{"id":4007,"date":"2010-04-15T17:35:14","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T21:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4007"},"modified":"2010-04-15T17:43:39","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T21:43:39","slug":"thomas-drake-citizen-patriot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/15\/thomas-drake-citizen-patriot\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Drake – citizen patriot…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Former N.S.A. Official Is Indicted in Leak Case<\/a>
The New York Times<\/strong>
By SCOTT SHANE
April 15, 2010<\/div>\n

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…<\/p>\n

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.\t\t<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

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”…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So I ran across this indictment<\/strong> <\/a>and began to try to figure out who the reporter was. Within minutes, it was apparent that there were many similar searches going on. I found the first references in emptywheel<\/font><\/strong>‘s comments. Then this article popped up. The Internet is amazing! And it looks like the day Thomas Drake got busted, Siobhan Gorman made a job change to the Wall Street Journal.<\/div>\n
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    The indictment has this:<\/div>\n
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    Defendant DRAKE worked at NDU until on or about November 28, 2007<\/strong> when NSA suspended his security clearance.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    Google has this [no content]<\/div>\n
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    Siobhan Gorman – mediabistro.com: jobs, classes, community and …
    November 29, 2007<\/strong>: Siobhan Gorman will cover domestic intelligence agencies, terrorism and counter-terrorism at the The Wall Street Journal. …<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    I guess it was a good time for a move…<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n
    It’s an interesting indictment to me. Most of these leaks are not<\/u> about the illegal unwarranted domestic spying program at the NSA. They are about a very muddled renovation of the NSA systems, one that cost us bundles of money. What’s so secret about computer renovations? So while he’s charged wuth leaking top secret documents, the documents are about something not so in need of being a secret. The only reason to keep them secret is to keep us from knowing how much money the NSA was going through. It sounds to me like Mr. Drake was a patriot whistle-blower to me. Maybe we ought to give him a medal instead of a prison sentence…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Former N.S.A. Official Is Indicted in Leak Case The New York Times By SCOTT SHANE April 15, 2010 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}