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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But even George Tenet, at the time the director of Central Intelligence, the director of the CIA, he knew the system was blinking red.
He had sent out a memo three years prior to 9-11 saying,
with that exact phrase.
I remember reading the memo when I was a contractor at NSA, but it was all like blown off.
No one really, it's like, who cares?
In very stark terms, that equipment was being placed on U.S.
networks for the purpose of
blanket surveillance.
By the NSA?
By the NSA and in partnership and in cooperation with telecommunication concerns, but incredibly compartmented level secret.
We're talking in terms of classification levels with
some of the key phone companies and others in the United States.
And that just kept growing over the years.
So there was the actual evidence of them placing or instrumenting U.S.
networks for the purpose of blanket surveillance.
They were, well, this program began primarily, I mentioned earlier, with phone calls, text messages, emails, and then internet, you know, basic internet usage, but on a vast level.
And the intent was, wherever the data was, this became the mantra.
We just need to get the data.
We just need to collect it.
That became the obsession.
Showing 221–240 of 874 · page 12 of 44
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