Biography

Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010, the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.

On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pleaded to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer; Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped represent him, called it an act of civil disobedience. Drake's father was a World War II veteran and his mother a secretary for Pearl S. Buck. He entered the U.S. Air Force in 1979, becoming an Airborne Voice Processing Specialist, with a fluency in German, and went on ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions. It was in that capacity that he encountered the surveillance state of East Germany and the Stasi, which informed his worldview and to which he compares developments in the United States since the September 11 attacks. Drake left the Air Force in 1989. He was also in the U.S. Navy, where he analyzed intelligence for the National Military Joint Intelligence Center. According to The Washington Post, he also at one time worked with the CIA. In 1989, Drake began work as an NSA contractor, evaluating software. As a contractor, he worked on projects like JACKPOT and LIBRARIAN, becoming an expert in the quality-testing of software and working on a system for measuring the quality of computer code at the NSA. Drake also continued his academic studies.In 2000, he was hired as a software systems quality specialist and management and information technology consultant for Columbia, Maryland-based Costal Research & Technology Inc. (CRTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Alexandria, Virginia-based Computer Systems Management, Inc. (CSMI). In late 2001, he went to work at the NSA as a full-time employee at the Signals Intelligence Directorate at Fort Meade with his actual first day on the job as an NSA employee being September 11, 2001. In 2002, he became a Technical Director for Software Engineering Implementation within the Cryptologic Systems and Professional Health Office. In 2003, Drake became a Process Portfolio Manager within NSA's newly formed Directorate of Engineering. He held a Top Secret security clearance. During the congressional investigations into 9/11, he testified about NSA failures. In 2006 he was reassigned to the National Defense University, where he became the NSA Chair and an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences within the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF). Drake was forced to leave the NDU in 2007 when his security clearance was suspended, and he resigned from the NSA the next year. Drake then went to work at Strayer University but was forced from that job after his indictment of April 2010. He found work at an Apple Store. He then founded Knowpari Systems, a consulting firm.

In 2011, Drake was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling and was co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award. Accepting the SAAII award he said, with references to an 1857 speech of Frederick Douglass: