“Trailblazer was canceled in 2006 and remains one of the worst failures in US intelligence history. But the money spent on this privatization scheme, like so much at the NSA, remains a state secret to this day.”

Former NSA Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis have endured years of legal harassment for exposing the waste and fraud behind a multibillion-dollar contract for a system called Trailblazer. Follow us on Twitter: @Intel_Today

The case of these four former National Security Agency employes — Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis — is not widely known. In 2007, they were falsely accused of leaking classified information to the US media.

Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran. In 2010, the US government alleged that Drake mishandled classified documents. On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped.

William Edward Binney is a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA)turned whistleblower. Binney resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency. He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration.

J. Kirk Wiebe worked as a senior analyst at the NSA from 1975 to 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, he was among a handful of NSA employees who stumbled upon a secret program at the agency to monitor the communications of millions of U.S. citizens. Wiebe and his colleagues decided to approach inspector generals at the Defense Department and Justice Department with what they found. [FRONTLINE]

Edward Loomis worked as an NSA cryptologist from 1964 to 2001. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Loomis unsuccessfully lobbied the agency to adopt a sophisticated data-collection program — nicknamed “ThinThread” — to monitor foreign Internet traffic going through the United States. Loomis, who later became the target of a Justice Department investigation into leaks of classified data, told FRONTLINE that had ThinThread been in place before 9/11, the attacks may have been averted. [FRONTLINE]

These four men have endured years of legal harassment for exposing the waste and fraud behind a multibillion-dollar contract for a system called Trailblazer.

The ‘Trailblazer’ project was supposed to “revolutionize” the way the NSA produced signals intelligence (SIGINT). Nothing ever came out of it. In fact, ‘Trailblazer’ was canceled in 2006.

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‘Trailblazer’ remains one of the worst failures in US intelligence history. But the money spent on this privatization scheme, like so much at the NSA, remains a state secret.

The Untold Story of the Four NSA Whistleblowers

REFERENCES

Trailblazer Project — Wikipedia

How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers — Guardian

United States of Secrets – Frontline