Thomas Drake's Decision: Whistleblowing or Espionage

Briefing Paper: Ethics Issue – Thomas Drake
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Briefing Paper: Ethics Issue – Thomas Drake
Memorandum for: The Senator
Subject: Thomas Drake
Date: March 11 2022
Overview
Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) for seven years, was accused of being an enemy of the state for sneaking classified information from the intelligence agency's headquarters to his home and willfully retaining the same to leak government secrets to the Baltimore Sun reporter, Siobhan Gorman (Mayer, 2011). Drake was also indicted of obstructing justice and deceiving federal law-enforcement agents, charges that would have resulted in a thirty-five-year prison term if he were found guilty. Even amidst calls for more government transparency, the prosecution maintained that Drake had committed espionage and that his disclosure of classified information threatened agents' safety in the field. Although the government later dropped all ten counts leveled against Drake, most pundits have endeavored to understand if Drake's decision to expose NSA's multibillion-dollar mismanagement classifies as whistleblowing or espionage.
Body
The September 11, 2001 attacks saw heightened government surveillance against the terror crime. Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005, would meet with President George Bush to discuss bolstering national intelligence to prevent future terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, Hayden and the Bush administration decided to pursue an aggressive stance in addressing the terrorism threat by instituting a metadata program that would intercept and analyze all communications content entering or leaving the United States (PBS, 2014). Most of the data collected in this anti-terrorism initiative violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which did not sit well with several NSA employees such as Drake. The latter was opposed to mass surveillance that infringed people’s privacy and the spending of billions of dol...