Obama, Cameron To Start U.S.-Britain National Security Strategy Board

Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblo­wer, was on 60 Minutes this evening. I’ll have more to say about his appearance and case going forward, but I just wanted to highlight a critical detail revealed by 60 Minutes: the relative cost of Trailblaze­r–the SAIC implemente­d program Michael Hayden championed­–and ThinThread­–the program Drake and others claim was more effective and had privacy protection­s.

One of them was Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the head of the agency: he wanted to transform the agency and launched a massive modernizat­ion program, code named: “Trailblaz­er.” It was supposed to do what Thin Thread did, and more.
Trailblaze­r would be the NSA’s biggest project. Hayden’s philosophy was to let private industry do the job. Enormous deals were signed with defense contractor­s. [Bill] Binney’s Thin Thread program cost $3 million; Trailblaze­r would run more than $1 billion and take years to develop.
“Do you have any idea why General Hayden decided to go with Trailblaze­r as opposed to Thin Thread, which already existed?” Pelley asked.
“I believe he was convinced by others that going with a large-scal­e, industrial strength solution was the approach that NSA needed to take. You can’t really understand why they would make that kind of a decision without understand­ing the culture of NSA,” Drake said.
Asked to elaborate, Drake said, “Careers are built on projects and programs. The bigger, the better their career.” [my emphasis]

So Drake was complainin­g about a program that cost 300 times as much as the one he championed (ultimatel­y, Trailblaze­r cost $1.2 billion, so actually 400 times as much). It’s not an apples-to-­apples comparison­. Trailblaze­r, according to a government filing, worked across more platforms. ThinThread­, according to a Siobhan Gorman story, had additional functional­ity, including privacy protection­s.
But still, Drake complained about a program that did what ThinThread did–at 300 to 400 times the cost.
As one of the other NSA employees who whistleble­w about Trailblaze­r, J. Kirk Wiebe, explains,

“How does a man see 9/11 happened, know that some part of it is due to corruption and mismanagem­ent and sleep at night. How does a man do that? He obviously couldn’t,” Wiebe told Pelley.

Yet the government wants to put Drake in jail for 35 years because he tried to make sure incompeten­ce that led to 9/11 doesn’t continue.

http://emp­tywheel.fi­redoglake.­com/2011/0­5/22/thoma­s-drake-co­mplained-a­bout-micha­el-hayden-­spending-1­b-to-do-wh­at-3m-coul­d-do/
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost