An Interview With Thomas Drake (Former NSA Senior Executive & Whistleblower Of Waste & Fraud At NSA)

Thomas Drake is a former senior executive with the National Security Agency, a United States Air Force and Navy veteran, computer software expert, and whistleblower. During his career at the Air Force, Drake was an Airborne Voice Processing Specialist, with fluency in German, and went on ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions. While at NSA he became a senior-executive holding top security clearance and later he blew the whistle on multi-billion fraud, loss of intelligence, wrongdoing and a secret dragnet electronic surveillance and data mining program conducted on a vast scale by the NSA after 9/11. The name of the program was called Trailblazer. This program violated and subverted the Constitution as well as individual sovereignty and privacy, while weakening national security and fundamentally eroding civil liberties.  In April 2010 he was charged by the US Department of Justice with a 10 felony count Espionage Act indictment facing 35 years in prison, until the government's case against him collapsed in June 2011. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pleaded to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling while also awarded the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award.