[Infowarrior] - NSA Whistleblower to Plead Guilty to Misdemeanor

[Richard Forno]

NSA Whistleblower to Plead Guilty to Misdemeanor

	• By Kim Zetter  
	• June 9, 2011  | 
	• 8:24 pm  | 
	• Categories: The Courts

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/drake-pleads-guilty/

Days before he was set to go on trial on charges that he illegally retained classified documents, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor count of exceeding authorized access to a computer.

Drake had been charged under the Espionage Act after he allegedly provided information about waste and mismanagement at the NSA to a Baltimore Sun reporter in 2006 and 2007.

The former NSA linguist, who was set to go to trial next Monday, rejected two pleas offered by the government on Wednesday before finally agreeing to a third proposal, according to the Washington Post. He turned down an offer to plead guilty to the charge that he retained classified documents without authorization.

Drake, who left the NSA in 2008 and has been reduced to working at an Apple Store outside Washington, D.C. while he awaited trial, was facing a possible sentence of 35 years if convicted of the charges he was facing. He has long maintained that he never provided the Sun with classified information and also disputed that any documents investigators found at his home contained classified material.

Experts told the Post that the misdemeanor plea indicates the government’s case against him was weak. The government likely harmed its case, they said, after prosecutors told a U.S. District judge this week that they would withhold documents they had planned to introduce as evidence, because out of fear that they would reveal sensitive technology information.

The government’s decision to prosecute Drake and the resulting media attention has already led to more public disclosures about the NSA’s illegal surveillance program than the government likely wanted.

Last month, a New Yorker article about the Drake case provided new insight into the program, including how top officials at the intelligence agency viewed it.

Drake was a linguist and military crypto expert who had been an NSA contractor when he began a new staff job with the agency on the morning of September 11, 2001, in the agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate.

As a contractor, Drake had become familiar with a data-mining program codenamed ThinThread, that had been tested within the NSA and could be deployed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regions where terrorism was prevalent. It was designed to trap, map and mine vast amounts of data in real time to pick out relevant and suspicious communications, rather than requiring the data to be stored and sifted later.

The program was “nearly perfect” except that it swooped up the data of Americans as well as foreigners and continued to intercept foreign communications as they traversed U.S.-based switches and networks. This violated U.S. law, which forbids the collection of domestic communication without a probable-cause warrant.

To solve this problem, the designer of the program added privacy controls and an “anonymizing feature” to encrypt all American communications that ThinThread processed. The system would flag patterns that looked suspicious, which authorities could then use to obtain a warrant and decrypt the information.

ThinThread was ready to deploy in early 2001, but the NSA’s lawyers determined it violated Americans’ privacy, and NSA director Michael Hayden scrapped it. In its place, Hayden focused funding on a different program, codenamed Trailblazer, which the NSA contracted with outside defense companies, like SAIC, to produce.

That system ran into numerous problems and cost overruns, yet continued with Hayden’s support. Hayden’s deputy director and his chief of signals-intelligence programs worked at various times for SAIC, which received several Trailblazer contracts worth hundreds of millions of  dollars. In 2006, after eating up some $1.2 billion, Trailblazer was finally deemed a flop and killed.

Drake’s revelations to the Baltimore Sun exposed the government’s waste and mismanagement of the programs.

Last year the government had dropped a criminal investigation of another whistle blower who helped expose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to the New York Times in 2004.

Thomas Tamm had held a Top Secret/SCI clearance at the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review when he discovered the illegal NSA program and tipped off the Times.