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
I ended up becoming a senior executive at the NSA, and my first day on the job was 9-11.
Still a rather dramatic event, not just in my life, but people that were at least old enough to remember.
There's sort of life before 9-11, and then there's life after 9-11.
That certainly is a date.
I was 44 years of age at the time.
It's hard to believe it's 25 years ago almost.
And very quickly after 9-11, the government decided that it just needed to start because of the failure to keep 3,000 people, almost 3,000 people who were murdered that day, despite all the warnings, despite all the intelligence.
And that's a whole story in itself.
And despite the fact that there was means by which you could have both, you did not have to sacrifice liberty for security, you didn't have to sacrifice security for liberty, something that Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that some years ago.
Because you might lose both, right, if you try to sacrifice either.
You can actually have both.
It's not an either-or case.
It's not one of those cases where you have to draw a line.
But what happened after 9-11 really became the foundation for my whistleblowing at NSA.
Because what happened is they decided in the deepest of secrecy, and we're talking about one of the deepest deep state secrets of all time, it was even deeper than the torture program, enhanced interrogation techniques, haha, euphemism, again, Orwellian language.
They decided to engage in what they refer to as bulk collection.
That's their euphemism, Orwellian language,
rather than call it mass surveillance, because that has a different, I mean, it has a much starker meaning, decide to start collecting massive amounts of data without any warrants on Americans.
And I was confronted within just weeks of 9-11.
It was my moment of truth.
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