The Espionage Act: Why Tom Drake was indicted


(CBS News)

Nearly two years before 9/11, America's largest intelligence agency was tracking three of the Al Qaeda hijackers. But that information, obtained by the National Security agency, wasn't analyzed in a way that could uncover the plot.

Inside the super-secret NSA, several analysts and managers believed that the agency had a powerful tool that might've had a chance to head off 9/11, but it wasn't used.

As Scott Pelley first reported in May, one of those agency insiders was Thomas Drake, who thought that taxpayer money was being wasted on useless intelligence gathering projects while promising technology was ignored.

Drake tried to get the word out but, as a result, he was charged under the Espionage Act and accused of betraying his country. Drake says that the only thing he betrayed was NSA mismanagement that undermined national security.

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