Thomas Drake is the 2011 winner of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. Thomas Drake attempted to expose massive NSA mismanagement and the agency's use of a data collection program that was more costly, more threatening to American citizens' privacy rights, and less effective than a readily-available alternative. For his actions, Drake's house was raided, and he was subsequently charged under the Espionage Act, facing 35 years in prison.
Bio
Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior official 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' do ents, 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.
TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT
In my case, while a senior official at the National Security Agency, I found out about the use of electronic eavesdropping on Americans, turning this country into the equivalent of a foreign nation, for the purposes of blanket surveillance and data mining, blatantly disregarding a 23-year legal regime that was the exclusive means for the conduct of such electronic collection and surveillance, which carried criminal sanctions when violated. I also discovered that NSA had withheld critical and crucial intelligence prior to 9/11 and after 9/11, as well as data and information that was available but remained undiscovered, and if shared—if shared—could have made a decisive difference alone in preventing the 9/11 attacks from ever happening. I also learned about a massively expensive and failing surveillance program under development called Trailblazer that largely served as nothing more than a funding vehicle to enrich government contractors and keep government program managers in charge, when a cheap, highly effective, and operational alternative called ThinThread was available in-house that fully protected Americans' privacy rights under the law, while also providing superior intelligence to this nation.
These secret programs which deliberately bypassed the Cons ution and existing laws were born during the first few critical weeks and months following 9/11 as a result of a willful decision made by the very highest levels of this government. Such shortcuts and end-runs were not and never necessary, as lawful existed that would have vastly improved our intelligence capability with the very best of American ingenuity and innovation, as well as time-honored noncoercive interrogation techniques.
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