but anyway, tom drake was as you said somebody who worked inside of the nsa and the puzzle palace andhe totally secret nsa, national security agency, and he had become a whistle-blower, and he had seen things that were wasteful inside, and we are talking about billions, and he was concerned that the agency was violating civil liberties in a huge program of domestic surveillance that he understood because he was a computer expert. by the time i got to this situation, he had been charged for leaking supposedly or to a reporter at the "baltimore sun" about his concerns, and he was being charged under the espionage act with and facing the possibility of life in prison. so it is the kind of moment that basically any reporter knows that the lawyer for this man was saying, whatever you do, don't talk to a reporter. so, and he had not talked to anybody at least not on the record. so, my mission was to see if i could somehow get him to speak to many. and he, it turned out, he was not alone. he had a small group of friends who had also become disgruntled together, and they had all been raided b

and i have had people over to my house and in fact, i had tom drake over to my house at one point when i had him talking to me. he was so wound up that he started at 9:00 a.m., and leaving at 9:00 p.m., and my daughter was cowering upstairs wondering who this man was. she said, is he okay? he looked a little bit nuts. but people when they are going to be prosecuted for something that could put them away for life does have a bug eyed look. and it is good that you didn't have doubt. i had one moment of doubt in the story when i interviewed the officials in the nsa trying to knock the story down and wanted to kill it. there was one especially effective official, a woman who basically said, and she didn't say that drake was a liar, she just said, gosh, i feel so bad for him. he's just not well. and she went into this whole thing about, you know, he has got family problems, and it is a recurrence in his life and this sort of thing and by the time i was leaving i thought, maybe he is not sturdy. i started, and i really worried, because it was a rational phenomenal for a while, but later the

she ran a center for whistleblowers and have been working with tom drake. the reason i was interested in this story at all was by the time he had been prosecuted, president obama waswe were supposed to be entering a new regime of a president who was a constitutional law professor. i was curious about whether some of the people who had been whistle-blowers' during the bush years about the abuse of government would be dealt with differently under president obama. his case was a test of all of this, so, anyway. >> may, your documentary which is really chilling, you can see it all on youtube -- "shouting in the dark." i suggest you do. we have a segment of it. for about one minute. let's just play it, let's give you the flavor of it. [clip] >> bahrain. an island kingdom in the arabian gulf, where the shia muslim are a majority. people fighting for democratic rights broke the barriers of fear. only to find themselves alone and crushed. this is their story and al jazeera is the witness. to follow their journey of hope. with the carnage that followed. this is the

tom. to emulate. be a. player . welcome back to conversations of the 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 be laser 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 is in short to my horror i discovered that if they had abandoned a twenty three year legal regime called the foreign intelligence surveillance act they completely bypass this from the dropped it overboard a an act was passed in one thousand nine hundred seventy eight largely because of the massive abuse even during the sixty's and seventy's against americans in violation of the constitution so i discovered to my horror. that is a was now an entirely different vehicle that i did not recognize as 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 in fact i remember talking with attor