Thomas Drake
speaker
874 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Thomas Drake’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what it began doing was sweeping up, or in partnership with certain telecommunication concerns and others, sweeping up vast...
volumes of American phone calls, text messages, emails, and it just grew by leaps and bounds from there.
Of course, Congress, I mean, this is history, but Congress realizing, you know, wait a minute, this whole intelligence apparatus that had been put into place, you know, in the years after World War II was supposed to keep us from any electronic surprise, right, a la Pearl Harbor.
And here it utterly failed, despite all the indications, despite all the warnings.
So I began to blow the whistle, and I also became a material witness for several investigations, two congressional 9-11 investigations, and also a DOD inspector general investigation.
And I recognize going back, because these are all the channels that are available to one is a whistleblower.
If you see something, say something, to use that phrase in a different context, I'm seeing my own government.
The problem is that the whistleblower channels are monitored and controlled by secret power.
or influenced by secret power.
And the last thing you're going to do, especially when the decision to turn NSA's enormous power on its own country,
there's no way you're going to be able to blow the whistle and not get blowback.
And I certainly began to receive significant retaliation, retribution for even having cooperated with these investigations, even though, like with Congress, I was subpoenaed.
I remember going down to
This was during the joint inquiry where I went down to a nondescript building that they had turned into a skiff, and there I am saying I'm going to speak nothing but the truth, right?
I was subpoenaed.
Yeah, I had rights as a whistleblower, but there's no remedy if they decide to violate that, then what is it?
It's a paper tiger.
So I was at great risk early on.
I mean, we're talking right after 9-11, I was already marked as someone they couldn't control.
In fact, during the time I was cooperating with the initial 9-11 investigation,
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