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Ex-NSA Official Indicted For Leaks To Newspaper
Hugh Pickens writes "The Baltimore Sun reports that in a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted Thomas A. Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007. Federal law prohibits government employees from disclosing classified information which could be 'expected to cause damage to national security.' The indictment (PDF) does not name either the reporter or the newspaper that received the information, but the description applies to articles written by Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that examined in detail the failings of several major NSA programs, costing billions of dollars, that were plagued with technical flaws and cost overruns. Gorman's stories did not focus on the substance of the electronic intelligence information the agency gathers and analyzes but exposed management and programmatic troubles within the agency."
Adds reader metrometro: "Of note: the government says the alleged NSA mole uses Hushmail, which is all the endorsement I need for a security system." Perhaps Mr. Drake was unaware of Hushmail's past cooperation with the US government?
"exposed management and programmatic troubles within the agency."! Can't have management look bad!
Check out Glenn Greenwald's post on this exact issue. He raises an extremely important point:
- Illegally wiretapping US citizens, and/or ordering illegal wiretapping of US citizens: No problem, we have to look forwards, not backwards.
- Exposing illegal and inefficient workings of the NSA: throw the book at 'em.
Something is very very rotten.
I am officially gone from
The real problem here is that officials use the security system to hide their fuck ups. By making all kinds of crap classified that shouldn't be they clog the system and reduce the efficiency. It's impossible to run a security system when you flood it with tons of info that is only classified because it's embarrassing to the morons in management.
charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007
How is it that a guy dumb enough to use e-mail for this was a senior NSA official?
Then you'd probably be indicted for treason if you got caught but hey.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's what they'd do in Russia.
Of course, in Soviet Russia, accident would have YOU.
We have a whistle-blower law to protect the American taxpayer, but if it's deemed classified, all bets are off.
Great, just great! So, if I want to be a crooked government official, I just need to be able to classify it as "Secret" and "National Security" and I'm off to the Bahamas!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
he was exposing government waste
if he were exposing state secrets, let him rot in jail
but that's all sound and fury surrounding the real issue of what was actually disclosed, and why
the substance of his disclosures and what motivated him: wasted tax payer dollars on lame NSA projects
as far as i am concerned, for his actions, this guy is a hero. we need MORE government employees like this. and his timing is impeccable, government waste is pissing off the country like never before right now: perhaps the tax party can make him some sort of patron saint?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"National security"? Please. This is about the fact that someone exposed the fact that they are wasting money in a highly incompetent manner.
Hushmail is notorious in certain circles for sharing people's PGP keys with investigators who come knocking. This was in relation to DEA and Customs investigations in Operation Web Tryp to crack down on people using the internet to get ahold of research chemical indoleethylamines and phenethylamines (read: designer psychedelics). A lot of these people were using Hushmail, and when the investigators went to Hushmail, the provider burned their users. If they'll rat you out to the DEA and Customs, bet your sweet ass they'll rat you out to the NSA. Fuck, read this article at Cryptome.
If you need any expectation at all of ACTUAL privacy (the kind that'll keep you out of prison), don't use Hushmail. Someone people actually trust, like maybe the people behind Wikileaks, should start a real anonymous mail network.
--Obyron
The information given is also consistent with leaks to the New York Times that destroyed (hopefully temporarily) our ability to move captured enemies safely, and destroyed (probably permanently) our best tools for intercepting enemy financing, and destroyed one of our best tools for monitoring enemy communications. IIRC, there were some other similar leaks. Yeah, the government sometimes uses classification to hide embarrassments, and that should be rooted out. But it also uses classification to undertake its constitutionally mandated duties. For the former, leaks are not the answer: whistleblower statutes and notification of congressmen on the intelligence oversight committees are the answer. For the latter, leaks are treason in time of war, though we seem to have discarded the notion of treason lately at least in terms of prosecuting people for it.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Can anyone say Valerie Plame?
Wherever you go, there you are.
exposing state secrets is a crime in china, russia, the usa, india, etc... as well it should be
do you have some sort of belief that exposing state secrets is a beneficial exercise?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh my god. This is the funniest post I've read in years.
Tell me, which article of the Constitution permits
1) unreasonable searches and seizures by
2) agencies under no or very little congressional oversight
3) which have secret budgets?
I think you and the tea partiers will be slightly disappointed once you get around to understanding the constitution instead of reading it for selective applications of your own biases.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
from within the system
going public means they can't sweep the issue under the rug. public anger compels the system to actually fix the problem. this is the function of the press in a healthy society. i don't know why you think problems could be solved without public knowledge and outrage breathing down bureaucrats necks. without the public knowledge and outrage, no solution would be forthcoming, ever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ok, let's say that Program X was a disaster. What you also expose by leaking this is that we don't have the capabilities of Program X. In other words, other intelligence agencies understand what we can and cannot do.
I would be entirely sure that the Congressional committees know perfectly well that a program is messing up. And while we should be concerned about technical projects being mismanaged or being messed up (not that that doesn't occur in private industry, right?), let's not kid ourselves.
Leaking this type of information is a problem. And if Congress didn't know about the mess, that's the appropriate people to leak to.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
for example: the security apparatus around nuclear power plants, that should not be exposed and anyone who does should be punished. that's what i was talking about
but something like bush and cheney's end runs around the constitution: yeah, that should be exposed
so i apologize, you are correct:
i should have qualified my comments better, as i was only really talking about the kind of state secrets like missile launch sequences, that should never be divulged publicly. but you are correct to take issue with my blanket comment, it was unqualified, plenty of "state secrets" need to be divulged
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree that over-classification is a problem from a transparency point of view. However, I disagree that it decreases efficiency - in fact efficiency and convenience is one of the big reasons that documents are unnecessarily classified to begin with. When you work on a classified system (like a computer) any documents you generate are automatically treated as classified at the highest level that the system is approved to process. Decreasing or declassifying a document requires you to go through a formal process.
If you are working a a project that is mostly unclassified with a view classified elements, then people spend most of their time working on the unclassified systems, and moving over to classified is a hassle that is only done when needed. As the amount of classified increases, it becomes more of a hassle as you have to split your work between two systems, generate tons of one-time-use CD-Rs for transferring unclassified data to the classified system (which must be immediately marked as classified and appropriately destroyed or tracked). After a point where most of the documents you generate are classified, it is just easier to do everything on the classified system, treat everything as classified, and just go through the review process when you legitimately need the document to be unclassified. In addition to decreasing the amount of data transfer that needs to take place, you also relieve yourself of the worry of accidentally including classified information in an unclassified document (or more likely, indirectly relieving classified information by the association of various unclassified information).
Finally, there often are legitimate reasons why things like schedules and budgets need to be classified. For example, if they include production quantities that are classified. I have worked on projects where the vast majority of our work was unclassified, but we still had both classified and unclassified versions of the budget. I can imagine project where it would be easier to only have a classified version.
All that said, not knowing the details of this case, I can't say whether the information release was legitimately harmful to National Security, or just a gross violation of procedure for good reasons.
Posted anonymously not because any of this is sensitive, but to avoid attracting unwanted attention to myself, by advertising to the work that I work on classified projects.
it could be said that reagan's completely bullshit star wars program spooked the russians, and if it was publicly revealed how much money was being wasted on complete crap, the russians wouldn't have been so spooked
however, if you are playing this game of managing perception and deceit, you've entered the rarified, high paranoia stratosophere of smoke and mirrors where the other side might also equally conclude that a "public disclosure" that a program is a failure is a lie in order to hide real deadly capabilities. in other words, its all high anxiety, all the time, and no one really trusts what anyone says anyway, so disclosure or nondisclosure of a "failed" program doesn't effects perceptions by the enemy either way: they are going to get spooked or not depending upon their own confidence levels
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This raises the question about email providers. Who provides good, private, secure email service? If Hushmail has handed over keys & data on request, I'd rather not pay them €50-100 per year. In truth I'm not an international criminal or James Bond or anything... so I can't really justify too much cost. But surely there is a service which does not retain data for too long and would at least ask for a court order before handing anything over... and does not assume you have the financial backing of a TLA.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Just use Freenet. It has both BBS style message exchange and the beginnings of something like smtp.
You should have been up-modded for your sig alone! OMG I can't stop laughing, at Jean-Louis Gasse. Nonetheless, although I have seen first hand that Windows is responsible for an enormous amount of inefficiency in large Federal bureaucracies, I suspect that the nature of the problems in the NSA is different. The problems and costs introduce by use of Windows on desktops and servers isn't something that anyone in the NSA would blow the whistle on. Since it's not any different any other place in government, it's really difficult to quantify (no basis of comparison to the hypothetical well run Linux or Mac Federal agency. Instead, these problems probably have a lot to do with developing systems which are on par with Google's distributed processing thingy -- big, really really big, complex, insanely complex if you haven't done it before, new thinking required, then more new re-thinking and re-re-thinking until you narrow in on a solution that actually works -- on par with inventing an operating system and a database and the computers they run on, in a foreign language. I expect technical failures and cost overruns in such situations, and Mr. Drake might have been naive to think running over budget by years and many billions wasn't expected by the administration(s) and Congressional oversight committees (if they want the capability, they'll pay for it.)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
An argument can be made that most "state secrets" are unhealthy in a democratic republic. We might be a lot better off if we admitted openly nearly all government activity.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Be thankful someone did talk about "the security apparatus around nuclear power plants" too :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Bank#Later_years
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
One of the very first things you have to do before getting a security clearance is sign a document acknowledging that revealing classified information is punishable by a fine of $10,000 or 10 years in prison or both. If you can't handle that from the outset, you have no business having a security clearance.
Make no mistake: this was a very serious crime. While I applaud this guy's intent, the proper place for his complaint was either the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From that point on, it is the responsibility of those Congressional committees to follow up on the information. No person other than the Director of Central Intelligence or the President has the authority to release classified information.
If you think that sucks, then imagine the situation where everyone with a clearance got to decide on their own whether that information should be kept secret or not. There wouldn't be any point to having classified information, and you might as well give it all away to the Chinese/Russians, etc. Do you think they'll reciprocate?
Necron69
You're discussing operations that clearly fall into the domain of the CIA, military intelligence, etc., clearly NSA wouldn't even know about moving captured enemies. We're fairly sure that Drake disclosed the data for Siobhan Gorman's article simply because Drake should never have had need-to-know for anything outside the NSA.
Intelligence services often don't prosecute leaks because they fear the trial might cause further real damage, but they'll probably prosecute when the trial merely prolongs their embarrassment otoh.
We know the Gorman article was based upon classified NSA documents showing massive waste. To me, that says the source was not given strong enough internal recourses.
A strong measure would be granting all senators automatic clearance for budgetary issues, thus effectively granting employees like Drake the ability to discuss the matter with a senator.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
yeah, again, i utterly fail in the comment qualification department
anyone who divulges a LACK OF security like this guy should get the congressional medal of honor
anyone who divulges the OPERATING DETAILS of a genuine security apparatus should get a cold cell
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As Steven Colbert recently demonstrated, Wikileaks has a clear agenda.
Whether you agree with that agenda or not, once you know that Wikileaks has an agenda you're stupid if you don't realize they're going to prioritize their agenda over your interests.
USE Wikileaks if you want. Like a piece of toilet paper if that floats your boat.
But only a FOOL would trust them.
Think of I2P as an onion-routed (Tor-like) anonymous network with web, email and bittorrent services built in.
>that examined in detail the failings of several major NSA programs, costing billions of dollars,
>that were plagued with technical flaws and cost overruns
I have to thank this guy profusively, now that we know all the problems with mismanagement
there should be an investigation, and they should be held fully accountable, but it will be tough to
prove anything, everything might be encrypted.
Also, they learn from their mistakes, now try getting any sort of info from there, it will be almost
impossible. I think though, there should be a sort of law against companies run by the government
using public money to fund projects, that specifies that financial information (not actual project info)
can not be kep secret, and any employee forwarding financial that should otherwise be public,
for some reason was hidden, can not be prosecuted, this would make a few more companies rethink their
while cloak and dagger scam.
NSA>We need billions of dollars for our projects
Gov.>Ok, we need a business plan or we need to know what it is for...
NSA>That is classified...
Gov.>That's good enough for us, here you go...
a Troll mod. Thus proving my point.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.