The Secret Sharer - Is Thomas Drake an Enemy of the State?

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former  government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a  courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges  that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior  executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s  electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an  enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered  against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917  statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who,  in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B.,  enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment  says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had  sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s  headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the  purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the  indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper  reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun  about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal  practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged  with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If  he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of  thirty-five years.
The government argues that Drake recklessly  endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of  benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel  who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The  N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field.  So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence  goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
Top  officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as  almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who  supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get  to break the law and disclose classified information just because you  want to.” He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”
When  President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of  government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom  he described as “often the best source of information about waste,  fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has  pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including  the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal  charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such  prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations  combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department  has carried over from the Bush years...

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Jane Mayer @'The New Yorker'