United States of Secrets, Part One (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] at the national security agency they called it the program we are under emergency conditions created after extraordinary means are required to deal with a threat collecting data on american citizens you're looking for unknown conspirators and the way they devised to do that was to look at everybody secrets at the highest levels of government a whole surveillance program without warrants designed for domestic surveillance what we're doing is lawful and i think is effective through two presidencies highly classified program he was collecting the entire internet stream he chose to keep the programs largely intact that's not just data collection that's digital surveillance i argued it was unethical illegal and unconstitutional and when this comes out all hell is going to break loose tonight on frontline united states of secrets part one the program [Music] the biggest leak of government secrets ever began in december of 2012 with a single email delivered to an ip address in rio de janeiro glenn greenwald one of the world's busiest journalists is sitting in his home in rio and he sees an email from someone he doesn't know it's not a friend it's not his mum and it just says i've got some stuff you might be interested in he didn't use his name and he said very cryptically and very vaguely that he had information that he wanted to discuss with me but could only do so if i were to install encryption guardian newspaper columnist and blogger glenn greenwald didn't pay much attention to the email 99 of the time it ends up that they're crazy or delusional or the the story is just not very good and this guy or girl we don't know who it is um is persistent so a few days later emails again and says look glenn can you do this thing and glenn still doesn't do it this attempt basically to leak all of these secrets initially just go straight into the sand [Music] the source moved on this time to berlin he was soon exchanging emails with american documentary filmmaker laura poitras she'd been in contact for over a month with a mysterious source who had reached out to her using her encryption key and using anonymous channels and said he had a big story for her a few weeks later in new york poitras met national security investigative reporter barton gellman at a greenwich village restaurant this was something she wanted to be exceptionally careful about we agreed on a cafe to meet at we also i think both understood that when we got there we'd moved to someplace else poitras asked gilman to vet the source and meet him electronically her source who became also my source i needed to take very special precautions in the usual nsa style and so he called me brass banner and he called himself vrx which means truth teller in latin through sophisticated encrypted messages verax promised an unprecedented scoop but it came with a warning he believed he was risking his freedom and possibly his life and he warned me as well that if the u.s intelligence community believed that by getting rid of me they could prevent this story from happening he said that my life would be at risk in late may varack surprised gilman and poitras he sent them an invitation he said your destination is hong kong portraits wanted to go barton gelman worried about a secret meeting in a foreign country like china decided not to but poitras knew someone who might join her that spring glenn greenwald arrived in new york to deliver a speech and we met that night in my hotel in the lobby and she showed me these emails that she had been exchanging with this person who was claiming that he was a national security state insider with access to very sensitive information that he believed to be very incriminating and and stated very definitively that he wanted to turn it over to her and to me greenwald decided to join poitras we all knew that this was incredibly risky and uncertain but the story had to be reported in june poitras and greenwald headed to the airport i i think they're kind of quite excited but there's also a sort of feeling that maybe this is just the most terrific hoax they were joined by ewan mccaskill a veteran guardian reporter at the time i didn't think it was for real didn't take it that seriously and thought it was a slightly obscure story once they were finally airborne poitras thought it was safe to share with greenwald something the source had securely sent to her that's kind of quite a moment they're in a secure space and so laura creeps forward to go and see glenn laura whips out this thumb drive and and in a very sort of almost mischievous way says you know guess what this is and and told me that she had just received a fairly large archive of documents they kind of can't control their excitement because this this is clearly the biggest story um that anyone's worked on since the pentagon papers in the 1970s and i didn't sleep one second for the next 16 hours because the adrenaline made that impossible to do because i not only saw the magnitude of the documents just the sheer quantity the fact that we had in our possession thousands not dozens or hundreds but many thousands of top secret nsa documents that were about a wide range of surveillance activities um that came directly from some of the most sensitive areas of the agency i could see out the corner of my eye glenn with the light on throughout this 13-hour flight you know reading on his laptop all the time laura coming to see him having chats and glenn getting more and more excited we essentially couldn't believe what it was that that we had and and that was really the first time i think i fully understood that this was going to be unlike any other story really ever in american journalism or politics [Music] in hong kong greenwald and the others traveled to a hotel in kowloon [Music] snowden's instructions to glenn and laura are like a kind of magical mystery tour across for something out of john mccarray he tells him to go to a hotel the mirror hotel in hong kong and says that he will meet them in a less trafficked part of the hotel next to a shopping mall um by a bench and a crocodile we had still no idea of who he was what his age was what his race was um we knew nothing about him demographically at all uh and so the plan that he picked was that he would be holding a rubik's cube in his hand so that when we he entered the room we would immediately know who he was all of a sudden this guy comes past with a rubik's cube um scramble up which is part of the kind of code but the man before them is not what they expected they expected some grizzled cia veteran wearing a blue blazer maybe with a bit of dandruff with a tie receding gray hair and they get this callow sort of fin limbed student type who looks as if he's just out of high school and he is their source and he's supposedly the guy who's who's got the crown jewels when this 29 year old kid who looked a lot younger shows up it was extremely disorienting and introduced a real awkwardness to our interaction and kind of a shock edward snowden led the group upstairs to his room in his bedroom by the door he'd piled pillows as high up the door jams as he could and pillows along the bottom so if somebody was outside eavesdropping would make it harder for them there was always this kind of uncertainty one might even say danger hovering over the room especially for the first few days because we didn't know what the nsa knew about what he was doing so we thought it was very possible that the door could be barged down at any moment and someone could enter to arrest snowden they painstakingly debriefed snowden for days at one point guardian reporter ewan mccaskill sent a text message to his editor in new york janine gibson ginny knew that i like guinness so she said if snowden is for real uh send me a message and just say the guinness is good and i was 100 sure that snowden in the documents were for real and i sent a message to janine saying the guinness is good the document snowden delivered revealed the history and details of one of the united states government's most closely guarded secrets it was known as the program [Music] the program began on september 11 2001 at fort meade in maryland washington now people talking about michael jordan's comeback the headquarters for the national security agency september or what what a gorgeous day i'm in my office uh remember the day brilliantly clear day clear blue skies i was in a suite waiting for a meeting and [Music] we had started up the hallway to his office when the first plane at the time that a plane has crashed my executive assistant a young woman came in and said hey we got reports of a plane hitting the world trade center and like 300 million other americans i thought wow small plane sport plane accident too bad my poor security chief didn't even have a chance to speak i just turned to him and said all non-essential personnel out of here now [Music] oh my goodness there is smoke pouring out of the pentagon everybody had the tv on because the tv is where the news was it wasn't coming out of nsa's computers it was on the tv because we had missed the entire event it was a enormous shock that you have this huge agency set up to prevent a surprise attack and they learn about it on a 300 television set uh tuned to cnn uh in in the director's office at the white house there was chaos a near total evacuation secret service bursts into the vice president's office basically frog marches him by one arm and the seat of his pants into this deep underground shelter that was built to withstand nuclear war almost immediately cheney directed his lawyer david addington to prepare the case for the president to exercise his unilateral authority as commander-in-chief david addington principal the vice president was interested in ensuring that the president's constitutional authority uh was used to its fullest cheney says i want you to tell me what powers we're going to need the president's going to need that he doesn't already have to respond to this calamity and they decide that they're going to push every boundary they have addington at one point says we're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop tours of the capital will be cancelled on september 12th at nsa headquarters the mood was summer where did it all begin we began soul searching almost immediately we all felt like a great wrong had been done and that we were all somewhat if not all culpable you have to remember that nsa was created after world war ii to prevent another surprise attack that was the whole res on depth for nsa pearl harbor we don't want another pearl harbor information that more people involved in the plot remain in the united states immediately we began to wonder what we had done wrong why did we miss the boat what didn't we detect that we should have detected the investigation continues in the aftermath troubling questions emerged from deep inside the agency why hadn't the nsa been able to connect the dots he was a very cautious agency it's an agency that is fighting with one hand tied behind his back out of a fear of a political backlash by being too aggressive the president now at the door during the nixon administration the nsa had overstepped spied on americans it certainly appears to violate the fourth amendment to the constitution caught and restricted by congress the domestic spying apparatus went dark for more than 20 years it was against the law to turn the nsa on americans if you were an nsa analyst this sort of legal regime was drilled into your head to the point where a lot of people said it's made the rules too restrictive and it's hampered the nsa's ability to detect terrorist plots some at the agency thought the nsa had been overly cautious and believed the 9 11 attacks could have been stopped i do believe it could have been prevented with revisions to the way we were permitted to operate before 9 11. revisions that i tried to get the general counsel to embrace and and wouldn't and couldn't quite try to get them to make adjustments to how we were operating how are we permitted to operate and they wouldn't do it i've felt this ever since it occurred over 3000 people's lives were lost and it's just a weight that i have been having trouble bearing it's i i'm sorry the toughest week for america since japan all over washington there was a growing demand to stop the next attack we have to remember that you know we had we had had terrorists living in this country for a number of months and we didn't know about it what else didn't we know and so there was a great deal of concern about the fact that that we not only could could not connect the dots we could not collect the dots at the cia director george tenet was under pressure from the vice president the director had a meeting with vice president cheney and his top aide david eddington and he was asked what can be done what can be done that isn't being done 911 made necessary a shift of policy cheney says in effect a tenant make me a shopping list tell me what you want to do that we're not letting you do yet tenet whose own agency was designing covert operations against al qaeda called general hayden george calls me and says mike any more you can do said george no not within my authorities not within my current authorities he paused and said that's not actually the question i asked you is there anything more you could do i said i'll get back to you aiden got the message at nsa headquarters he spread the word take the gloves off bring me an aggressive plan and they asked me is there anything that we had that could have prevented 911. loomis told them what he believed was necessary begin monitoring foreign internet traffic going through the united states the u.s internet hubs handle so much of the worldwide internet traffic so i said let us allow collection between u.s and foreign foreign to u.s against the terrorism problem but others in the agency were proposing much more aggressive data collection what they propose to do is create a whole new surveillance program without warrants trapping all sorts of information taking advantage of the fact that modern communication trunk lines tend to come through the united states the idea of this program was you're looking for unknown conspirators and the way they devised to do that was to look at everybody it was the outline of something hayden could take to the vice president he headed to washington to propose the idea it would be his first meeting in the oval office prior to 9 11 i don't think i knew general hayden i probably knew his name i doubt that the president knew his name it's a very big change for the director of nsa to suddenly have all this attention from senior officials in the white house and so forth and i'm sure it had a major impact on hayden the president had been briefed he put his arm around general hayden called him his childhood nickname mikey so i walk in to see the president it's the president and the vice president in the room um almost certainly condi was there as the national security adviser andy card would have been there cheney suggests a question and george bush asks it what would you like to do that you can't already do that would help prevent another 911 hayden outlined the program it would gather data on the phone calls and internet traffic of hundreds of millions of americans then search it for suspicious connections but he was worried about whether it was legal and the first thing he says to me is mike i i understand your concerns but there are some things we're going to have to do and i think i have the authority to authorize you to do the things that you've outlined president says go i want you to go develop a program come back to me we've got the lawyers working on it but you have my order we're going to do this hayden left the white house knowing that the program was bound to be controversial no president had authorized it prior to this time and michael hayden goes home after uh briefing the president and the vice president about his ideas for expanding surveillance and takes a walk with his wife and she said what's on your mind so well we're going to go do something here and i didn't go in any into any details we're going to do something yeah one day it's going to be public and when it gets public it's going to be very controversial and the people doing are going to be swept into this thing she said huh is it the right thing to do yeah i think so he said okay we'll deal with that when it comes on october 4th in a secret signing with cheney the president officially authorized the program that order is written by david addington the vice president's lawyer it's not written by the president's lawyer and this is not only unusual but probably unique in the history of major u.s intelligence operations is written by the vice president's lawyer and stored in his own safe addington worked out of a small office next to the white house in the old executive office building this order is one of the most closely kept secrets of the bush cheney administration for four years it kept so secret that many people involved in national security inside the white house and the government don't know about it addington personally hand carried a copy of the secret document out to fort meade he said i'm coming out i'll be there in about 30 minutes hand carried this was very closely guarded that we were doing this he comes onto the campus at fort meade up to the top deck and hands me the order now general hayden wanted the sign off of his top lawyer robert dietz i think he was concerned and wanted my view of whether this program that was was lawful i spent a kind of sleepless night pondering the legality of it that this was a very hard call it's a very hard call the nsa has a general counsel and about a hundred lawyers and they were told the president has signed it it's been certified as lawful and once all the signatures are there that's it we salute we say okay it's lawful we're gonna go ahead in the intel world if a president says to you i need this in order to keep the american people safe you need to try to figure out where that line is constitutionally and march right up to it two other nsa lawyers would also sign off on the program we came to the conclusion independently um but consistently that there was no doubt in our mind that it was a legitimate use of the president's article to authority general hayden had heard exactly what he needed article two the president's authority as commander-in-chief i have my three good friends here who have you know been my guardian angels on these things since i became director saying this is good now the massive collection of data could begin who's emailing whom who's texting whom who's doing uh skype calls with whom they're collecting a lot of information a lot of content of phone calls they're actually recording the voices not for all of our calls but for a lot of u.s telephone calls and they were doing this under an authority that had never existed before it would be general hayden's most closely guarded secret only a small handful of nsa employees knew what the president had authorized most were kept out of the loop including this man senior manager thomas drake my first day reporting on the job was the morning of 9 11. he had been in the military he'd been in the air force he's he's devoted his life to national security issues he's a computer genius of a sort drake had no idea what had been going on between hayden and the white house he had been given a different task i was actually charged to find whatever you've got in the labs whatever you've got in your agency even if it's not operational put it into the fight we need it it might help us we need to we need to deal with the threat but according to the rules drake thought he had to follow whatever he found had to safeguard americans privacy he started by digging around inside the deepest reaches of the nsa's secret r d programs and he stumbles into sort of a skunk works and he discovers that there was actually a program before 911 that could have as they said eavesdropped on the entire world it's called thin thread thin thread a program that could capture and sort massive amounts of phone and email data was the brainchild of veteran crypto mathematician bill benny the whole idea was to build networks around the world of everybody and who they communicate with then you could isolate all the groups of terrorists once you could do that you could use that metadata to select that information from all those tens of terabytes going by but to make sure the nsa would not spy on u.s citizens benny and the other analysts had built-in privacy protections it anonymizes who it's listening in on unless there's a court warrant that makes the identity of that person clear if you knew that it was us person related it would be automatically encrypted that was part of the design of thin thread it had a data privacy section that was working very well protecting citizens and innocent people uh by encrypting the data and not allowing analysts to look at it even drake was ecstatic the experimental program could monitor massive amounts of data but the encryption would protect the privacy of individual americans he took it upstairs to the top deck in those short days and weeks after 9 11 i put together a two-page classified implementation plan to put thin threat into the fight and i presented it to maureen baginski baginski was drake's immediate superior the third highest ranking official at nsa it took a while to get any kind of response he felt there was something strange going on she would refuse to see me none of her responses were ever electronic none of her responses were in a form that would be recorded or saved finally he wrote a memo sent to her and instead of responding electronically which would have been normal she wrote in a big black felt pen it was kind of a modified cursive and she said they've gone with a different program when drake asked her what this other solution was she said i'm sorry i can't tell you it didn't take long for clues to emerge that something much bigger was going on they started seeing stacks of servers piled in corners and so forth so we had to walk away around all this hardware that was piling up out there and so we knew you know something was happening all of a sudden people who normally would communicate with each other were keeping secret this new operation of some sort dozens of nsa employees were sworn to secrecy but before long details were leaked to drake i have people coming to me with grave concerns about what are we doing tom i thought we're supposed to have a warrant i'm being directed to deploy what's normally foreign intelligence outward-facing equipment i'm being now directed to place it on internal networks at the same time bill binney and the thin thread team heard that the program was using thin thread but stripping out the privacy protections what they're hearing is that the program they designed is in some form being put into use but without the the protections that they had designed in what they did was they they got rid of the section of the code that encrypted any of the attributes of u.s citizens even ed loomis who had wanted a more robust approach was surprised at how far the agency was willing to go i just refused to believe after all i had been through for 37 years that all of a sudden things would change and they'd go back to the old ways back to the early 70s i didn't believe that they could possibly have just flip-flopped and and gone 180 degrees the other way i i just didn't believe it to the thin thread team collecting data without a warrant seemed like a direct violation of the rules they had followed for years all these years having grown up you never spy on americans we had suddenly become uh criminals by association the agency had gone down a path that we had been preached to you never do we were very very very concerned and the fact that their thin thread system had been incorporated into the program was the last straw we said we we can't stick around and be a party to this this we can't be an accessory to all these crimes so we have to get out at the end of october 2001 bill binney kirk wiebe and ed loomis all quietly retired tom drake stayed behind so drake is now still working away over at the nsa with his his worries rising about what's going on in terms of domestic surveillance once again drake confronted maureen baginski i made one final attempt one final appeal to maureen baginski and she demurred and she simply said call call the office of general counsel which i did and i said i want to i want to speak to the lead attorney she'd give me the name i want to speak it was vida potenza he goes to the general counsel's office with his concerns and says i think this program may be illegal as he proceeded to tell me you don't understand all the lawyers have approved it it's legal we are under emergency emergency conditions extraordinary extraordinary means are required to deal with a threat we just need the data and then the most the most chilling i don't often have said this part of the conversation don't ask any more questions mr drake if he came to me someone who was not read into the program right and not a part of what we were doing and told me that we were running amok essentially inviting the constitution and it was in that time frame when there was an awful lot going on and we were all worried about the next attack there's no doubt in my mind i would have told him you know go talk to your management don't bother me with this i mean you know you you did the the minute he said if if he did say you're using this to violate the constitution i i mean i probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly so i mean if that's what he said he said then anything after that i probably wasn't listening to anyway the program was continuing to grow in secret the nation's largest telephone companies were now giving the nsa the private call records of millions of americans tom drake had hit a dead end inside the agency that fall bill benny took an extraordinary step he decided to break ranks to take the matter to congress the next move is to try to get some cooperation from congress from the senate and house intelligence committees and he finds an ally in diane rourke who felt the same way diane rourke was a top congressional intelligence staffer i worked at the house intelligence committee for 17 years and for the last five of those years i had the nsa account for the republican majority she's an interesting character she's very conservative she's a republican she is an oversight of the nsa partly to make it powerful and also to keep it from wasting money porter goss was rorke's boss goss was the powerful chairman of the house select committee on intelligence and future cia director diane is the go-to girl on the house permanent select committee on matters dealing with nsa so she spent a fair amount of time at nsa she knew personnel out there benny and rourke decided it would be safer to meet away from her congressional office bill came to me at my house and told me that part of their system their thin threat system was being used for collection of domestic communications in a dragnet fashion collection on everybody so diane says they have gone rogue you know that was her point that she thought they were going rogue i was aghast i was absolutely aghast because nsa had this because this constituted a complete reversal of nsa policy rourke is a very feisty woman she was just certain that there was no way that this program was legal and she said and if the nsa officials are breaking the law i am going to fry them rourke began to distribute a series of searing memos to the leaders of the house intelligence committee diane very capable so good that she pierced the veil of a program that she was not briefed on not cleared for but knew something was going on i updated them on what was going on explained to them the uh all the technology in as simple a way as i could and i argued very strongly that they needed to have the protections restored i told them that if you know if they did not if the administration refused to do this they should insist that the system be be killed be stopped what rourke did not know was that in october the white house had invited a small group of congressional leaders to a secret briefing in the vice president's office general hayden led the briefing mike hate is particularly good at coming in and explaining things in a way that uh so we will say neophytes in the business could understand it and you really wanted to believe what mike had to say uh and and absorb it and digest it rather than question it with a very difficult circumstance very facile command of the facts he's also very good at alighting past the parts that he doesn't think you want to hear and using very careful language to avoid saying things he doesn't want to say while also avoiding any outright falsehood our purpose in this was to get the other political branch involved in this program and so we would be defeating our own purposes working it against our own goals if we weren't full monty uh to to these folks but as open as hayden says he was he and the vice president's office created strict conditions for the briefing you have the the individual senator member of congress who's brought in and read into a program they're not allowed to bring any staff with them they're not necessarily allowed to communicate any of what they've heard to their staff in some instances they're not lawyers so they may not understand all of the legal fine points in most instances they're not technologists so they may not be able to grasp what it is precisely that they're being briefed on or the implications of it 14 people were killed and scores were wounded they returned to congress some now feeling they were unable to exercise effective oversight of the program by the summer of 2002 it was running full speed and i argued with everybody that i met and i got no refutation from them i said it was it was unethical immoral politically stupid illegal and unconstitutional and stop and when this comes out all hell is going to break loose finally intelligence committee chairman porter goss had had enough i said you need to talk to general hayden and you also need to know that concerns of the areas you're talking about are known to me and i'm not going to discuss because you're frankly not cleared for this level of program or what's going on here but the fact that you've discovered this means that you need to talk to general hayden rourke was summoned to the top deck at the nsa to meet with director hayden my whole point in going there was to ask him why he had taken off the protections the encryption and the automated tracking i asked this any number of times and he always evaded answering and i finally just decided i was not going to leave the room until i got an answer and so i kept asking and so about the fifth time he looked down and i remember he could not look me in the eye and he said we have the power we don't need them and he made clear that the power he's referring to was the commander-in-chief's wartime authority it's awkward for me having the conversation because she's not been briefed on the program all right so um to a certain level of detail i i simply respond that i disagree with both of our conclusions that i think what we're doing is lawful and what i and i think what it is we're doing is effective and if i knew of a better way of doing it i would do that too toward the end of the meeting general hayden made it pretty clear that he he wanted me to stop lobbying against the program i said look and diane this is going to become public and when it becomes public you can argue your point and i can argue mine and so instead of allaying my concerns this actually made me far more worried it was clear to me that he didn't like my talking to other people in the executive branch and on the house intelligence committee and trying to convince them to put controls on the program for now hayden's secret was there's a secure uncertainty like sandra said about how many by early 2003 keeping the president's program secret was about to become harder in a small office at the department of justice attorney thomas tan had just started a new job i went in with a lot of patriotic fervor i work with agents fbi agents primarily to try and develop intelligence about people that we thought were foreign agents or terrorists he came from a family of fbi agents but not just any fbi agents his uncle was one of the top aides to j edgar hoover his father had also been a senior official under j edgar hoover tam would work with one of the most secretive institutions in washington the foreign intelligence surveillance court the fisa court it was in an uh on the sixth floor and only one elevator went up there and it was literally in a bank vault because they were worried about the the soviet union you know overhearing what was going on good evening president nixon reportedly will announce his resignation tonight the fisa court had been set up to act as a watchdog after those revelations during the nixon administration that the nsa had been spying on americans when that came out you saw a period of reform like none other we we'd seen like nothing we'd seen before then and and frankly nothing since under the reforms the nsa could conduct surveillance inside the united states only if the fisa court issued a warrant you can turn your ears outward but not inward you can listen all you want abroad but you really cannot do that to americans unless you have a warrant and inside the department of justice it was thomas tam's job to prepare warrants for the fisa court the law specifically said that if you didn't go through the court you were committing a federal felony but then as tam began working on terrorism cases he discovered something surprising evidence of the program there are references to wiretaps and information that hadn't come through fisa warrants so the question is where did they come from where did the government get this information tam learned that hardly anyone at the doj knew details about what was going on i asked a supervisor of mine if she knew what the what the program was about and she told me that she just assumed that what we were doing was illegal and she didn't want to ask any questions tam became concerned they were conducting electronic surveillance without getting warrants and using that information then to develop probable cause and basically not informing the court of the source of the information tam and others at the doj unaware of the secret presidential order wondered if attorney general ashcroft was doing something illegal it just kind of ate away at me and kind of came to a head when [Music] i ran into one of the deputies of the unit who said that there was a chance that for the first time ever that a sitting attorney general would be indicted tam says he tried to take his questions up the chain of command without success he was quite disturbed by that was quite disturbed that he wasn't getting answers to the questions he was asking eventually tam decided to take a risky step he headed up pennsylvania avenue to congress for a secret meeting with a powerful senate staffer i said does congress know what we're doing with regard to this program and she said she she couldn't tell me i said well then i think you know maybe i will go to the press and she i remember her last comment was you know tom whistleblowers frequently don't end up very well and i told her yeah i understood that this weekend in baghdad a bomb last night in the fall of 2003 the white house got involved in filling an important vacancy at the justice department the justice department needs a new head of the office of legal counsel which is a very powerful position cheney and addington get together and say who should we pick david addington had a candidate in mind for the job jack goldsmith jack goldsmith is impeccably credentialed member of the federalist societies well-known and liked in the conservative movement david addington calls goldsmith in and interrogates him about a few of his lesser known positions and what would you think about this or that and he's convinced goldsmith like he himself is a true believer and is going to be making the right decisions with addington's blessing goldsmith became the new head of the office of legal counsel charged with reviewing the legality of the administration's most secret operations i was being briefed into a lot of programs classified programs counterterrorism programs i was extraordinarily naive i had a sense that this was an important job i did not have a full sense of the nature of the issues or the pace before long goldsmith headed for david addington's office it was time to learn about the program jack like most of the others who are briefed on this walks into addington's office which he regards as a little bit peculiar what's this doing in vice president's lawyer's office addington opens the safe pulls it out there's the red cover it says top secret slash s i slash comment slash stellar wind the cover name for this program as he read the document goldsmith began to have grave doubts the program was an example of the administration going alone in secret based on inadequate legal reasoning and flawed legal opinions goldsmith discovered that as part of the program the government had been tracking data about the emails of tens of millions of americans he said you can't justify the email collection it is on its face a clear violation of the fourth amendment and perhaps the first amendment as well addington was furious that goldsmith would raise questions about the program and he let him know he was very tough in making his arguments he was very sarcastic and aggressive against people with whom he disagreed and dismissive oftentimes and he acted with the implicit blessing of the vice president so all these things made him a very very forceful presence you know david pushed he pushed everybody he pushed me even when i was the attorney general he would push me so that was just david's nature and i think jack didn't appreciate being pushed sometimes he was daring jack goldsmith to say this is illegal and you've got to stop it he never believed that goldsmith would do it goldsmith tells him we're going to pull back our endorsement of the legality of this program and addington roars at him and says if you do that the blood of a hundred thousand people uh killed in the next attack will be on your head for cheney addington gonzalez hayden and others the personal stakes at this moment were extremely high it was a felony to conduct this kind of surveillance in the united states and everyone was relying on the shield that they were trying to create of having the president order it explicitly and have the attorney general sign off and say it's lawful and as soon as the justice department starts to say we're not so sure this is lawful there is a great deal of concern and anxiety five separate car bombs blew up in a span last night at the justice department they prepared for conflict with the white house goldsmith's boss deputy attorney general james comey delivered the news to john ashcroft parts of the program appeared to be illegal they go to the attorney general john ashcroft they say we don't think this is legal we think we need to get this changed or we need to stop what's going on because we don't have a solid foundation to go on ashcroft was supposed to sign a reauthorization of the entire program every 45 days and for two and a half years he had but now he balked ashcroft gives comey his verbal assurance that he is not going to go along with this program and that he is going to demand changes or he won't sign then just hours later attorney general ashcroft collapsed suffering from severe pancreatitis james comey was now the acting attorney general comey notifies the white house formally that he's not going to sign and we're now within 48 hours of expiration of this program with the deadline looming inside the white house alberto gonzalez chief of staff andrew card and david addington headed to attorney general ashcroft's hospital room went to the west wing picked up david who had the authorization we get to the hospital and i tell david to stay back because there is history between david and the attorney general and i didn't want to aggravate the attorney general any needlessly janet ashcroft the attorney general's wife is very alarmed she calls up ashcroft's chief of staff and says oh my god they're coming over ashcroft's chief of staff calls comey the deputy comey is in a car on his way home he has the driver make an actual u-turn they slap the flasher and the siren on and he heads over to that hospital as fast as he can go it was the evening about eight o'clock and i got a call from the justice department command center so i rushed to the hospital double parked ran up the stairs goldsmith and comey waited in ashcroft's room he had tubes going in and out of him he looked ashen and i actually thought he looked near death i thought he looked just terrible in walked alberto gonzalez white house counsel and andrew card the president chief of staff we get to the hospital and general ashcroft is laying in bed and as soon as we got there judge i said nothing other than sorry feeling bad and judge gonzalez said we brought the document here's the document attorney general ashcroft kind of lifted himself he wrote rose he arose from the bed kind of lifted himself up and gave about a two or three minute speech or talk address to gonzales and card in which he basically i can't get into the details but he showed enormous unbelievable clarity about what the issues were and what was going on and he explained why he also would not approve the program and he read them a bit of the riot act and then he said at the end of all this he said in any event i'm not the attorney general now jim comey is because tim comey was the acting attorney general and with that extraordinary performance and it was just an amazing one of the most amazing things i've ever seen in my life because he went from seeming you know near death to having this a moment this amazing moment of clarity and he just again receded into the bed and i really worried at that point that he was going to expire and um i mean it just it looked like he gave it the last of his energy and and so finally uh he when he repeats again he's no longer the attorney general and has finished talking andy and i just said thank you we'll we'll raise this with the deputy attorney general and we and we left it was an intense unbelievable scene and a gonzalez card quickly left and that was the end of it in the wake of the hospital confrontation at the white house cheney insisted the president should act on his own reauthorize all of the program even though the justice department said part of it was illegal cheney and david addington draft a new order and this time it has one subtle difference instead of having a signature page for the attorney general i certify the lawfulness of this order there's a new signature for the white house council alberto gonzalez who does not have the same legal authority i satisfy myself that there would there was sufficient legal authority to move forward and i felt that the president was not a lawyer and if this it was my job if if i felt comfortable that it was in fact lawful to provide that signature i did it because i wanted to protect the president that's why i signed that document but the white house wondered would general hayden go out on a legal limb and continue the program david addington calls me and says are you willing to do this without the signature of the attorney general with the signature of white house counsel al gonzalez and authorization from the president and i thought and i said yes hayden and gonzalez say their willingness was informed by something that happened just before the addington call in madrid this morning more than 190 people were killed at least 10 simultaneous bombs it was one of the worst terrorist attacks since september 11th given that starkness of the al-qaeda threat given the ambiguity of the situation i thought the correct operational legal and ethical decision was all right we'll do this one more time on the somewhat different framework so that was a point where he could have said i'm turning it off until we get a proper order from the justice department but he didn't he went along with eddington and cheney that afternoon president bush reauthorized the program at the justice department jack goldsmith prepared his resignation letter i had drafted my resignation letter and was prepared to resign and i was sure i was going to resign that day it was inconceivable to me based on what had happened the last two days that i wouldn't resign dozens of top doj officials threatened to join him including fbi director mueller and even acting attorney general comey and i would never be part of something that i believe to be fundamentally wrong with a heavy heart and undiminished love of my country and my department i resign as deputy attorney general of the united states effective immediately sincerely yours james b comey george bush is on the edge of a cliff his presidency is at stake this was going to be something on the order of two dozen nearly the entire political appointment list at the justice department from the attorney general on down and no president could survive that in an election year the next morning the president decided to have a private talk with acting attorney general comey after the national security briefing bush has to come stay a minute come talk to me and cheney starts to follow and bush says no no this is just the two of us and he says what's going on here how could you possibly do something of this importance at the very last minute moment of time comey suddenly realizes that the president had no idea what had been happening the president thinks this just began yesterday he doesn't know it's been going on for three months and so he says mr president if that's what you've been told you have been very poorly served by your advisors president certainly did not want a situation where the fbi director and the deputy attorney general would resign so he was not too happy to learn that this had risen to a level of banks that it had risen to the president then sent for fbi director mueller mueller's waiting downstairs a level outside the situation room some aide goes and says president wants to see you right now get in there and bush says to mueller go tell jim comey to fix this i withdraw the order you go make it right the warrantless email data collection was shut down the crisis was averted but at the white house they were determined to resume it and so they're they're sort of literally you know they're sort of sifting through the the the fisa law they're sifting through the patriot act trying to find existing laws existing authorities you might call it loopholes to justify these programs general hayden was sent to the secret fisa court to convince a judge to restart it could we get a court order to authorize this and so we began a very aggressive program with the chief judge of the fisa court at that time judge color catelli to take that part of the program that had been stopped and presented to her to see if we could get an order to allow that program to go forward hayden personally meets with judge catelli of the fisa court um on on two saturdays to make the pitch to explain how they're going to do this and cotelli eventually rules that this is legal that the nsa can indeed collect all of the internet metadata going to and from the united states and they use this authority that previously was used to uh to trace num numbers going to and from a single telephone for everybody caller catelli's secret ruling relied on a controversial interpretation of a 25 year old supreme court case this was frankly a huge stretch the idea that you could use this to justify the collection of trillions of pieces of internet metadata surprised a lot of people when it came out in the snowden archives but that's where they went the program was back online bigger than ever that part of the program over which there was a grand dispute in the spring of 2004 was resumed in large measure under a different legal theory by the fall of 2004 to defend the patriot act this time in buffalo he continued his voice for an extension of the anti-terror that same year the president hit the campaign trail publicly arguing there was no warrantless surveillance program nothing has changed by the way when we're talking about chasing down terrorists we're talking about getting a court order before we do so bush got up there several times and said you know when you hear about us wiretapping that means we're getting a court warrant well that we knew that wasn't true you know he was leaving out this this whole other side of the equation in terms of the nsa operation it's important for our fellow citizens to understand constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland because we value the constitution as the president insisted the government always secured warrants in washington that department of justice attorney thomas tam knew otherwise i agonized for probably for months i was upset i would say with what i thought was being done to the way our government was supposed to work [Music] tam had not been aware that jack goldsmith from the top echelon at the department of justice had nearly resigned but his concerns about the program had continued to grow he agonized about this spent a lot of sleepless nights wondered [Music] about what he should do it just it just kind of ate away at me and it was pretty clear to me at least that i didn't want to keep participating in whatever was going on tam decided to take a very big step one dramatically out of character for the son and nephew of high-ranking fbi agents one day on his lunch break he slipped into a washington subway station he used a pay phone to make an anonymous call to the new york times he said he was sweating nervous looking around he felt he said like a spy when he made that phone call but he did i certainly was conscious of the fact that i i if i were going to be found out and i did think i would be found out actually eventually um that that there would be serious ramifications but i just thought it was important [Applause] [Music] [Applause] tam says the phone call was to a new york times reporter i had read articles by eric lichblow with the new york times i knew he was covering the department of justice lishblah will not confirm that tam was a source but acknowledges receiving a tip from an anonymous source there was a suggestion from from one of the early sources that whatever is going on involving this super sensitive spy program was causing such tumult and debate within the justice department that there's talk of ashcroft being indicted and you know that certainly gets your attention tan says he and lish blau had a series of clandestine conversations around washington i eventually told him my suspicions that i'm very very limited people knew what what it was all about and that that really some very experienced high-level lawyers thought what we were what the government was doing was illegal having leaked tam disappeared back into the bureaucracy at the justice department at the times eric lishblow knew that another reporter james risen had also been hearing about the program we heard basically that the president had authorized a warrantless wiretapping program it was uh believed by a lot of by the people we were talking to to be in violation of the uh of fisa and of the constitution they were doing things well outside their lane without the knowledge of most of the court without the knowledge of most members of congress really on the the white house's own authority that was really what in our mind made the story eager to get general hayden on the record james risen called the nsa i told the press person that i needed to talk to hayden immediately and for a very sensitive matter and i didn't tell him exactly what it was but to my surprise she got him on the phone immediately i remember i was sitting next to him i did not know he was going to do that it was a bit shocking not only that he was calling him but also they got hayden on the line i read them like two paragraphs of the draft of the story september 11th attacks president bush secretly authorized the national security agency to eavesdrop on americans and you could hear like a sharp intake of breath like i can't you know it was almost like he was he didn't want to say it but he was like i can't believe you've got that story i think this is a very bad thing that you know there's a reason we keep intelligent sources and methods secret same reason journalists try to keep their sources of method secret you know you can't survive unless you keep them secret i'd caught him off guard and he started to confirm it and then realized what he was doing and hung up hayden sounded the alarm the new york times was preparing to expose the existence of the program in the middle of an election year we were worried that this would compromise a very important very significant intelligence activity there was a great there was debate within the administration about what to do should we try to get an injunction the white house demanded a series of meetings with the times the first was inside the eisenhower executive office building acting cia director john mclaughlin ran the meeting one thing i remember about his presentation was that he never actually confirmed that they had such a program they kept talking in these hypotheticals like saying if we were doing this this would be very important to the government the language he used which was kind of orwellian in a way was if the united states had such a program we would request that the new york times not publish any information about it and then i started taking notes and they tried to stop me from taking notes and it was a very contentious meeting that only convinced me further that the story was right and that they were trying to stop it meeting after meeting the government made the argument the program was both effective and legal one of the strongest selling points they made which um to my mind was probably the most disingenuous was the idea that this had all been legally reviewed this was all perfectly legal perfectly constitutional everyone was on board there was no doubt about its legality back in the times offices the reporters argued the white house was misleading them but the editors were not convinced the story should run there were intense discussions and it got got emotional on all sides we argued that this was really important that our sources were telling us it was illegal or unconstitutional that there was uh clearly people in the government who disagreed with what the government what the officials were saying to the to the editors in the fall of 2004 the administration invited the times top editors to a closed-door meeting executive editor bill keller met with the president's top advisors condoleezza rice general hayden alberto gonzalez and others who insisted to keller that revealing the existence of the program would endanger national security i had a consensus of everybody that we had contact with in the administration um that this would be an extremely dangerous thing to do these were you know serious people a consensus across the board of those who talked to us that it was going to be dangerous a level of stridency that was quite impressive and you know after much discussion decided that we weren't ready to go with it keller spiked the story the white house had prevailed the program would remain a well-kept secret the president has ordered a major shakeup of america's spy operations the nuts and bolts of intelligence will fall to lieutenant general michael hayden who now heads up to once general hayden was promoted by the white house to help oversee all intelligence operations he was replaced by a new general keith alexander the change gave tom drake another chance to voice his concerns about the program he wrote general alexander a classified letter within the system my last official act for all intents and purposes was to write that formal letter to to alexander the letter said the nsa's intelligence gathering activities were out of control and needed to be reined in this is a crusade for him being drake someone who's got a somewhat obsessive personality he keeps trying to get the word out but general alexander was no more responsive than hayden had been and by writing directly to the general drake had broken bureaucratic protocol his days were numbered they actually reorganized my job right out from under me and i literally was left with nothing i had an office i had a flag as a senior executive but nothing else no programs no people no team no nothing drake had formed friendships with the thin threat group binny wiebe loomis and congress's diane rourke now they began to seriously consider what they called the nuclear option going to the press and i can remember throwing the question out there one evening i said what do we do tom's not getting anywhere and so we would say is it time to go to the press invoke the nuclear option which is going to the press and we were all afraid to do it we're still traditional kind of employees the government wanted to stay inside the government to try to get the government to change its ways to make it you know to write itself as opposed to having to force it by going to the fourth estate the public the third real option of going to the press was fraught with enormous peril at a minimum you would no doubt be fired or worse it had been nearly one year since the new york times had refused to publish the investigation into the nsa during that year the program had grown dramatically terabytes huge amounts of information about americans telephone calls and emails had been clandestinely captured finally reporter james risen from the new york times had had enough he decided to strike out on his own the story was dead now twice dead and i thought the only way to ever get this story out was to put it in a book ryzen had a surprise for eric leschbauer he invited him to drive over to his house to read a draft chapter of the book the story the new york times had refused to print chapter was just called the program in it he basically made known the existence of this program and the fact that that the administration had gotten the paper to spike the story i said i want to make sure it's okay with you and he said the only thing i ask is you know put my name in there too it did not take long for the editors at the new york times to get word of what ryzen was planning i began to hear through the grapevine that he might include the nsa story in the book so that led to a series of you know very awkward conversations with jim the editors were furious at me they thought i was being insubordinate he had a gun to their head they are really being forced to reconsider the papers gonna look pretty pretty bad [Music] that led to uh this massive game of chicken uh between me my book me my book and the new york times over the next few months inside the times the editor who had killed the story 12 months earlier now faced a hard choice because we had to either decide we're still not ready to run this story or the situation has changed sufficiently that we are ready to run the story in which case we better get the story you know in the best possible shape and let the administration know on a frigid december evening editors bill keller phil taubman and new york times publisher arthur salzberger were summoned to the white house it was indeed a dark and stormy night i remember it it was dark and it was stormy and we were in the oval mr solzberg began to speak and the president said i'm going to go first i want to talk to you about this program i want to talk to you about why this is important why we think it saves lives and why it should not be made public the president turned the meeting over to general hayden for one of his famous briefings it's hard to brief in the oval you know you can't no visual aids hard to roll out something in front of somebody so i gave him the best explanation of the program i could but i did bring up specific examples the example he gives them is a plot in which uh radical is planning to bring down the brooklyn bridge apparently with a device similar to a blowtorch and it actually kind of makes the times editors kind of scratch their heads because they think this is kind of uh surprising that somebody could sit there with a blowtorch or something like that and and and bring down the brooklyn bridge without anybody noticing him and stopping him first seemed absurd to them i think arthur believes that the president may have cracked a smile on when the when the bringing down the brooklyn bridge item came up but maybe that's just a wishful memory the president then played his trump card threatening that the new york times would be responsible for the next attack he said you know listen if you guys published this article and there is another 911 we're going to be called before congress to explain how we failed to prevent it and you should be in the chair beside us explaining because you'll be complicit in allowing damage to our country he was saying in effect you arthur salzburger will have blood on your hands if there's another attack that could have been prevented by this program [Music] you know i think anybody would feel goosebumps the new york times broke the story about the national security nevertheless the times decided to publish the story revealing the existence of the program four years now the nsa has been secretly spying on its own citizens the new york times story in december 2005 just shocked the world the extent of unchecked domestic surveillance is far greater than previously it is the definition in most people's minds of illegal government activity with the bombshell of a story in the new york times today than the nsa they were in crisis mode at the white house all eyes were on president bush we call it the big paws [Music] okay when stuff like this goes public what's the big guy going to do is he going to man up and support you or suddenly get reflective on you and for once the president actually decides he's going to come out and address it directly he goes on the offensive to try to push back against critics who said he went too far it would be a first an admission the program existed this is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the united states our friends and allies the president comes out and and minimizes what he describes as the program and um he gives a very truncated description of what they're doing that sounds you know i think probably not too worrisome to most americans i authorize the national security agency consistent with u.s law and the constitution to intercept the international communications of people with known leaks links to al qaeda and related terrorist organizations it was the least controversial and smallest element of the program there was no reference to the massive gathering of domestic communications data his characterization of the fact was simply wrong and it was wrong from the beginning the program wasn't to surveil known suspects known conspirators you could easily get a warrant for that the program was to sift big data was to trawl through enormous volumes literally trillions of telephone calls trillions of emails and to look for unknown conspirators once again it would be left to general hayden to brief the press he too minimized the scale of the program this is targeted this is focused this is about al-qaeda one end of any call targeted under this program is always outside the united states when they ask questions about how widespread the program was he confined it to this little part of the program that had leaked and did not address all the other parts that were far worse that had not leaked there was no mention that the nsa was tracking telephone calls and emails inside the united states and hayden even dismissed the idea that there had been any internal dissent about the program not a single employee of the national security agency has addressed a concern about this program to the nsaid should also add that no member of the nsa workforce who has been asked to be included in this program has responded to that request with anything except enthusiasm general hayden's press conference introduced many of the tactics that the administration has used to deflect questioning and also to mislead the public and i was amazed at what he was saying because it was not truthful it was misleading and that was the beginning of the spinning and the lies bush heads to the nsa as part of his week-long glitch to defend his controversial wiretapping program yesterday it was the president today the attorney general speaks out on the matter will visit one of the nation's most secret buildings today at the national security agency thomas drake was watching the white house's reaction carefully drake watches what top levels of the u.s government saying about this program and he thinks they're lying i realized that they were lying that they were desperate to protect the domestic surveillance program he knows it's much more than what they're describing and and and and this makes him mad the far larger program was the dragnet surveillance the vast bulk copy of millions and millions of phone records email records internet usage and financial transactional and credit card information drake had been complaining internally about the program for more than four years now he said he had run out of options all the internal proper channels had been exhausted the one final choice was to actually touch the third rail and go to the press drake decided to act on his own without the thin thread team he'd reach out to a newspaper reporter siobhan gorman worked for the baltimore sun he just reaches out to her in a way that he thinks is secret using all kinds of protected hush mail to tell her he wants to talk to her and might have documents to share with her drake said that he would only provide unclassified material it's a pretty classic whistleblower kind of move that he makes and he's careful he thinks not to violate any kind of national security laws in in reaching out to her gorman will not acknowledge that drake was her source but she says she knows why she received the leaks there were a number of people at nsa that were just very unhappy and i think that the revelation of warrantless surveillance probably did loosen up some concerns that some people inside nsa might have had at first drake remained completely anonymous communicating entirely by encrypted email she had no idea who i was i ultimately was referred to as just a senior official it was sort of an agreement as to how she would couch who i was in her reporting but i was a deep i was a deep source baltimore sun reports today that the nsa rejected and so i provided her unclassified information about the secret surveillance program gorman would write a series of lengthy stories a deep investigation into the nsa thin thread and the warrantless surveillance of millions of americans foreign but drake wasn't the only leaker other stories broke the high ranking the new york times revealed the story of that standoff in attorney general ashcroft's hospital room and a leak to usa today revealed the government had been collecting the phone records of tens of millions of americans vice president cheney was furious he was determined to stop the leakers you've known dick cheney i've known him for a long time he was always upset about leakers so it wasn't this was not out of character fit within the character that he was whether he was secretary of defense or chief of staff to the president the investigation would be run by the fbi a massive manhunt for the leakers led by the new attorney general alberto gonzalez they had broke the law they leaked classified information that's against the law the the job of the department of justice to prosecute those who break the law the agents began their investigation across the street at the department of justice itself calling everyone who had worked with the fisa court including thomas tan then he starts getting phone calls from this fbi agent jason lawless at work he's ducking the calls terrified tam refused to return the calls i was preoccupied with what was going to happen to me and when you know when it was going to happen what was going to happen if it was going to happen and finally um wallace gets them on the phone and says hey this will only take a few minutes but tan panicked and quickly sealed his fate i told him that i chose not to talk to him i chose to exercise my rights under the constitution to not be a witness against myself and of course i knew that you know that immediately would send up red flags and that i would immediately be their primary suspect thomas tam resigned from the justice department he began to wait for a federal indictment a story that has now triggered a justice department in cambridge massachusetts jack goldsmith had settled in as a professor at harvard law school one morning he was summoned to a meeting in harvard square with two fbi agents as we were sitting down at the table over coffee one of the agents sort of sheepishly handed me a manila envelope and he said that it was a subpoena to be for a grand jury investigation into the leak of the new york times and he was very embarrassed and sheepish about this the subpoena was issued under the leadership of attorney general alberto gonzalez it seemed particularly ironic that the justice department was coming after me for illegal actions or allegedly illegal actions or possibly illegal actions taken in connection with this program by the summer of 2007 it had been more than 18 months since the fbi had begun its investigation they had little to show for it they decided to up the ante they would conduct a series of early morning raids on the houses of their primary suspects at nine o'clock eastern standard time the fbi with guns drawn raids the homes of benny and weeby and out on the west coast they raided the home of diane brourk waking her up it was quite shocking in fact they went through the whole house and went through every every book every paper every every drawer turned the mattress over you know it was it was quite shocking it's nine o'clock in the morning and i see these blue uniform with gold fbi on the back people coming across left to right and i said well it sent a chill through me immediately well at first i knew the fbi was in my house was the guy pointing a gun at me when i was coming out of the shower they took uh my computer all all the electronic hardware discs and things that go with that any kind of electric electronic storage device and they also took some of my magazines technical magazines and papers and things like that and then they hit one more ed loomis my my life was in a shambles at that point i my wife was hysterical she couldn't believe what had just occurred i couldn't believe what just occurred and i had no no insight into why it had you know this button is nsa's second highest award and i wonder what it was that i did personally so wrong that i deserve this kind of treatment here i am an eagle scout a retired scout master and a devout patriot and my patriotism is being questioned by the government that i'd serve for 43 years i i just couldn't it just didn't make sense to me you you feel pretty low your self-esteem takes a big hit there's discord in the family because kids family wife may ask you well what did you do to bring this upon the house it tore me up i it i was i was i became a recluse pretty much uh i cut off virtually all social contact with friends it was it was rough very rough ed probably took it worse in terms of cost to family and self physically mentally because ed went into the shadows he became a recluse quiet um he lost his wife it's it's still eating at me but i've i've i've told my family i've told my i told my father before he passed away i know i've done nothing wrong [Music] the fbi considered them persons of interest for leaking to the new york times but they all insisted they hadn't and new york times reporter james risen agrees i didn't know any of them and i just felt badly that they were getting caught up in something that was completely unrelated i knew that couldn't be true that that was just collateral damage tom drake's home was not raided by the fbi that day but drake had the feeling that he was next almost six months goes by and drake still hasn't been raided but then on the morning of november 28th 2007. i'm seeing these cars pull up as i look out the window just after 7 a.m in the morning and there's a dozen fbi agents and my heart's up in my throat because i realize it's now me the fbi search warrant said that they were looking for evidence that drake was the new york times leaker drake being drake sits down at his kitchen table with the fbi agents without a lawyer present and spends the entire day trying to convince them that the real culprits are the people at the nsa who have run this illegal program so i told them everything i could but they didn't want to hear about that they wanted to hear about the new york times and sources the fbi carted away drake's computers and boxes of his papers drake waited a few months later in april 2008 drake gets a summons to go meet with somebody who is described as somebody very important the meeting was with federal prosecutor stephen terrell when drake sits down terrell says to him mr drake you are screwed terrell had no hard evidence drake ever spoke to the new york times or that he had given any classified material to the baltimore sun nevertheless darrell said the fbi had discovered classified documents on drake's computer and in his basement a felony he proceeded to tell me how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison mr drake unless you cooperate with our investigation we have more than enough information to put you away for a long long time you better start talking and they talked numbers you know 478 months 35 years the government said he would have the blood of soldiers on his hands for what he did terrell wanted drake to confess and admit that he was the center of a conspiracy involving rorke binney and the others i was not going to plead out and he was all ticked off and he says well we'll just have to go with what we got drake and the others faced decades in federal prison and at least tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills desperate they came to believe they had only one chance [Applause] as it happened 2008 was a presidential election year and there was one candidate who was promising a change are you fired up ready to go fired up ready to go no more secrecy that's a commitment i make to you as president he's promising to be the most transparent administration history he believes that there's been too much secrecy he made a real point of owning these kinds of arguments both as a senator and then on the campaign trail it's time for us to change america and that's why i'm running for president barack obama even embraced the importance of whistleblowers obama throughout his history as a champion of whistleblowers arguing that they're the folks who help make government better and reveal conduct that if not is illegal uh is questionable i certainly had a lot of hope and i had a lot of hope for hope and change but i actually thought that somebody might say you know you actually did the right thing this administration and when it came to the secrecy surrounding the creation of the program obama was forceful i will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our constitution and our freedom that means no more illegal wiretapping of american citizens it's not a calibrated statement this is a political statement this is in his words surveillance state run amok no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient that is not who we are and it's not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists it was like he was back at the university of chicago as a constitutional scholar you know he he sounded like an aclu lawyer at the white house in the waning months of the bush administration they were determined to find a way to make the program permanent the debate shifted pretty quickly to congress in terms of debating whether or not the administration should get the power to do what they were doing the president decided to try to convince congress to enshrine the program into law for president bush is really a significant reversal he's decided he needs congress to back up what he's done he in effect is abandoning his claim that he has the power under article two of the constitution to do this without congress the administration proposed to amend the fisa law and insisted it was reform but insiders knew it granted the nsa unprecedented power the fisa amendment act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al qaeda it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes so in a sense the vice amendment act not only validates the terrorist surveillance program it expands it at the united states congress the administration secretly made the case for the bill at closed hearings of the intelligence committees you had to read it very very closely to understand what they were doing and i don't think people knew what actually the intent of that was the intent of that was to make legal all of the programs that the attorney general uh the fbi director had said they had a problem with publicly the president would press lawmakers with a familiar warning pass this law or americans could die without this law our ability to prevent new attacks will be weakened and it will become harder for us to uncover terrorist plots we must not allow this to happen it is time for congress to pass a law candidate barack obama now faced a choice would he vote against the president's bill i remember when uh the bill came forward there was some uh discussion as to whether or not he would support it the senate is expected to vote on a controversial measure he was thinking ahead to the general election and how he was a young senator with a lot not a lot of national security experience and how he needed to be seen as being tough on these issues in private a tougher more determined obama was emerging i remember the first conversation i ever had with him during the campaign i said look when you become president you have to kill people and are you willing to pull the trigger are you willing to do that side of the job and he got very silent and looked at me in a very steely kind of way and said i know that and i can do that u.s senate a returning final vote on the fisa bill setting new rules for electronic surveillance and now obama had a chance to enhance his national security to eavesdrop credentials both domestic and international communications for all of his criticism in the past for all of his background as constitutional lawyer and civil libertarian he chooses to accept the rather expansive law and he votes for it mr obama uh senator obama getting a lot of heat for this vote much of it from his own senator barack obama voted for the surveillance bill despite his opposition to it in the past [Music] off to work for president obama it's a busy first day takes over two wars a staggering economy and a soaring federal budget six months later barack obama was the new president and the on national commander-in-chief right from the stadium and other military advisors the first time that barack obama ever learns about the full scale of this program is an early briefing in the situation room about all of the data that the nsa is collecting in these domestic surveillance programs the point of the briefing was to provide the president and the new national security team at the white house with an overview of how these programs worked what the value of the programs was the legal structures that supported the programs what the authority was he was told about the trillions of phone calls emails and internet data that had been secretly gathered as we talked about these programs the way they were used in particular the value of the collection of content of an extraordinarily vital tool that that the idea was all right this is a really important program we need to maintain it the president's closest advisors insisted the program was necessary there was very strong view in the intelligence community that this was an important program that it did fill an important gap the new president faced a decision whether to dramatically restrict the program i think that the president approached this with the degree of seriousness that you would hope and expect from the president of the united states when you get into office when you're the man when you're in the white house you don't want to give up any tools that you inherit you don't want to give up anything that might get you that one fact that will stop an attack he made his decision the program would continue he had a chance to say well that's too far let's let's not sweeping quite so many people who don't have anything to do with terrorism as part of this broad sweep and he chose to keep the programs largely intact i'm not aware of any case in which obama pushed back hard and said you can't do that convinced the program was effective and necessary obama would now own it at the nsa they were now spending more than 10 billion a year on capturing communications of people around the world the nsa was on the verge of what it came to call the golden age of electronic surveillance because there was so much more communication so much more data so much better computer capacity to process it and it was there for the taking to run the operations the nsa relied on a number of private contractors companies that could provide highly skilled computer programmers and engineers the nsa cia and other intelligence services suddenly realized that they needed people with those kind of skills twenty-five-year-old edward snowden was one of them a high school dropout snowden had grown up just 20 minutes from the nsa he grew up in in the community where lots of people who are in the military in the intelligence community live his father was on the coast guard for 30 years if you've been to a ron paul rally you've seen lots of people who look exactly like edward snowden you're a young clean-cut student you know passionate passionate about the constitution snowden had enlisted in the army but left after breaking both of his legs in training and he had the reaction after 9 11 that a lot of patriotic young americans had which is i'd like to do my part and that brought him to the nsa and the cia and the worlds of secret intelligence by 2009 snowden was working as an nsa contractor in japan the job provided him extensive access to the details of nsa operations he really began to understand the true scope of how much the nsa had gotten its hands into the backbone of the internet the more snowden saw the more disturbed he became it was a gradual accumulation of evidence and of observations that led him to think something's going wrong here the balance is out of whack the surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than i would have imagined and far greater than the american public has been able to debate one of the key documents snowden discovered a classified inspector general report detailing the history of the program it tells the entire secret history of the program it talks about addington and hayden writing the authorization for the program according to general hayden the vice president's council david addington drafted the first authorization talks about the rebellion at the justice department consequently the white house counsel rather than the attorney general signed the 11 march 2004 authorization it's the entire unadulterated history of these programs and he told me that reading the inspector general's report had made a big impression on him he felt like people had done things that were wrong and had not been held accountable for them no more and under president obama snowden watched as the program continued his hope was that obama would be a force for transparency and that's not what happened and that was another of the pivotal moments in which snowden realized it was going to have to be him as snowden was deciding exactly what to do obama's justice department began to address those bush-era leak investigations led by attorney general eric holder what's interesting is that these cases from the bush era linger on they don't just throw them out they they revisit them and they keep keep going after the enemies of national security agencies much as they've done under bush despite the campaign rhetoric in support of whistleblowers president obama did nothing to stop the prosecutions this president personally really doesn't like people leaking classified information he takes that very seriously and he thinks that we should all take it very seriously in every conversation that obama had that i have heard about he said when it comes to national security you leak classified information that could endanger people we're going to come down on you like a ton of bricks and when the bricks fell they landed on thomas drake they couldn't indict us all so they went after the one that they could at least show an example to the rest of the intelligence analysts you speak you go to the press you're going to get hammered these were the lessons that were coming supposed to come out of being rated and then in tom's case indicted on april 14 2010 thomas drake was finally charged i was arraigned before i was arraigned before the judge i was fingerprinted you know by the u.s marshals with the fbi you know agent watching um you know i was i was a direct threat to the national security of the united states i truly had become an enemy of the state drake was charged with violating the espionage act and i'm facing a distinct prospect of having the rest of my life spent behind bars effectively as he waited for his day in court drake's life began to fall apart he spent two years draining all his resources on a private attorney and then when he had no more money he had to go to a public defender he was extraordinarily lonely i mean life had become already extremely difficult all the income i had all retirement's gone your life is turned upside down your persona non grata i ended up finding work initially part time then full time at an apple store at the center of the government's case were those documents found at drake's house prosecutors insisted they were classified drake's lawyers turned to author james bamford i was hired as a consultant by the defense and was able to find basically all the information that they were charging him with it was already in the public domain not only that it had been placed in the public domain by the government government itself i looked at the stuff that he was indicted for that material was clearly marked unclassified it was not stamped classified until after it was seized from tom drake's home and all they did was draw a line through it and classified that material and so then they charged him with having classified material it's like framing him and we're going to frame you after the fact the government later insisted the documents drake had contained national secrets and were covered by the espionage law but then just days before the trial was to begin the charges against drake were dropped it was astounding basically drake went from someone charged with such serious crimes that he could spend the rest of his life in prison to having it bargained down because the justice department could see it was falling apart to a misdemeanor where he spent no time at all in prison drake agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor unauthorized use of a government computer he was charged a 25 court fee put on probation for a year and given community service none of the other suspects in the leak investigation were ever charged [Music] it had been more than 10 years despite the revelations of insiders like drake and the news reports about the program there was little public outrage and few congressional critics the program was continuing to grow but at a secret bunker in hawaii edward snowden was now working for a new nsa contractor snowden was initiating his own move to expose the program fbi has raided the offices established to protect federal whistleblowers snowden studied carefully the actions of the other whistleblowers the thin thread group and especially what he learned from drake and benny is that you can be discredited or people won't know whether to believe you if you don't have proof and it was because of that that he decided it had to be documents and it had to be a lot of documents new york times broke the story after holding it for a year and unlike tam snowden would not go to the new york times paper faces questions about why it held that story snowden was disgusted at the new york times for you know having that story before the election sitting on it for month after month and hit a real antipathy towards the new york times as a result of the way it behaved over uh ryzen instead of the new york times snowden would reach out to glenn greenwald laura poitras and barton gelman and he would begin systematically copying and giving them documents that held many of the united states most closely guarded secrets snowden had clearances for human intelligence he had clearances for many many compartments of electronic surveillance and he had a third set of powers which is actually called super user it's a very potent combination that opened many many doors to him here is this low-level analyst who is able to access if you believe the government 1.7 million documents and walk out of the agency with them without them having the slightest idea that it was taking place this was a stupendous intelligence breach this was the largest collection of classified information the largest leak of classified information that had ever occurred in the history of the united states or indeed the history of the world for the national security agency the biggest threat to the program was just beginning nsa has collected millions of contact lists hundreds of thousands of email address books every day could allow the nsa to map out a person's life [Music] a user [Music] for more on this and other frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org frontline frontline's united states of secrets is available on dvd to order visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800 play pbs frontline is also available for download on itunes [Music] you

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

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Length: 113min 17sec (6797 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021