Jane Mayer has another blockbuster story on the origins of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, revealing that the NSA had a program in development called ThinThread that would have done more to protect Americans' rights but nixed it because -- well, because they could. As with torture, one comes away with the disturbing conclusion that the secret to getting away with breaking the law is to have enough high-level government officials involved so as to make investigations politically inconvenient.
Perhaps the more disturbing issue, though, is the zeal with which the administration has gone after government employees who leaked evidence of government officials breaking the law. After all, high-level officials leak secrets all the time -- just take a look at the deluge of information coming out of the raid on Osama bin Laden's former compound in Abbottabad.
The issue here is that the government is trying to dissuade further leaks, even those that can be clearly described as whistle-blowing. Mayer's narrative is framed around the case of Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who helped design the ThinThread program and spoke to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun about the waste involved in producing Trailblazer, the alternate surveillance program that lacked similar civil-liberties protections. He's now being prosecuted under the Espionage Act, as though he were a traitor and a foreign spy.
Now, some in Mayer's article don't see Drake as an objective source because he may have been angry about his own program not being used. But that's actually sort of irrelevant -- the information he leaked was in the public interest, the case against him is rather thin, and the larger objective is clearly to discourage "good" leaks as well as "bad" ones.
Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, attended the meeting, and said that Obama’s tone was generally supportive of transparency. But when the subject of national-security leaks came up, Brian said, “the President shifted in his seat and leaned forward. He said this may be where we have some differences. He said he doesn’t want to protect the people who leak to the media war plans that could impact the troops.” Though Brian was impressed with Obama’s over-all stance on transparency, she felt that he might be misinformed about some of the current leak cases. She warned Obama that prosecuting whistle-blowers would undermine his legacy. Brian had been told by the White House to avoid any “ask”s on specific issues, but she told the President that, according to his own logic, Drake was exactly the kind of whistle-blower who deserved protection.
My feeling is that the sort of blanket leaking of information of which Bradley Manning is accused shouldn't be protected, but the prosecution of Drake and others shows the administration isn't being as discerning as Obama suggested it should be. The irony is that these aggressive prosecutions of whistle-blowers are part of what makes the emergence of third-party organizations like WikiLeaks, which can act as avenues for leaks while protecting their sources, inevitable.
Does anyone think that the larger issue here -- the existence of a government surveillance program violating Americans' individual rights -- is a smaller deal than the leaks that lead to it? One would assume from the pattern of prosecutions that the big issue when the government breaks the law is that the public might find out about it. While I'm aware that some government functions require secrecy, the ultimate goal of prosecuting whistle-blowers is to ensure that the next time the government secretly breaks the law, we just won't know.
