This is absolutely outrageous, the Obama Justice Department has announced that it is indicting Thomas Drake. Drake was one of the whistleblowers of NSA programs that were not only severely mismanaged but also tried to circumvent privacy safeguards. It seems Obama has now decided not to bring down actual criminals, but the heroes who expose government screwups and criminality.
WASHINGTON — In a highly unusual legal action against an alleged leaker of government secrets, a federal grand jury has indicted 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.
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The F.B.I. executive assistant director in charge of national security, Arthur M. Cummings II, said the bureau would continue to aggressively pursue such leak investigations.
But Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a press advocacy group, called the indictment "unfortunate."
"The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will," she said.
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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.
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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."
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http://www.nytimes.com/...
In 2006 and 2007, Siobhan Gorman, a highly regarded intelligence reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote a series of articles about how the National Security Agency was (mis)managing a highly sensitive, very expensive collection program known as Trailblazer. Relying on interviews with current and former senior intelligence officials as well as internal documents, Gorman was able to show that the NSA's "state-of-the art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications" was a boondoggle of sorts -- and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored. A program known as "Thin Thread," which had proved its worth to the NSA before 9/11 and which contained several civil liberties safeguards, was abandoned in favor of Trailblazer because the latter program, according to Gorman's sources, "had more political support" and was a favorite of then NSA-director Michael Hayden's.
A former National Security Agency executive was outed as the main source for Gorman's articles today.
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Drake faces up to 40 years in prison.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/...
To recap: whistleblowers of government waste and criminal activities get prosecuted, while the actual criminals get off scot free.
Obama's awesome "looking forward, not backward"-policy at work!