both men are whistleblowers who have revealed startling new information on the national security agency's use of domestic spying programs american citizens what was once the type of story reserved only for spy thriller movies suddenly become reality here in the united states and now our conversations with great minds with thomas drake and kirk we've. heard that i had conversations with great minds i'm joined by n.s.a. whistleblowers thomas drake and kirk we both men were involved in exposing the n.s.a.'s massive arguably illegal domestic spying program known as the trailblazer project initiated in two thousand spite not leaking any classified information and exhaustedly going through all the protocols required for members of the intelligence community to blow the whistle on wrongdoing both men face serious retributions for going public with what they knew about the n.s.a. surveillance program in two thousand and seven after

a reporter for the baltimore sun jane information regarding waste fraud abuse the n.s.a. f.b.i. agents raided the home of kirk wiebe confiscating computer hard drives and business records and revoking the security security clearance for and that's a veteran that he had held since one thousand nine hundred sixty four we be it was not charged with any crime however thomas drake whose home was also rated was charged with multiple crimes including violation of the espionage act of one nine hundred seventeen eventually all those charges were dropped in two thousand and eleven since then drake has gone on to win multiple awards for his courage and blowing the whistle on the n.s.a. including the right in our prize for truth telling and the sam adams associates for integrity in intelligence and both he and kirk wiebe done tremendous work to inform all of us about the growing american surveillance state thomas drake we will john thank you for being with me tonight thank you ever since the first of all i'd like to talk about you. as

a little bit if it's all right here thomas was back into the n.s.a. did you. know i was working in the industry and i was also a contractor at n.s.a. and i answered an ad in the washington post from february of two thousand and one and long story short it was an outside hiring program and i went through a whole process of being interviewed and was all to be offered a position as a senior executive at my first day on the job was nine eleven wow. that had to be a radical change in protocols but kirk you were there before nine eleven yes i was how did you get into the n.s.a. and what was your experience of what happened i wouldn't into the military right out of high school. was ready to sit down and study all that much yet and ended up in the united states air force curity service which is the air force is equivalent to n.s.a. or was back in those days it's called something different today but i enjoyed that

work i got out about for our four years later after serving in turkey in japan and went into the sales business for about four years but it's you get my cross was intelligence i wanted to return to it. so i went to school got a degree in russian. and then applied to the national security agency and they were only too happy to have media apply and then nine eleven happened you were just starting you were there already there what happened on nine eleven that changed the culture at the n.s.a. and or or did did that change the culture at the n.s.a. this would be the bigger question yeah it did that morning when the first plane struck i was on my way into work i was coming in a bit late it was on the baltimore beltway beautiful day if you remember and at first i thought it was an accident but as soon as the second one hit i knew something was up got to work went inside everybody had you know the media on

watching the reports. we were all anxious sad and puzzled. mixed emotions were rampant and then we were told that another plane was missing it was flight ninety three and we were told to evacuate the building and we all did except for essential operations personnel that's how begin and thomas you've you've noted that there was that this change with nine eleven or correct me if i'm wrong of the change that came along with nine eleven in some ways led the agency to do things that were worthy of having the whistle blown up that is fair to say that nine eleven i mean not only do i remember it will always remember it we all remember what we were doing on nine eleven but it is accurate to say that nine eleven was a seismic shift in how n.s.a. as well as the larger government chose to regard that the law of the land which is

the constitution and legal regimes that have been carefully put put put into place since the seventy's particularly the foreign intelligence surveillance act as well as others church by committee lots of abuses a place in the sixty's and seventy's a lead to two standing intelligence committees right oversight for the secrets out of government were essentially abandoned just thrown overboard. the i think was in two thousand and four was when john ashcroft was in the hospital. i believe there is what is known as one of the famous bedside yeah right to get and sign and alberto gonzales and andrew card the chief of staff to george w. bush owed up to try to i guess they were trying to get around james called me who was the acting attorney general who had decided that a program that the n.s.a. was doing was illegal and it had to be reauthorized every forty five days do i have this right according to published reports yes it was a super secret program is that is that part of the program that occurred that you

guys were blowing the whistle on as a part of the spectrum of programs this there's two aspects to it one is the law right what you can and cannot do the other one is the technology. n.s.a. was behind the curve when it came to the information age prenup pre nine eleven there was some very innovative small things going on making actual breakthroughs that were later ignored by management at that place at that agency but the director at the time michael hayden. prompted largely by nine eleven in terms of speed decided that we needed to have industry come in big time and solve the problems of in a say regarding the digital age and it was all about networked communications that was the target if you will how to deal with. the fundamental decisions made to buy

the solution not make it an essay historically had been a center of innovation at the forefront of the computer technology going back to the fifty's and this particular case yes they had show they chose to go out to the defense industry very large defense contractors and by the solution rather than take full advantage of the incredible innovation judy was actually produce within n.s.a. and as they had faced a critical challenge during the ninety's and it was certainly compound by nine eleven and nine eleven the country had failed government had failed to provide for the protection of the country under the constitution and so the work force took a really hard management shows most a man shows remain in denial about that failure about the failure and then used it as a trigger event recognizing the fear and the concern and oh my gosh you know where's the threat sure there's a target going to abandon the carefully prescribe laws have been put into place in

that in the. decade or the eight years of the bush administration and to some extent the last couple years the clinton ministration but mostly the bush administration it seems that there was a really aggressive effort at many levels of government to simply outsource things to turn government functions into profit centers typically for politically connected people from both parties but you know to outsource things is that when you're talking about that's certainly a huge part of this and it's one of the big elephants in the room it's something that's not always talked about is you remember if you're a defense contractor you know your allegiance to shareholders and there's certainly a profit margin which that you want to want to make and although there are. many many contractors in the government they're doing the right thing nine eleven was regarded by many of the largest defense contractors as an opportunity make significant amounts of money and congress was all congress obliged and very large checks were being written i was there seeing billions and billions of extra dollars

being poured in a say it's amazing when you consider the during world war two senator harry truman actually church a committee to look for war profiteers and prosecute them and franklin roosevelt said there will not be one war millionaire as the result of the current troubles and this is kind of the opposite many million many many millionaires were made but nine eleven by nine eleven that's it's i give people who do know it's the capitalist system the free enterprise that's not there but in my taking advantage of such an egregious act it was committed against this country i heard from senior officials and i say including the very person i reported to that nine eleven was a gift to n.s.a. you know well you would think you know that the military and intelligence committee woods at at it at a not necessarily evil level or whatever the word is dysfunctional level would say ok people are going to our pants mention of what we're doing we do important stuff this this is important but to see it as a profit opportunity that seems like

a bridge too far but that is that's the critical decisions are being made by the corporation and all those solutions even though george tenet at the time the head of the cia and and the d.c.i. the director of central intelligence the call had gone out to put the very best you have into the fight i did matter where it was in the lab it was prototyped even it was an operational let's put into the fight one of my responsibilities after nine eleven i was actually charged with finding those solutions what makes a sort of sense that yes so how did it go wrong. well that's part of the untold the greater untold story history of n.s.a. what went wrong. could have been one of the tragic really the tragic side of all this is what could have been it's one of the things i continue to live with more than a decade later and you know to the extent you can talk about that what could have been well deliberate decisions were made to ignore discount and push to sunder critical critical technology including a program called thin thread

a breakthrough. engineering solution a breakthrough program that now provided superior intelligence had solved the challenge problem one thousand sets i make sense of the large amounts of data in real time and thin thread was something that you were working on as walker i was a member of a small team of people along with bill bennett another n.s.a. whistleblower and had me in a small research center there were about a dozen of us including contractors a small number of contractors looking for ways to deal with the mass of data that the information age brought to the equation and we failed at something but we also learned some things that made some big breakthroughs in fact the deputy director of n.s.a. came down to see what we had done. he responded this way my god you can make huge breakthrough why are you being so quiet about. we never heard from

him again. or will continue this conversation just a moment more conversations with an essay whistleblowers occurred with me and tom straight coming up after the break. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big

picture. into it only a military mechanisms to do the work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government's doing you want to know why i pay taxes. but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. conversations

with great minds tonight i'm speaking with n.s.a. whistleblowers kirk we and thomas drake two men who were involved in exposing the n.s.a.'s illegal surveillance program known as the trail blazer project let's get back to it. thomas you were you were pointing out that there were illegal dimensions to this program that were unnecessary what were they why how did they come about and why were they on this short to my horror i discovered that is a band in a twenty three year legal regime called the foreign intelligence surveillance act they completely bypass dropped it overboard a and act was passed in one thousand

nine hundred seventy eight largely because of the massive abuse even in the seventy's against americans in violation of the constitution so i discovered to my horror. that is a and was now an entirely different vehicle that i did not recognize post nine eleven with the excuse of nine eleven found out that this program called stellar wind had been directly authorized by the white house and fact i remember talking with attorneys because of my concerns about the program he said it's all been approved it's legal so while i don't ask any more questions so what was still turning the united states of america without any controls well any kind of operating. for a nation for the purposes of blanket dragnet electron. surveillance against u.s. persons would be total violation of the fourth amendment and in complete violation of the standing statute which is supposed to be the exclusive means by which you would conduct such alectryon surveillance and and what did you do when you learned

i blew the whistle internally and i had a couple months later i began to became a material witness for the first of several nine eleven congressional destinations and then i became a metro it is for the joint inquiry which took place in the summer of two thousand and two reported all of this right and then this led to what happened to you well ultimately there was a duty and specter general audit of the trailblazer the entire program and ultimately two thousand and five the new york times article was out from eric lichtblau and james rise and revealing public you for the first time the existence of this so-called. terrorist surveillance program or it was wiretapping program which is just the tip of the iceberg right where you were arrested and taken but was not it was a story short there was a major criminal master investigation launched by the do j. in late december two thousand and five ultimately i got caught up in that investigation by virtue of association with with other other people who had knowledge of the program and knowledge of synthroid. and this we have

a photo of the stellar stellar wind center in utah this is believe this is it right here. your thoughts on this and what happened what was your take on this at the time and what happened to you as a convoy and i found out about this facility right. now this is this facility is operating right now no ok it's being built it's going to fill currently under under construction and i believe it will be ready in twenty thirty next year this is the giant. vacuum cleaner for data inside the united states as well as outside well it's not clear precisely what the purpose of the center. is because it's veiled it extreme secrecy. our friend bill binney who's a mathematician and fellow whistleblower. put it this way the other night we were talking about we needed a simple metaphor to talk about this facility not exabytes and. things that people

don't understand and he came up with with a statement that it could roughly hold one hundred years. of the global communications. one hundred years worth well let's say it's only fifty years but it gives you an idea of the staggering capability even when your local community sentences is across the waking while i was still at n.s.a. this was well underway in the planning stages now made clear several years ago they wanted to build this this is very kind of sure. i think that we can all agree that there's a strong case to be made for knowing what's you know if there are external threats or for that matter internal threats. yeah absolutely and although internal threats historically were the province of the f.b.i. and the cia n.s.a. were charged with extra threats. one did the one to the n.s.a.

start looking inside you know this is what you just you just described this is nine eleven was was the event it was pretty quick pretty quickly within a month month and a half after nine eleven. is what i'm told it began. and you have to understand and i say it was already in a bad position with regard to network communications it was in a weak position so it then did not have the capability to monitor all the world's communications and that's going to take a while to get to it's going to take some growth and learning but certainly that facility will be able to store the communications for when that moment comes in and presumably process them. back to what extent is that facility an in-house project versus external contractors we were talking earlier about how nine eleven became you know an opportunity to make billions and

a small number of people who come multi multi millionaires is that is that facility still traveling down the road or has the n.s.a. pulled back and said we're going to you know i don't know it's far as i know and remember i'm not there any long. but from what i can gauge they are still pursuing very close and even closer relations ships with the business community so they're getting a lot of help from the outside you've said at the at that during this period of time after nine eleven and before you left the n.s.a. . there were communications from superiors indicating this was a good idea to bring in outside contractors yes help people make money there had been a study a number of years ago by some former n.s.a. seniors that seem to worry and legitimately so that n.s.a. ability to innovate internally. had waned and that it was perhaps now

time to go on the outside and bring in the expertise of those who were actually building the internet making it robust and so forth and so on now unfortunately. that became a form of this called outsourcing they took the pill ignored everything going on inside. and let industry have at it and at its first attempt was trailblazer it failed on a large huge scale general hayden i remember i was doing a radio show for nine years i remember when he said this went off on him for some time on the air. he didn't he didn't know what the what the contents of the for fourth amendment was you know he didn't understand the difference between you know somebody swearing an oath that a crime was weak and probable cause and. what. what happened

to with regard to the fourth amendment was there was there it was there a general sense within the n.s.a. that we have to operate within the boundaries of the constitution or did nine eleven did cause people to say you know the ends justify the means we need to be safe yes. we happened. and it was totally unnecessary. it was well within technologies capability at the time to encrypt or safeguard the identities of american citizens then as it is right now and yet we have no fourth amendment protections built into any of the recent legislation granting the u.s. government unbridled capability to grab people's data whether it be for intelligence purposes or for cyber security on the one. and there are those who say well you know if you're not doing anything wrong why do you care

if somebody's snooping on you on the other hand you have some of the founders of this country talking about the need for anonymity in fact they publish things under the names like rustic us in order to be able to operate in a way that was consistent with small democracy in a small are. is that debate even being held anymore thomas is that within the n.s.a. where there is an artificial canard there really it is that it's and it's also a false dichotomy that somehow we have to trade off our liberty for the sake of security right we have to go back to franklin quote yes so is it possible to unring that bell well you know frank church him self warned the country as a result of what he found out about the massive abuse during the sixty's and seventy's that if the technology advanced to a stage where essentially you could surveil everybody or have they kept tab past that he to surveil everybody would you be able to pull it back and so the open

question really is. why should we trust n.s.a. in the twenty first century any more than we. ended up finding out how much you have to distrust n.s.a. during the sixty's and seventy's. there's there's very few people who have not in some way at some time in their lives committed some crime and one of the ways that really genuinely tyrannical regimes operate the north korean regime for example is they will make all kinds of things illegal you know it's illegal to travel outside of your town without permission and then they don't provide any means to get the permission so basically everybody in the country is a criminal and the government knows about it and then they selectively pull that out of the hat when somebody pops up and they want to slap them down is are we moving in that direction. in my estimation we are we're headed towards a police state how many times have tom and i and bill talking about this it sounds like they're stoppel it sounds like. of the east german. operation

we are moving in that direction people are trashing the constitution they've lost their respect for expediency is the call of the day let's make everyone happy i wrote my congressman congressman roscoe bartlett about this issue of privacy and legislation and what was the thing that gave him confidence that this power would not be abused he said it's based on good faith. well now there were people i mean call me and ashcroft apparently who want to push back on that we have just a minute left either of you are there are people in this administration in the government right now pushing back or is as it just all been thrown over the overboard well i would tell you that right now my personal hero in this fight is senator ron wyden of oregon. and just recently he and

eleven other senators signed the letter and sent it to the director of national intelligence asking that this whole patriot act section seven o two be examined because there are laws in there that even the american people don't know about and when the public doesn't know about something anything can happen that's extraordinary kurt thanks so much for being thank you it's a pleasure to me thank you thank you for dropping by. to see this or other conversations of the great minds go to our website conversations of great minds dot com. that's it for tonight's show but before we go let me introduce you to david a singer songwriter and activist based in chapel hill north carolina and author of the children's book white flower which deals with the issue of racism david thanks

for joining us. why they haven't been. in the south lamb late night sky. from the church. when the sun comes up again wait in men stand and stare at the soot on the ground. result of their weapons and then some in this string and they cut out the wood with their swords. but this strike and it blows against. the hammering nails into boy words. i keep thinking a. man. and to. see. it's just. express against. the.

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