Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where
he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an
American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security
Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in
essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count
indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the
Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames,
the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S.
intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate
informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained
top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect,
sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort
Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized
disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak
government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable
as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal
practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged
with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If
he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of
thirty-five years.