Thomas Drake

He was a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who blew the whistle on multi-billion dollar program fraud and cover up as well as the secret unlawful surveillance program. The Department of Justice launched a criminal national security 'leak' investigation of Mr. Drake in 2006 then prosecuted and indicted him under the WWI-era Espionage Act in April of 2010 as reprisal and retaliation with ten felony counts facing up to 35 years in prison. However their very public case against him collapsed under the weight of truth in both the court of law and the court of public opinion on the eve of his scheduled trial in June 2011. He is a former Cold War-era airborne crypto-linguist and electronic warfare mission crew supervisor who specialized in East Germany. He learned to program on an 8-bit Atari 800 Home Computer.