Jane Mayer, writing the current issue of The New Yorker, tells an amazing story about a former NSA employee who is charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse inside the NSA. The article also describes the scope and illegality of the country’s warrantless wiretap program against Americans. I strongly recommend you read the entire article.

In December, 2005, the N.S.A.’s culture of secrecy was breached by a stunning leak. [The accused man was not involved in the story.] The Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that the N.S.A. was running a warrantless wiretapping program inside the United States. The paper’s editors had held onto the scoop for more than a year, weighing the propriety of publishing it. According to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, President Bush pleaded with the paper’s editors to not publish the story; Keller told New York that “the basic message was: You’ll have blood on your hands.” After the paper defied the Administration, Bush called the leak “a shameful act.” At his command, federal agents launched a criminal investigation to identify the paper’s source.

The Times story shocked the country. Democrats, including then Senator Obama, denounced the program as illegal and demanded congressional hearings. A FISA court judge resigned in protest. In March, 2006, Mark Klein, a retired A.T. & T. employee, gave a sworn statement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was filing a lawsuit against the company, describing a secret room in San Francisco where powerful Narus computers appeared to be sorting and copying all of the telecom’s Internet traffic—both foreign and domestic. A high-capacity fibre-optic cable seemed to be forwarding this data to a centralized location, which, Klein surmised, was N.S.A. headquarters. Soon, USA Today reported that A.T. & T., Verizon, and BellSouth had secretly opened their electronic records to the government, in violation of communications laws. Legal experts said that each instance of spying without a warrant was a serious crime, and that there appeared to be hundreds of thousands of infractions.

President Bush and Administration officials assured the American public that the surveillance program was legal, although new legislation was eventually required to bring it more in line with the law. They insisted that the traditional method of getting warrants was too slow for the urgent threats posed by international terrorism. And they implied that the only domestic surveillance taking place involved tapping phone calls in which one speaker was outside the U.S.

Drake [the accused former employee] says of Bush Administration officials, “They were lying through their teeth. They had chosen to go an illegal route, and it wasn’t because they had no other choice.” He also believed that the Administration was covering up the full extent of the program. “The phone calls were the tip of the iceberg. The really sensitive stuff was the data mining.” He says, “I was faced with a crisis of conscience. What do I do—remain silent, and complicit, or go to the press?”

Drake faces 35 years in prison if convicted. Yet, the masterminds of an illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying program have gone unprosecuted.

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps [see the first related link below], is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

Related articles

• Feds Drop Probe of NSA Wiretapping Whistle Blower (wired.com)
• FBI defends ISPs, telecoms for warrantless wiretaps (freer.com)
• Open thread for night owls: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state? (dailykos.com)
• prosecuting the whistle blowers (3quarksdaily.com)
• Thursday Reads (skydancingblog.com)