10
Jun 11Rule of law.
To say the case against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake just collapsed would imply there was ever a case to be made in the first place.
A bit of backstory, which reads almost exactly like “stop snitching,” from this excellent NYer piece:
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.
The whole article reveals the infuriating and chilling1 behavior of the NSA and Obama administration. Drake, for what it’s worth, charitably thinks Obama got rolled by the spooks:
“I actually had hopes for Obama,” he said. He had not only expected the President to roll back the prosecutions launched by the Bush Administration; he had thought that Bush Administration officials would be investigated for overstepping the law in the “war on terror.”
“But power is incredibly destructive,” Drake said. “It’s a weird, pathological thing. I also think the intelligence community coöpted Obama, because he’s rather naïve about national security.”
- If you recall, the NSA’s illegal activities were apparently sanctioned by the Supreme Court. ↩
Tagged: civil liberty, never trust the cops, news, politics