Thomas A. Drake

The change would create five new organizations inside the NSA focusing on artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support, and global intelligence.

Between the Lines' Melinda Tu spoke with Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive turned whistleblower, about this latest development at his former agency.

20 years ago, Drake revealed the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 warrantless mass surveillance program, 9/11 intelligence failures, and multi-billion dollar fraud and waste.

To tell his story, Drake first went through all the proper government procedures, but finally talked to a newspaper reporter after he believed all established whistleblower channels had failed.

That is an incredibly ambitious schedule.

You're transforming this vast, incredibly classified, technically complex agency in just a few months.

That was Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive and whistleblower.

Find more news and commentary on the NSA reorganization plan and links to Drake's website by visiting our Between the Lines website at btlonline.org.

Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist who talks about Donald Trump's cognitive decline that she and other mental health professionals believe poses an extreme and imminent threat to the nation and the world.

And Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive and whistleblower who expresses skepticism about the Trump administration's restructuring plan for the National Security Agency that he says is a tactic to avoid needed reforms.

But first, we begin with a summary of some of the week's underreported news stories.

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Find a link to Dr. Lee's commentaries and related analysis by visiting our Between the Lines website at btlonline.org. [rock music] In mid-September, the National Security Agency, or NSA, announced it would undergo another massive restructuring, this time under its new director, General Joshua Rudd, who has only led the agency since March this year.

The change would create five new organizations inside the NSA focusing on artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support, and global intelligence.

Between the Lines Melinda Tu spoke with Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive turned whistleblower, about this latest development at his former agency.

Twenty years ago, Drake revealed the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 warrantless mass surveillance program, 9/11 intelligence failures, and multi-billion dollar fraud and waste.

Now more than ever, with the government at war on journalists, hacktivists, and whistleblowers, we need to protect those who reveal information that the public has a right to know but that the government wants kept secret.

What makes Jess so good at representing whistleblowers, and she's represented, among others, me, Tom Drake, Daniel Hale, and Ed Snowden, is that earlier in her life, she was a whistleblower herself.

She knows on a cellular level what makes whistleblowers or any individual whistleblower tick.

Forgive me for even starting by appearing to focus on myself, but the way I met Jesselyn Radack, the great Jesselyn Radack, who became not just one of my attorneys, but one of my closest and dearest friends, was several days after my arrest.

Yes.

Almost immediately, you became quite literally the go-to person for national security whistleblowers.

The first time I ever read your name in the papers was in relation to the Tom Drake case.

Tom Drake's case was a groundbreaking case for national security whistleblowing, and throughout the body of the reporting, in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, your name was right there next to his every time.

He was proceeding, uh, politically.

Whether he knew ex- exactly what was gonna happen, he should have, because NSA did, and we can ask Tom Drake about that.

So there was enough evidence to do it, and, uh, they let Tenet off the hook because he had made enough warnings that, uh, he could come back and say, "Well, on, on this date I told the, the Senate committee this and that." So yeah, they were all involved.

I think Tenet knew about it.