WASHINGTON — In a highly unusual legal action against an alleged leaker of government secrets, a federal grand jury has indicted a former senior official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007. The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources…
The indictment, handed down on Wednesday by a grand jury in Baltimore, does not name either the reporter who received the information or the newspaper, but the description fits articles written by Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that examined in detail the failings of several major N.S.A. modernization programs and problems with supplying its huge electric power demands. Some of her articles were honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists.
The N.S.A., which monitors phone calls, e-mail messages and other electronic communications, had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to update its systems to collect and sort the huge amount of data it was collecting. The modernization programs were plagued with technical failures and cost overruns, and Ms. Gorman, who now works for The Wall Street Journal, was the reporter who most aggressively covered the problems…
The Baltimore Sun articles that appear to be referred to in the indictment dealt with mismanagement and did not generally focus on the most highly protected N.S.A. secrets — whose communications it focuses on and what countries government and military codes it has broken. That may make a prosecution more feasible, from the point of view of protecting secrets during a trial. But because the articles in question documented government failures and weaknesses, the prosecution could raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from public scrutiny. If Ms. Gorman’s articles were indeed those involved in the case, Ms. Dalglish said, they exposed “a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that was of great interest to Congress.” She called the articles “important public-interest reporting”…
Defendant DRAKE worked at NDU until on or about November 28, 2007 when NSA suspended his security clearance.
Siobhan Gorman – mediabistro.com: jobs, classes, community and …
November 29, 2007: Siobhan Gorman will cover domestic intelligence agencies, terrorism and counter-terrorism at the The Wall Street Journal. …
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