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 was happening is these companies would just turn over the data, literally provide the data directly to NSA.
In other cases, NSA was instrumenting international, like where the hubs, where the...
talking both wired and wireless, but primarily wired at the time, where they would actually put, this came out later with an AT&T whistleblower, who he passed away here recently, out in San Francisco, where they were actually, they were using an optical splitter.
And so what was happening is, this is fiber optics, they actually had a separate
fiber optic that would, when it came in from overseas, it would split off so they could collect it later.
And it didn't matter that it was the fact that here's a US end to the communications.
We're just going to take it all because, you know, again, we just need it all.
That was again, the mantra was just take it all.
That's just a couple of examples of,
Cell towers, which obviously because cell technology was becoming increasingly well, yeah, all those cell towers have records of calls being made, being transferred back and forth because in order for a cell phone to make a call, unless you're using satellite, which is another version of that, you can, if you have access through the owner of the cell tower, in this case, the provider of record, which would be a telephone company,
They just turn over the records.
And so you began this just that, and it became easy.
Remember, it's the digital age.
So it became very easy to just simply collect the data.
Well, that's the real bugaboo.
As I well know, I remember, and this gets back to my technical background, because I was, again, you know, I was a cryptolinguist, but I was also an intelligence analyst.
So it's one thing to collect data.
It's one thing to listen in on it.
It's another thing to store it.
It's a whole other thing to make sense of it.
Showing 261–280 of 874 · page 14 of 44
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