In 2005, Drake faced the last resort of so many ignored internal whistleblowers: anonymous digital communications with the press. He signed up for an account with Hushmail, an encrypted e-mail service, and, using a proxy to disguise his IP address, began sending messages about Trailblazer’s alleged corruption to Siobhan Gorman, a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. His pseudonym: “The Shadow Knows.” With the paranoia of an NSA analyst, Drake took a certain amount of caution in those missives. He installed four layers of firewalls on his home network and used a 256-character password on his encrypted e-mail account, the longest the service would accept.
Even then, Drake eventually decided physical meetings would be more difficult to eavesdrop, and trusted Gorman enough that he believed meeting her in person would be safer. “There is no absolute anonymity electronically,” says Drake. “There are means that make it more difficult to identify you. But there’s always a digital trail.”
Drake says he made certain to never share classified documents in his dealings with Gorman, only testifying to Trailblazer’s fiscal waste. In early 2006, as Trailblazer was collapsing, the Sun published an award-winning series of articles about the NSA’s problems, including one that focused on Trailblazer.
But by then, the agency was concerned about a leak of far larger proportions. A few months before, The New York Times had published its story detailing how the NSA had engaged in widespread, illegal spying on Americans. In the post-9/11 era, the privacy concerns that had shelved Thinthread were now an anachronism. According to the Times’ story, a new project was now hoovering up phone conversations and Internet traffic without the encryption and court-order protections that Thinthread had implemented: warrantless wiretapping. “Every line was crossed,” says Drake. “They had turned the U.S. into a foreign nation electronically.”
The Bush administration, which had pleaded with the Times not to publish the story, was humiliated and furious. A Department of Justice witch hunt set out to find the newspaper’s sources.
Drake had participated in official protests against Trailblazer and also provided classified information to Congress during its investigation of intelligence failures before September 11. Those two actions were easily enough to pull him into the Justice Department’s dragnet. In November 2007, a team of armed FBI agents arrived at his home.
Drake sensed that the agents had no interest in Trailblazer, and he believed that his communications with Gorman were both legal and insignificant compared to the leak that had exposed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. So he decided on the spot to come clean, and spent the day sitting with the agents at his kitchen table, debriefing them on his whistleblowing activities to avoid any confusion with their investigation. He gave the investigators full access to his computers, and they carted away boxes full of his papers.
Eventually, the FBI would identify Department of Justice lawyer Thomas Tamm as at least one source for The New York Times’ exposé. But Tamm was never prosecuted, likely for fear that his trial would expose too many details of the secret surveillance program that have yet to come to light.
Instead, they indicted Drake.
Drake was accused of illegally taking classified papers from his office to his home under a section of the Espionage Act, the same spy-hunting law used to indict Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He faced ten felony charges and thirty-five years in prison, and his case was pursued for more than two and a half years without a trial. The prosecutor in the case argued that Drake should be used to “send a message to the silent majority of people who live by secrecy agreements.”
Finally, just days before his court date in 2011, the prosecution admitted that it had vastly exaggerated the classification of the documents Drake had been holding. Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge that carried a year of probation and community service. In the sentencing hearing, the judge in the case called the prosecution’s behavior in exaggerating the charges against Drake “inappropriate” and “unconscionable.”
By that point, Drake had spent eighty-two thousand dollars in legal fees, taken a second mortgage on his house, and been dismissed from his job both at the NSA and as an instructor at the National Defense University. Factoring in his lost pension after decades of military service, he estimates his financial damages in the millions. His Pentagon colleagues cut ties with him. He was separated from his wife for a year. Even his father, a World War II veteran, struggled to understand his actions. Today, he works at a Washington, D.C., Apple store for an hourly wage.
“I worked with the system, and I got fried,” he says.
Thomas Drake’s story is hardly unique. The Obama administration has pursued more leakers under espionage charges than all other presidential administrations combined. They include Jeffrey Sterling, an ex-CIA analyst who gave information to author James Risen about how the agency had botched an attempt to sabotage Iran’s nuclear development plans. Lawyer and FBI translator Shamai Leibowitz pleaded guilty to leaking classified transcripts of bugged conversations in the Israeli embassy to the blog Tikun Olam, in the hopes of stemming Israeli aggression toward Iran. Stephen Kim, an arms expert for the State Department, the military, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, was prosecuted for leaking a report to Fox News on North Korea’s plans to develop a nuclear weapon. Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou, who had at times defended and criticized the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding, was indicted for revealing the name of two of the agency’s interrogators to media including The New York Times. As of this writing, prosecutions of Kiriakou, Kim, and Sterling continue—as does that of Bradley Manning.
All totaled, that makes six leakers prosecuted under the Espionage Act, compared with three such cases in all previous history—the Obama administration may yet pursue a seventh case with the prosecution of Julian Assange. All of which adds up to an unlikely track record for a president who came to office spouting promises of unprecedented government transparency and proclaiming on his official website in 2009 that whistleblowing is an act “of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars” and “should be encouraged rather than stifled.”
Where did that evident hypocrisy come from? Obama has been “co-opted” by Washington’s culture of secrecy, argues Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project who has advised Drake, and who once served as a whistleblower herself, leaking evidence of Justice Department ethics violations to Newsweek in 2002. “He wants to curry favor with the national intelligence community, where he’s perceived as weak,” she says.
But Drake, who has tasted secret information many times over in his career, offers an explanation of Obama’s behavior that comes closer to the speech about Circe’s potion that Daniel Ellsberg once gave to Henry Kissinger.
“He had never had that kind of access to secrets before,” says Drake. “It was a lot of power. He was enamored with it. And it changed him.”
CHAPTER 6
THE GLOBALIZERS
Birgitta Jónsdóttir and I are driving away from Reykjavík on a highway that cuts through Iceland’s starkly sculpted tundra. Nearly every other car on the road is headed in the opposite direction. And with good reason: Just the day before, the volcanic mountain Grímsvötn at the center of Vatnajökull, a glacier in southeastern Iceland the size of Delaware, spontaneously ejected a twelve-mile-high mushroom cloud of steam and ash into the sky.
Now Jónsdóttir’s white Honda Jazz is pointed in the direction of the mass of aerosolized lava rock slowly expanding across the country. “The government put out a warning that you shouldn’t drive this way,” Jónsdóttir says flatly from behind the wheel, her expression mostly hidden by large black sunglasses covered in glass crystals and framed by black hair cut into a severe fringe. She’s wearing a black skirt, stockings with a blue-and-black paisley design, and white leather boots. “I don’t care. We’re going anyway.”
When we a
rrive in the town of Hveragerði an hour later, the ash cloud has become a thick gray line with vague borders looming on the horizon. By early evening it will have reached the town and blocked out the sun, imposing a biblical darkness that’s especially unusual in late Icelandic May, where the sun typically sets at eleven P.M. and continues to illuminate the sky from behind the horizon for the entire night. With a few hours before the ash cloud hits, we drive through the small town where Jónsdóttir lived in her teens, and she points out landmarks: the concrete house with a large garden that her grandparents built; the unassuming headquarters for the neo-Nazi party of Iceland next door; greenhouses heated with geothermal water and sulfurous hot springs that bubble up randomly around the suburban grid. “They’re always changing, always changing,” Jónsdóttir says in her lilting and staccato English. “A few years ago one opened up underneath a family’s living room.”
Then we drive by an old schoolhouse, and Jónsdóttir tells me one of her many stories of antiauthoritarian rebellion. In this building, she says, a teacher first cornered her and tried to sexually molest her, threatening to give the fourteen-year-old a low grade in his class unless she let him touch her breasts. She says she responded by threatening to “hang him from his dick if he ever tried to touch me or any girl in the school again.”
She drives on, any emotion hidden behind her glasses. But she continues her tale: Over the next days, Jónsdóttir tried to convince other victims who had been sexually bullied by the teacher to press charges or speak out against him. None would. She talked to school administrators, who she says ignored her story and asked her not to repeat it.
A few minutes later in our tour of Hveragerði, we pull up to an art gallery built into a greenhouse. This glass structure, Jónsdóttir says with a dark laugh, was the scene of her first “direct action.” In the middle of an art exhibition attended by the teacher who had tried to touch her, the punkishly clad teenager stood on a chair above the crowd and publicly denounced him, calling the man a pedophile and detailing his attempted sex abuses. “My grandparents weren’t very happy about this,” she says with a thin smile.
Telling uncomfortable truths is a skill that’s come in handy in twenty-first-century Iceland, a fishing island turned banking paradise where a mountain of financial and political lies and half-truths have collapsed into a record-setting financial crater. Only in the angry revolution that followed that crisis could a punk, poet, anarchist, and all-around kicker of hornet’s nests like Jónsdóttir dream of coming to power as a politician.
Since being elected to Iceland’s parliament in 2009, Jónsdóttir has sought to fill the Vatnajökull-size void left by the country’s banks with a new national identity: The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. A series of bills that she and others are still propelling through the Icelandic legislature would turn the island into the world’s strongest legal haven for leakers, whistleblowers, and digital truth-tellers of every variety.
The inspiration for the Initiative, known as IMMI, was conceived in the same hacktivist fits of imagination as WikiLeaks. Jónsdóttir, Julian Assange, and other WikiLeaks volunteers crafted it side-by-side, and Jónsdóttir worked with the secret-spilling group during its ascendancy to the international spotlight and its release of the Collateral Murder video.
But Jónsdóttir sees IMMI not as merely a stable foundation for the future of any single transparency outlet. She views it as the next step in a decentralized and global media movement, an arctic anchor for whistleblowers and muckrakers everywhere. “I want WikiLeaks to morph into two things or ten,” she told me when we first met in a Reykjavík café six months earlier. “The most important thing is to make it possible for others to do what they’re doing. Once IMMI is in place, they can all come here.”
IMMI, in its ideal incarnation, would mean that the manifold WikiLeaks of the future wouldn’t need to live outside the law and use uncanny technical expertise to stay ahead of their foes. Instead, she envisions a horde of leaking outlets and investigative journalists simply moving their servers and a skeleton staff to Iceland, just as companies incorporate in the Cayman Islands to escape the world’s tax system, or Ayn Rand’s men of the mind moved to the mountains to escape corrupt government. A Scandinavian Galt’s Gulch for the world’s secret-spillers.
“WikiLeaks was an important icebreaker,” she says, her words accelerating. “It was the tip. IMMI is the rest of the wedge, and it will open up everything.”
In September 2010, just as WikiLeaks was ramping up its serial blitzkrieg of leaks, a German spokesperson for the group then known as Daniel Schmitt gave an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel. He told the newsweekly that his real name was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and that he was leaving WikiLeaks after having been suspended by Julian Assange. His expulsion after three years of work, he said, was due to his having asked too many questions about Assange’s focus on America-centric megaleaks and the group’s growing dysfunction. “There are technical problems and no one to take care of them,” he told the magazine. “We grew insanely fast in recent months and we urgently need to become more professional and transparent in all areas. This development is being blocked internally. It is no longer clear even to me who is actually making decisions and who is answerable to them.”
He hinted at a new post-WikiLeaks project. “I will continue to do my part to ensure that the idea of a decentralized whistleblower platform stays afloat. I will work on that now. It’s in line with one of our original shared convictions—in the end, there must be a thousand WikiLeaks.”
In the year following that “thousand WikiLeaks” prophecy, copycats began to spring up by the dozens in all flavors and languages, editorial goals, and technological means: BaltiLeaks, BritiLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, Corporate Leaks, CrowdLeaks, EnviroLeaks, FrenchLeaks, GlobaLeaks, Indoleaks, IrishLeaks, IsraeliLeaks, Jumbo Leaks, KHLeaks, LeakyMails, Localeaks, MapleLeaks, MurdochLeaks, Office Leaks, Porn WikiLeaks, PinoyLeaks, PirateLeaks, QuebecLeaks, RuLeaks, ScienceLeaks, TradeLeaks, UniLeaks.
Mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and Sweden’s public radio service set up their own experimental leak portals. CommanderX, the “leader” within Anonymous whom Aaron Barr had tried and failed to unmask, created HackerLeaks, a repository for material stolen by hackers. The leaking scene became so crowded that two environmentally focused sites, GreenLeaks.com and GreenLeaks.org, threatened legal action against each other over the rights to the name.
As Nation blogger Greg Mitchell noted, only one thing was missing from this newborn leaking movement: Leaks.
Around the time of Domscheit-Berg’s departure from WikiLeaks, the site’s submission system had disappeared. Assange would tell me in November that the group simply had too much material in its publishing backlog to accept new submissions, a half-truth that hid a much messier explanation, one that would only be revealed by Domscheit-Berg in later months.
But even with WikiLeaks’ conduit closed, the new players in the leaking game seemed to be receiving virtually none of those displaced leaks. One reason: They had missed the lessons of WikiLeaks’ anonymity protections. Many of the new sites made no mention of Tor and used only SSL encryption or PGP, which fail to hide the identity of the user visiting the site. In some cases they offered no security measures or encryption at all.
Even the mainstream media sites, despite coveting WikiLeaks’ trove of documents, seemed to have misunderstood its technical side. Al Jazeera’s leak portal, which it called its Transparency Unit, only offered an SSL-encrypted site with a PGP key and suggested users run Tor. It had no Tor Hidden Service, the safeguard that would have not only permitted, but required users to be anonymous. It didn’t offer cover traffic, and even planted a tracking cookie file in the user’s browser.
The Wall Street Journal’s leak conduit, called Safehouse, was built so ineptly that the security community declared it dead on arrival. Jacob Appelbaum, who had been supportive of o
ther leaking copycats, pointed out that Safehouse was vulnerable to an attack that would allow a network snoop to easily strip away the SSL encryption it used, and worse, the site wasn’t compatible with Tor, despite suggesting that users run the anonymity program. “Pro tip: if you’re going to create a document leaking website—have a clue!” Appelbaum wrote.
A legal analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that both the Al Jazeera and Wall Street Journal sites’ fine print contained just as many holes. Both stated that if law enforcement asked for identifying information on the user, they could comply and hand over whatever data they might possess. The Journal’s site warned users it might share the leaker’s information with any third party that served its interests. In other words, as EFF attorney Hanni Fakhoury wrote in a blog post, “They reserve the right to sell you out.”
With WikiLeaks’ submissions offline and no trustworthy alternative, the newborn leaking movement found itself in a drought. With one exception.
In December 2010, BalkanLeaks, the document leaking site for a Bulgarian investigative journalism outfit called Bivol, came online, with a slogan across its masthead: “The Balkans aren’t keeping secrets anymore.” When I checked out the site, I saw that it used a Tor Hidden Service for submissions, a rare sign of security smarts among the new crop of copycats. But otherwise it resembled all the other obscure and leakless WikiLeaks wannabes from Brussels to Jakarta.
Later that month, BalkanLeaks posted a Microsoft Word file with a note saying that the document had been submitted to the site’s Tor server. It was an agreement from the Bulgarian Department of Energy outlining the construction of a nuclear power plant as a joint project of Russia and Bulgaria. Despite the importance of the agreement, the Word file seemed strangely to have been written by an employee of a private firm. But it showed no real evidence of corruption, and the agreement was even available on the Department of Energy’s website. Hardly the world’s juiciest leak.
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