FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

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dennis
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FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

Post by dennis »

Thomas Drake: NSA Whistleblower
Sign the Petition to Stop the Retaliatory Prosecution of Thomas Drake,
NSA Whistleblower and American Hero A MODERN DAY HELMUTH HUBENER
This is happening right now , TODAY. Here is an example of a freedom fighter like our own Steven Jones being prosecuted, persecuted, his life ruined, for speaking out against the government spys, AND the gov. contractors that enable the spying like Science Applications International Corp, This company is worse than Haliburton. this is the HEART OF THE SECRET SURVEILLANCE CARRIED ON AGAINST FREEDOM LOVING PEOPLE.
Thomas Drake is a former National Security Agency NSA employee who is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act for retaining, not leaking, classified information in conjunction with a series of news articles that revealed gross mismanagement and terrible waste in the agency.

Thomas Drake is also a patriot. And he’s basically being accused of trying to make his country safer.

Drake is no spy. And the charges against him don’t begin to approach any sort of feasible argument that he is one. But that’s not stopping the Obama administration from charging him under the Espionage Act. Instead of reporting American secrets to an enemy of the state, Drake simply was appalled to see hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars wasted, and the civil liberties of countless American citizens ignored. Just like any patriot would.

According to news reports, during Drake’s work with the NSA, he became familiar with ThinThread – a data collection program that could sift through massive amounts of public data for patterns useful to analysts. But then, after 9/11, the agency moved to switch to a data collection program called Trailblazer – which was more expensive, less effective, and raised concerns about privacy violations. Drake or other concerned staffers turned to senior agency officials, the Defense Department's inspector general, and Congress. Nothing changed. (For more on the background of the case, click on the articles below. Here is one from the Washington Post.)

The system didn’t work for Drake. And it often doesn’t work for national security whistleblowers. Without adequate internal disclosure channels, intelligence whistleblowers are faced with an impossible choice – either risk their careers by making unprotected internal disclosures, or remain silent about horrible problems such as gross waste, privacy violations, or even lapses in national security.

Drake protected the American people from waste and abuse at the hands of their government. It’s time for us to protect him.
This is something we can do more than just talk and post news.
Here’s what you can do:

• Contact President Obama and Attorney General Holder by signing the petition here, urging them to end this senseless retaliatory campaign.

• “Like” the Save Tom Drake Facebook page.

• Call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 and the Office of the Attorney General public comment line at 202-353-1555 and demand charges again Drake be dropped.

GAP has taken an interest in this case because the charging of Thomas Drake is not only an affront to justice, but also a reprehensible “warning shot” to intelligence whistleblowers everywhere. We cannot allow this to stand.
http://www.whistleblower.org/action-cen ... -tom-drake
In essence this is about Drake exposing the secret surveilance and fraud by NSA AND SAIC. AND PROTECTING FREEDOM OF PRIVACY . ONE OF THE IMPORTANT AND LAST FREEDOM LEFT. AND THEN GETTING PROSECUTED FOR IT.
Last edited by dennis on December 10th, 2010, 10:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

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dennis
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Re: FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

Post by dennis »

What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ
BY Glenn Greenwald
Bush's decision to use the NSA to spy domestically on American citizens was one of the most significant stories of this generation. It was long recognized that turning the NSA inward was one of the greatest dangers to freedom, as Sen. Frank Church warned back in 1975, after he investigated America's secret surveillance apparatus: "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left.
The more I think and read about the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the more I think this might actually be one of the worst steps the Obama administration has taken yet, if not the single worst step -- and that's obviously saying a lot. During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush's term (though several were threatened). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake. Aside from the indefensible fact that only crimes committed by high-level Bush officials -- but nobody else -- enjoy the benefits of Obama's "Look Forward, Not Backward" decree, think about the interests being served by this prosecution. Most discussions yesterday suggested that Drake's leaks to The Baltimore Sun's Sibohan Gorman were about waste and mismanagement in the "Trailblazer" project rather than controversial NSA spying activities, but that's not entirely accurate.

Just consider this May 18, 2006, article by Gorman, describing how and why the NSA opted for the "Trailblazer" proposal over the privacy-protecting "Thin Thread" program, in the process discarding key privacy protections designed to ensure that the NSA would not eavesdrop on the domestic calls of U.S. citizens (h/t ondelette). In that article -- which really should be read to get a sense for the whistle-blowing that is being punished by the DOJ -- Gorman described at length how then-NSA head Michael Hayden rejected technologies that could "rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy" and "that monitored potential abuse of the records." As she put it: "Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records -- an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection -- agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it."

It's not hyperbole to say that Bush's decision to use the NSA to spy domestically on American citizens was one of the most significant stories of this generation. It was long recognized that turning the NSA inward was one of the greatest dangers to freedom, as Sen. Frank Church warned back in 1975, after he investigated America's secret surveillance apparatus: "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." It was, of course, the December 16, 2005, New York Times article by Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau which first disclosed that the Bush NSA was illegally eavesdropping on American citizens inside the U.S., but Gorman's articles regarding the Trailblazer program -- in the time period covered by the indictment, using NSA sources (almost certainly including Drake) -- provided crucial details about how and why the Bush NSA dispensed with key safeguards to protect innocent Americans from such invasive domestic surveillance.

And then there's the massive fraud and waste which Gorman also exposed as a result of Drake's whistle-blowing. The primary focus of her stories was that the Trailblazer project turned into a massive, billion-dollar "boondoggle" which vastly exceeded its original estimates, sucked up enormous amounts of the post-9/11 intelligence budget explosion, and produced very little of value. But look at the coalition of corporations which was contracted to develop this Trailblazer project, the familiar cast of Surveillance State interests who were the recipients of the "boondoggle" which Gorman and Drake exposed:


Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) today announced a contract award from the National Security Agency to be the provider of the technology demonstration platform phase of the TRAILBLAZER program.

The TDP phase of the TRAILBLAZER program is currently estimated at $280 million and will be performed over a period of 26 months.



The NSA selected the SAIC-led Digital Network Intelligence Enterprise team that includes Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, The Boeing Company, Computer Sciences Corporation and SAIC wholly-owned subsidiary Telcordia Technologies to contribute to the modernization of the NSA's signals intelligence capabilities.


SAIC itself is, by its own description, an enormous defense contractor devoted to "customers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, other U.S. Government civil agencies and selected commercial markets." Just like its Trailblazer partners -- Boeing, Booz Allen and Northrop Grumman -- SAIC feeds off the massive Pentagon and intelligence budgets. In other words, Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private intelligence and defense industry that has all but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises more power, by far, than any single faction in the country.

Think about to whose interests the Obama DOJ is devoted given that -- while they protect the most profound Bush crimes based on the Presidential decree of "Look Forward, Not Backward" -- they chose this whistle-blower to prosecute (and Drake, incidentally, is apparently impoverished, as he's been assigned a Public Defender to represent him). In the process, of course, the Obama DOJ also intimidates and deters future whistle-blowers from exposing what they know, thus further suffocating one of the very few remaining mechanisms Americans have to learn about what takes place behind the virtually impenetrable Wall of Secrecy surrounding the Surveillance State -- a Wall of Secrecy which the Obama administration, through its promiscuous use of "state secrets" and immunity claims, has relentlessly fortified and expanded. Anyone who doubts that whistle-blower prosecutions like this are intended to prevent any further disclosures of wrongdoing should simply review the 2008 Pentagon report which identified WikiLeaks as a major threat to the U.S. and proposed that exposure and prosecution of their sources would crush their ability to obtain further leaks
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... osecutions

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Jason
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Re: FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

Post by Jason »

SAIC actually developed an algorithm to analyze funded grant submissions for key words which were then inserted in future grant applications. When I was heavily researching them in 2005 - 1 in 5 employees had a top secret security clearance. And they had more former top brass military officials than any other company.

Mostly fly low out of the media spotlight.

SaveTomDrake
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Re: FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

Post by SaveTomDrake »

Thank you, Dennis, for your support and advocacy of Thomas Drake.

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dennis
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Re: FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

Post by dennis »

Thomas Drake is a whistleblower, a former senior official with the National Security Agency (NSA) who exposed the fact that the agency was illegally spying on millions of Americans with a budget-busting data-mining program that was ultimately shut down. He embodies everything about the principles of “transparency” and “open government” in which the president claims to believe. So why then is the Obama administration threatening to put him in jail for the rest of his life?

By any measure, what Drake did was a public service, providing the kind of check an agency with a classified budget undoubtedly needs from time to time. From 2006 to 2007, he reportedly provided information to a journalist with the Baltimore Sun showing that the agency was wasting millions of dollars in taxpayer money on a massively over-budget initiative that also happened to be facilitating widespread violations of Americans’ constitutional rights.

But in Washington, medals are reserved for incompetent FEMA directors and war criminals; doing the right thing is a tried-and-true ticket to early retirement and maybe even a prison term. And sure enough, in April 2010 Drake’s whistle-blowing was rewarded with an indictment under the Espionage Act by Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department (DOJ). Treated as if he were some Cold War era spy, Drake faces 35 years in prison.

“It sends a very chilling message that, not only are you committing career suicide if you blow the whistle, which had always been the case in the past, but now you face spending the rest of your natural life in jail,” Jesselyn Radack, a former DOJ lawyer turned whistleblower, says in an interview. Now with the whistleblowing group Government Accountability Project, Radack resigned from the Justice Department after officials retaliated against her for exposing gross ethical violations in their treatment of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

Specifically, Drake stands accused of retaining classified information about an initiative called “Trailblazer,” a $1.2 billion data-mining program launched in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks that was ultimately shut down after a scathing report from the NSA’s Inspector General and revelations that it collected millions of innocent Americans’ phone calls. Drake had been a proponent of a rival program, “ThinThread,” that cost one-tenth the money and would have anonymized the data it collected, providing a much greater safeguard against abuse. But then the NSA has never much cared for privacy -- except its own -- and the opinions of Drake and former top agency officials were ignored.

"He tried to have his concerns heard and nobody really wanted to listen," Nina Ginsberg, an attorney for a congressional staffer who shared Drake’s concerns, told the Washington Post.

Now, after already being forced out of the NSA, Drake must prepare for a trial early next year. And Radack says that has a lot more to do with politics than justice. "This is to send a message, and the message clearly is to shut up -- to keep quiet.” But what about President Obama’s pledge that his administration would usher in an “unprecedented level of openness in government”? Good question: less than half-way through his first term, Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for leaking information to the press than any other president in U.S. history.

And the indictment of Drake can’t be blamed on DOJ holdovers from the Bush administration.

“This is completely Obama’s decision,” says Raddack. “He didn’t have to do that. And it’s rather odd he chose to do so in light of his willingness to completely give a pass to the people who committed far more real and serious crimes under the Bush administration.”

“They could have let it die on the vine,” she adds, “but instead, strangely, the Obama administration -- whose edict is to look forward and not backwards at the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed through torture and warrantless wiretapping -- decided to look backwards.”

Perhaps stranger still is that the prosecution of Drake is being handled by William Welch, the same DOJ prosecutor currently under criminal investigation for allegedly witholding evidence during the botched trial of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. That's justice in the age of Obama -- the hero gets a prison term while the crook gets a pension.

In a more just world, though, the president would be lauding Drake as the type of person the government needs to provide the sort of transparency and accountability he loves to talk about on the campaign trail. At the very least, the administration should spare him the indignity of a criminal prosecution.

Join Change.org and the Government Accountability Project in calling on President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to immediately drop the prosecution of Thomas Drake.

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dennis
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Re: FREEDOM FIGHTER, PATRIOT NEEDS HELP!!!

Post by dennis »

We should continue to come to the aid of patriots, programs and organizations which are trying to save our Constitution through every legal and moral means possible.
(Ezra Taft Benson. Be Not Deceived. General Conference, October, 1963.)
Anyone else willing to come to the aid of Tom Drake?
The governments # 1 target are the patriots. Once the patriots are gone the NWO has won. what happens to one can happen to any and all. If Drake knew that his sacrifice wasnt in vain, that people were behind him and on his side , it would make a big difference.
"Non-violence is the constant awareness of the dignity and humanity of oneself and others; it seeks truth and justice; it renounces violence both in method and in attitude; it is a courageous acceptance of active love and goodwill as the instrument with which to overcome evil and transform both oneself and others. It is the willingness to undergo suffering rather than inflict it. It excludes retaliation and flight."

-- Wally Nelson,

Strange we are willing to argue back and forth for months on end about seemingly unimportant trivia or someones speculative idea and not even willing to lift a finger to support a true modern day sacrificial martyr Steve Jones can verify how important support from others can be in our real war on the real terrorists. That other Bush war is based on a lie,fake, and unconstitutional. How many people on this forum for voted for Bush TWICE! and his side kick cheney the weesel TWICE

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