National Security Agency Executive Indicted

From Cato@Liberty

On Thursday, the government indicted former National Security Agency executive Thomas Drake for obstructing justice and mishandling classified documents—though the underlying crime, for which Drake was not actually charged, was leaking embarrassing information to national security reporter Siobhan Gorman (then of the Baltimore Sun, now at The Wall Street Journal). As Glenn Greenwald observes, the decision to move forward with a rare leak prosecution in Drake’s case stands in rather sharp contrast to the decision to look the other way when it comes to other sorts of wrongdoing in the world of intelligence.
For years, the NSA managed a sweeping program of warrantless wiretaps and large-scale data mining, which a federal judge recently confirmed was in gross violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The telecoms who participated in the scheme were, equally clearly, violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The FBI separately and systematically flouted the same law by obtaining call records for thousands of phone numbers without any legitimate legal process. And, of course, there’s the little matter of torture. For these crimes, the administration has pronounced a verdict of “boys will be boys,” on the grounds that it’s better to gaze boldly into our shining future than get bogged down in recriminations over all that old stuff.