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THE PONCA CITY NEWS, SUNDAY, JUNE 12, 2011 - PAGE 1-D
Government Strikes Plea Deal in Leak of Classified Documents
to unravel after prosecutors
said early this week that they
planned to withdraw some evidence rather than risk exposing
an unidentified telecommunications technology targeted by
the NSA’s vast electronic eavesdropping network.
Had Drake been convicted in a trial, he could have
faced up to 35 years in prison
on charges of obstruction of
justice, lying to the FBI and
illegal possession of classified NSA documents under
the seldom-used Espionage
Act of 1917, even though he
was not accused of spying. The
Act is regarded by some legal
experts as vague and overly
broad.
Drake’s supporters say that
if prosecutors had pursued
the case, it would have made it
harder to hold the U.S. intelligence community responsible
for waste, abuse and mismanagement.
“The case clearly collapsed,” said Jessalyn Radack
of the Government Accountability Project. “It was a case
built on sand, and when the
government was put to the
test, I think it shows that whistle-blowers are not spies and
that the Espionage Act is a
particularly heinous tool that
should never be used to cover
up government wrongdoing
and punish whistle-blowers
who oppose it.”
As a presidential candidate,
Barack Obama called for a more
open government and lauded
federal workers who reported
wrongdoing. But with the disclosure of hundreds of thou-
sands of sensitive military and
diplomatic documents by the
anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks last year, President Obama
appeared determined to halt
the exposure of national security secrets.
He has pursued cases
against five government leakers under espionage statutes,
more than any of his recent
predecessors.
William M. Welch II, the
senior prosecutor, warned in
court documents in the Drake
case that U.S. “national security would crumble if every
individual could anoint himself a whistle-blower ... and
immunize themselves from
prosecution for the most damaging of classified information disclosures.”
Under the agreement, the
government and Drake agreed
that if the case had gone to
trial, prosecutors would have
proved that from February
2006 through about March
2007, Drake intentionally
logged into a system called
NSANet, obtained official
NSA information and provided it orally and in writing
to another person who was
not permitted or authorized to
receive it.
Drake “knew that NSA
restricted the use of and
access to its computers and
NSANet to official use only”
when he accessed them, the
plea documents said.
Court papers did not name
the unauthorized person who
received the information. But
the indictment said Drake
leaked to a newspaper report-
er, identified in other court
documents as Siobhan Gorman, who wrote an award-winning series of articles on the
NSA for the Baltimore Sun.
Newspaper spokeswoman
Renee Mutchnik said late
Thursday the paper had no
comment. Gorman, who now
works at The Wall Street
Journal, did not respond to a
request for comment.
The NSA is one of the government’s largest spy agencies, employing an army of
linguists, cryptologists and
computer experts to snoop on
electronic communications
across the globe from its headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.,
south of Baltimore.
The need for secrecy is
drilled into NSA employees,
who sometimes joke the initials stand for “Never Say Anything,” and “No Such Agency.”
But as it prepared to prosecute Drake, the government
appeared to struggle to craft
a case that avoided the disclosure of some of the spy agencies targets and capabilities.
The last straw may have
been U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett’s recent decision,
detailed in a June 5 letter
from prosecutors, rejecting
efforts to mask references to
“NSA’s targeting of a specific
telecommunications technology” in six documents entered
into evidence.
As a result, the prosecution
said, it was withdrawing four
of the documents and would
eliminate any reference to the
technology in two others.
The government never pub-
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licly described the classified
documents it said it found
in Drake’s Maryland home,
beyond their titles and the
fact they were secret.
But the documents are
thought to relate to the NSA’s
internal debate over TrailBlazer, an ill-fated project
launched in 2002 to use contractors to overhaul the agency’s vast computer systems to
capture and screen information flooding into the agency’s
computers from the Internet
and cell phones.
The project eventually cost
$1.2 billion, but never worked
as intended and was ended in
2006.
Drake supported an inhouse system that was much
cheaper and which he said
could have gathered critical
information about al-Qaida
before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was also
critical of the NSA’s domestic
spying after 9/11.
Steven Aftergood, head of
the Federation of American
Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, said while the
government needs to keep
some things secret, it had overreached in the Drake case.
“The whole experience has
been shattering,” Aftergood
said. “But I think the primary
message is to the government
that not every security infraction is or ought to be a federal
case. You can break the rules
without committing a felony.
And the government should
not overreact to every little
deviation from the rules.”
———
Yost reported from Washington.
Cases of E. coli Sickness
Confirmed in Oklahoma
TULSA (AP) — The Tulsa City-County Health Department
says three children have been sickened by E. coli bacteria.
Agency spokewoman Melanie Christian says the department’s lab confirmed the cases in the children, who are under
10 years old. Christian says two of the children were hospitalized but one has gone home.
She says two of the children are siblings.
Agency officials are still investigating how and where the
children contracted the illness.
Christian says two of the children go to daycare at the Boston
Avenue United Methodist Church in Tulsa, but that’s the only
common point of contact. She says health officials have done
some inspections at the daycare but they haven’t found anything of concern.
E. coli most commonly is contracted through consumption of
poorly cooked meat or unpasteurized milk or juices.
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3330 N.14TH • PONCA CITY • 765-5595
PEMBERTON
By DOUGLAS BIRCH
And PETE YOST
Associated Press
BALTIMORE (AP) — A
former top official with the
National Security Agency who
was accused of passing classified documents to a reporter
has agreed to a plea bargain
with prosecutors in a deal that
pleased civil-liberties advocates but is a setback for the
Obama administration’s effort
to crack down on leakers.
Former NSA executive
Thomas Drake, 54, of Maryland is expected to plead
guilty Friday in federal court
in Baltimore to the unauthorized use of a government computer, a misdemeanor, while
the government will drop 10
felony counts, including the
unauthorized possession of
classified documents, that
could have sent him to prison
for 35 years.
The lesser charge still carries a maximum penalty of up
to one year behind bars and
a $100,000 fine, but the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower advocacy
group, said that under the
arrangement Drake wouldn’t
spend any time behind bars or
pay a fine.
The deal was struck after
nearly a week of negotiations
between federal prosecutors
and Drake’s defense team, and
averted what was expected to
be a three-week trial.
The
government’s
case
against Drake, who blew the
whistle on what he considered
a billion-dollar boondoggle at
his former agency, appeared
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