Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Telling Drake's side of the story is a fine exercise, but it's not what this article purports to do. Instead, it's loaded with copy intended to bolster it's claims of being heavily reported and of breaking new news. But it doesn't do that.

Here's the kernel of what seems to have happened, synthesizing both the Crane reporting from the Guardian today and the Drake indictment:

1. Drake favored a competing dragnet surveillance system that was pushed aside in favor of Trailblazer.

2. Drake lodged a complaint with the NSA IG that Trailblazer was a waste of money with inadequate technical controls. He is joined in his complaint by William Binney and several other former NSA employees.

3. Concurrently, Drake began leaking to reporters --- presumably, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who broke the first major NSA surveillance story for the NYT --- using Hushmail.

4. In handling Drake's formal complaint, the NSA managed to leak Drake's identity to DOJ. The article is fuzzy about exactly which law this violates (it refers to the Whistleblower Protection Act, much of which does not apply to national defense and classified information, and not the ICWPA, which has different procedures and protections). Either way: the White House is apoplectic about the Risen/Lichtblau scoop and uses the leak to raid Drake.

5. In the course of investigating Drake, DOJ discovers (perhaps by first ruling out Binney and the other original complainants) Drake's Hushmail leak. Drake is prosecuted.

The Guardian article would have you believe that Drake was prosecuted directly for blowing the whistle through formal channels. But that is not at all what seems to have happened. Yes, in the process of investigating Drake's complaint, there was a procedural foul (Drake's name shouldn't have ended up at DOJ). But it wasn't Drake's formal complaint that got Drake in real trouble!

Again: I think Drake has the most sympathetic case of all the NSA whistleblowers. His leak was extraordinarily targeted, not particularly political, and clearly in the public interest. I'm not writing to litigate whether Drake was right. I'm saying: the Guardian did a poor job of reporting this story.

You're also incorrect on many points here.

1. You're making Trailblazer sound similar to Drake's favored system. This is extremely misleading, and is a long discussion on its own. But making this claim paints Drake's motives as career politics and seeks to diminish his character by inferring ulterior motives. If nothing else, that isn't a productive debate.

2. Drake's complaint was not merely that it was a waste of money with inadequate technical controls. He was also not joined in his complain by William Binney.

Binney made the initial complaint, and it was to the Pentagon Inspector General, not the NSA Inspector General (if that is a thing), and he was anonymously joined by Drake and 3 others. This was in Two of the other complainants were former NSA employees who worked on the original program, and one was Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who had been trying to investigate the NSA on these matters (which is her job), and was getting stonewalled. Drake was still an NSA employee and did not want his career to be impacted, so his name was left off. Others, including Binney, who originally made the "competing system" initiated this because they felt that TrailBlazer was a modified version of ThinThread with all of the privacy protections removed and deployed domestically.

3. Drake did not concurrently leak to reporters. His contact with reporters was several years later. The first report was internally, then he went to congress, then in 2005 he finally went to the media. The Binney complaint was filed in 2012, and the internal escalations within the NSA and Congress had already been happening for years before (ultimately leading to Binney's 2001 resignation in protest).

Drake's hushmail communication was to Gorman of the WSJ about Trailblazer, not James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of NYT, who instead had a totally different story, which was the AT&T warrantless surveillance issue. He set some ground rules for his communication with Gorman, one of which was that he would not reveal anything classified. He maintains that he never did. The outcome of the trial was that he never did. Yes, this contradicts the indictment, for very obvious reasons.

Risen/NYT on the warrantless AT&T issue was a totally different story and in fact had nothing to do with Drake! The investigators of the leak thought the sources might have been the same, and they were wrong.

No, that's not what I believe. As I keep saying: Drake has the most sympathetic of all the NSA leaker cases. What he revealed was very targeted and motivated by the public interest (something you cannot say of some other leakers who, for instance, leaked counterproliferation secrets, or details in preparation for a book they were promoting). I do not believe Drake's leak was careerist.

I bring up ThinThread because the article paints Drake as someone who was motivated to blow the whistle based on the same concerns Snowden had. But that's not what happened. Both ThinThread and Trailblazer were in large part motivated by concerns that more and more SIGINT had a nexus in the US, and that large-scale systems needed to be implemented to capture intelligence that had a US nexus.

When you look at the Drake complaint to the NSA IG through the lens of Snowden, your natural reaction is that the NSA was pushing the concern aside out of C.Y.A., to prevent the public from learning that it was monitoring US comms. But in fact, Drake's complaint is about how Trailblazer was monitoring US comms; the privacy concerns it had were procedural and not substantive. It wasn't stark, the way the article makes it out to be.

I was imprecise about the word "concurrent". My frame of reference was "between the numbered steps in my outline". You're right to correct me. Either way, the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't the IG complaint that got Drake in trouble; it was the communication with reporters.

You can believe that the communications with the press were proper (I don't agree) or in the public interest to the extent that they overrode "proper" (I do agree). But either way, you should be able to agree with me that in an article that is entirely about what happens when insiders at NSA raise concerns through official channels, the fact that Drake got in trouble primarily for what he did through unofficial channels is important to the story, and should have been prominently included.

Considering that you conflated the Risen/NYT leak with the Drake/Binney/ThinThread/WSJ story, I am not sure how you feel comfortable enough to say that Drake got in trouble for doing things through unofficial channels. If that is your central point, you got the most important detail here completely mixed up with another case. I charge that it is you who is doing a poor job of reporting (to say nothing of the Guardian).

That's an association the article made, not me. The indictment and court filings aren't specific about which reporters were involved. Either way, can you rebut the argument I actually made?

I agree that if we're going to hold Guardian stories to the standards of Hacker News comments, I have much less of a case. That article would make a fine Hacker News comment.

> the Guardian did a poor job of reporting this story

Given Jacob Appelbaum's description[1] of the Guardian, this is not surprising.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJValv4YQcY#t=78 (note: strong language - Jacob doesn't pull his punches)

I would not generally describe myself as a Jacob Appelbaum fan, but that was a really well done talk. (It doesn't do my argument here any favors; it's accusing The Guardian of collaborating with the Five Eyes powers, and I'm saying that in this piece they did the opposite).

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