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
Remember, I was at the epigenesis of the mass surveillance regime post 9-11.
Yeah, you were there as it was beginning, really in earnest.
The foundation of it, but it quickly expanded.
But by the time we get to Snowden, and this is even several years after I was indicted, you're talking now three years after I was indicted,
ostensibly because I had revealed the secret surveillance program to the New York Times.
That was the original basis.
If you go back to the affidavit, which I was not able to get during the course of my pretrial proceedings, interestingly enough, the government covered that up, even though they had been ordered by the court to release it in the public interest.
They realized that it was going to expose how they had framed me.
So they did all kinds of shenanigans not to give it to my own public defenders.
So almost three years later, we have now the Snow disclosures.
I had always hoped someone like Snow would come along.
Why?
To reveal, obviously at great risk, the full metastasization of the mass surveillance regime that had been put into place post 9-11.
Some call it soft tyranny, that the mechanism by which you have turnkey tyranny, as others have shared, or sort of something like inverted democracy, where, see, this gets into sort of the heart and core of power and control.
um henry kissinger actually had something to say about that um he said power was the greatest aphrodisiac and probably said more about kissinger than anything else but also had something to say about power it's incredibly seductive to hold power of any kind direct or indirect over another human being and we have too many examples in terms of the sad litany of human history across the millennia um example after example after example um
And so, yeah, are you really truly free?
Are you?
See, this is now what I call privacy, meaning what's happened, and this is the perversion, really, is the data commoditization, as I call it, and it's something I confronted, and I was a technologist for a number of years.
I did a lot of consulting in Silicon Valley.
But after I went free, or I should say stayed free, right,
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