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
So it's quite a story in itself.
It unfolds over a number of years.
So I went through every whistleblower channel that existed.
My final act of whistleblowing NSA, interestingly enough, was actually with the then NSA director, Keith Alexander.
He was the follow-on to the previous director, Michael V. Hayden, who had come on in 99.
So Alexander shows up in late summer of 2005.
And it was massive blowback.
I ended up losing my job.
I was basically what they call laterally arabesque in the bureaucracy.
The message was clearly, you know, the handwriting was on the wall, as it were.
And I made a fateful decision, though.
In late February of 2006...
after having exhausted every whistleblower channel that existed, I exercised my First Amendment rights, redress their grievances against my own government,
even though they're restricted in the government because, again, because of the agency that I worked in, which is highly classified, involving a lot of secrets, but it does not prevent you.
You still can go to the press.
In this case, I went to the press with unclassified information, but I knew there was a risk, just like what happened at Ellsberg.
But in this case, it was unclassified.
I actually did go to the press and
with what I knew regarding not just the warrantless surveillance program, but also just the fact that there was an alternative program called ThinThread, the fact that there was 9-11 intelligence failures and a massive coverup, and then just billions and billions in waste, fraud, and abuse.
And so in December, and here's the short version, okay, in December of 2005,
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