By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, May 23, 2011

Thomas Drake is accused of releasing top-secret defense documents to a reporter. Is he a menace or a hero?

Besides going over Drake's history in detail, Mayer's article gets heavily into the Obama adminstration having tough stances on leaks of state secrets, with plenty of negative opinions offered about that.

However, I found this one example she gives of a possible reason to be quite interesting:

On March 28th, Obama held a meeting in the White House with five advocates for greater transparency in government. During the discussion, the President drew a sharp distinction between whistle-blowers who exclusively reveal wrongdoing and those who jeopardize national security. The importance of maintaining secrecy about the impending raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was likely on Obama’s mind. The White House has been particularly bedevilled by the ongoing release of classified documents by WikiLeaks, the group led by Julian Assange. Last year, WikiLeaks began releasing a vast trove of sensitive government documents allegedly leaked by a U.S. soldier, Bradley Manning; the documents included references to a courier for bin Laden who had moved his family to Abbottabad—the town where bin Laden was hiding out. Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy.”

There is also a great deal of interesting information in the piece from interviews with Bill Binney, a former N.S.A. "crypto mathematician," about his development  of "Thin Thread" for monitoring worldwide communications, and his worries about its misuse:

Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man....Now retired and suffering gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case. When we met, at a restaurant near N.S.A. headquarters, he leaned crutches against an extra chair. “This is too serious not to talk about,” he said.

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11.

ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”