That it's unconstitutional is bad enough. But the ineffectiveness of the NSA is the most damning aspect of all:<p>> Drake had discovered a shocking example while researching his postmortem report on the September 11 attacks. Months beforehand, the NSA had come into possession of a telephone number in San Diego that was used by two of the hijackers who later crashed planes into the World Trade Center. But the NSA did not act on this finding.<p>> As Drake later told the NSA expert James Bamford, the NSA intercepted seven phone calls between this San Diego phone number and an al-Qaida “safe house” in Yemen. Drake found a record of the seven calls buried in an NSA database.<p>> US officials had long known that the Yemen safe house was the operational hub through which Bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, ordered attacks. Seven phone calls to such a hub from the same phone number was obviously suspicious. Yet the NSA took no action – the information had apparently been overlooked.<p>If you are going to shred the foundation of jurisprudence, you should get something for your trouble.
> "Hillary Clinton argue that Snowden broke the law when he should have trusted it. “He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower,” Clinton said in the first Democratic presidential debate last October. “He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that.”<p>Tell that to Thomas Drake. Tell it, for that matter, to John Crane."
Whenever a story about Snowden is in the news, some people complain that some of the documents he released were "off topic". They accuse Snowden of releasing too much[1]. I agree, in an ideal world Snowden's bulk-copy methods shouldn't have been necessary.<p>Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the "proper" methods of whistleblowing didn't work. When the proper methods fail, fallback methods are used. When legitimate channels fail, whistleblowing has to appel directly to the people. This is practically guaranteed to have collateral damage.<p>Anyone who is angry with Snowden's methods should work hard to create safe and effective whistleblower mechanisms.<p>[1] The cutoff point for "too much" varying with personal opinion.
This was my main concern about how Snowden approached the whistleblowing - it seems that in practice, the whistleblowers got punished heavily for doing their job, so I have to say that I was wrong to question Snowden's methods, and the government needs to reform how it handles whistleblowing.
I've learned about US's Office of Special Counsel - an agency that's tasked to protect government whistleblowers - from an episode of Person of Interest. In it, a low-ranking NSA worker tried to ask his employees about what he discovered, only to get terminated and framed for drug use; he called the OSC and in response to that the OSC sent his coordinates to a squad of black-ops hitmen.<p>While obviously work of fiction, it somehow <i>feels</i> like an accurate description of how this works, and this article only confirms it. If you stumble upon a secret that could endanger important people in the government, the government ain't gonna be helping you. I think Drake and Crane are lucky to be alive today.
I don't have a strong opinion on the whole article, but almost from the beginning it's less than honest.<p>Of all the whistleblower cases of the last 10 years, Thomas Drake has the most sympathetic. The conventional narrative about Drake appears to be mostly correct. But there are two very important details that this story not only leaves out, but implicitly contradicts.<p>1. Drake did not follow NSA whistleblower protocol in revealing details about Trailblazer. Unless NSA whistleblower protocol includes "create a Hushmail account and then send classified documents to journalists over it".<p>2. Drake was concerned about dragnet surveillance. But his concern wasn't "why" or "whether". It was "how". Drake blew the whistle on Trailblazer after a program he sponsored, ThinThread, was pushed aside for Trailblazer. ThinThread sounds a lot better in magazine articles, but it too was a large-scale dragnet surveillance system. The differences were that ThinThread was less expensive, and that ThinThread had better technical controls. But nobody on HN would be OK with ThinThread either.<p>For pretty much all of the whistleblower cases, you can go to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS.org) to get the original case documents.
Yes, we need to punish people trying to bring systemic wrongdoing to light, and protect poor innocents like Ollie North from the consequences of their choices. /s
<i>it didn’t have to be a problem if everyone was a good team player.</i><p>The eternal line that makes law inefficient, and "government secrets" or "spy agencies" utterly untenable.
The larger lesson of stories like this is that trying to fight the system is mostly not worth it. Even if you in the end "win", it will have been at the cost of your career and life savings. And if you lose, you're in prison for a long time.<p>If you uncover something that seems very wrong, you are probably safe pushing back a little and making the matter known to your superiors. But if that isn't working, the best course of action is to get out. It won't stop the crap from happening, but you did all you could do without taking some very big personal risks, and at least the blood won't be on your hands.