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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer
A Reporter at Large
The Secret Sharer
Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
by Jane Mayer May 23, 2011
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.
The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives
of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign
documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who
is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The
N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the
field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our
intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak
prosecutions as almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant
Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal
division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose
classified information just because you want to.” He added,
“Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed
the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of
whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of
information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the
Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a
surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been
using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged
instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than
have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake
case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried
over from the Bush years.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the
Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010),
argues for more stringent protection of classified information,
says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian
crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”
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