Thomas Drake

Thomas Drake
In 2010, Thomas A. Drake was accused under the Espionage Act of mishandling government documents relating to the Trailblazer Project, a misguided attempt by the United States National Security Agency to track individuals by analyzing communications like the use of the internet. He favored a separate project code named ThinThread that protected the privacy of the public, and believed that the expensive Trailblazer project was unconstitutional and an abuse of the resources afforded to the NSA. He proceeded through the legal whistleblowing process defined by the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, escalating the report through members in his own agency and all the way up to congress, where the report was essentially ignored when they attempted to get the Department of Defense to investigate the report. In 2006, he released the information to The Baltimore Sun, and in 2007 both he and the members of congress who had filed for the DoD investigation were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He rejected deals to plead guilty, stating that he would not "plea bargain with the truth." Eventually, he pled guilty to a single misdemeanor of misusing agency computer systems, and was released.