Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake

“We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a
national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak
prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the
emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a
half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret
clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a
reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate
partnerships with the government that have transformed the
counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin
says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second
term of the Bush Administration.”