Drake sits in Bethesda Row after a shift at the nearby Apple Store. He began working for the company in after leaving the NSA. Photo by Lukas Gates. By Zoe Kaufmann January 31, Is Thomas Drake is a spy, a traitor or a hero? It depends on who you ask. The Obama administration and the national security establishment labeled him a leaker, guilty of treason, while government accountability advocates still herald him as a patriot, guilty only of acting on moral conviction.
Now, though, Drake works at the Apple Store in downtown Bethesda, a far cry from his national security background. It was relatively inexpensive, effective at filtering out non-essential information and contained powerful rapid-encryption privacy protections. Instead, the NSA chose to use Trailblazer, a similar but far more expensive and less effective program that lacked adequate privacy protections, the Baltimore Sun reported.
By , it had gone hundred of millions of dollars over budget and was shut down. While working at the NSA, Drake came across projects and strategies that made him question the decisions made by individuals in the highest echelons of the agency. Drake found that different branches of the national security structure had withheld crucial information from one another regarding Sept. Drake and his colleagues discovered that the agency had obtained information containing indications of the events of Sept.
This was the equivalent of an electronic Pearl Harbor, except we had blinded our own selves. Evidence of warrantless domestic surveillance in hand, they went to the Inspectors General of the NSA and the Department of Defense, the offices tasked with oversight and accountability; Drake even testified before Congress. No one listened. He needed to bet she could guess the password to the email and decrypt his message on the first try.
Gorman did, and the Baltimore Sun published the first article using declassified information he provided in Drake maintains this was his only leak. But a New York Times article about the warrantless wiretapping program in December cited an unnamed senior NSA official, whom the government alleged was Drake.
