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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?
It's what they'd do in Russia.
Of course, in Soviet Russia, accident would have YOU.
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
This is about the fact that someone exposed the fact that they are wasting money in a highly incompetent manner.
Actually the government is quite competent at wasting money!
mmmm...forbidden donut
Can anyone say Valerie Plame?
Wherever you go, there you are.
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.
That money got wasted in a highly incompetent way is not news.
That someone is getting in trouble for whistleblowing is not especially news.
But this kind of whistleblowing is always going to end badly for the whistleblower, because even if a legitimate transparency function is served (calling attention to wasteful and inefficient program administration), the programs themselves are classified. In the public eyes, they're not supposed to even exist. To praise them in public would also be a breach of classification. So, this is the hardest class of whistleblowing on the books: even if 99% of the classification decisions on the program can be written off as cover-up, there's still a critical core of legitimate secrecy which gets violated. Trends and techniques used in espionage get exposed. Adversaries are tipped off. Whole lines of intelligence gathering dry up, fail, or have to be abandoned.
It's an unpleasant situation.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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
I don't trust Wikileaks--they have an agenda, and it isn't simply informing people about things which are unlawfully/immorally kept hidden. I will grant that they are serving an important function right now, and I am grateful for this... but trust? No way.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The NSA is one of the few organizations that I would expect to be able to break the encryption on a mass of encrypted e-mails -- not by brute forcing it, but by awesome cryptanalysis. I'd be surprised if the Java applet didn't have some implementation errors, or the data being encrypted had enough recognizable patterns in it to allow some work with known plaintexts.
That said, Hushmail giving them a copy of all your (encrypted) e-mail is not a whole lot different than your normal e-mail provider doing the same. About the only significantly different situation (that I can think of) would be if they were to have physical access to your drives... but for that they'd (we assume) need a warrant.