Apparently, the government is scrambling in the Thomas Drake NSA whistleblower case.

According to Ellen Nakashima, they offered him two plea bargains yesterday, both involving no jail time. He rejected both.

Earlier, we learned that (thanks to Antonin Scalia) the word “suspicion” no longer means what it used to mean.

Now we learn that “protected” doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

As Josh Gerstein reports, the judge in the Thomas Drake case has agreed to let the government protect unclassified information using the Classified Information Procedures Act. But as Drake’s lawyers make clear, the process of substitution is making unclassified information look classified.

Lockheed may have prevented a much bigger breach into their own systems. But the assumption of many is that other companies might not have noticed what Lockheed did.

I’ve been reviewing the docket on Thomas Drake’s case to see whether it touches on the privacy concerns Drake had about NSA’s post-9/11 activities.

It appears it doesn’t. . . .

The government wants to put Drake in jail for 35 years because he tried to make sure incompetence that led to 9/11 doesn’t continue.

While Jane Mayer’s profile on NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has generated a lot of attention for the way Obama’s DOJ is senselessly prosecuting him, there has been less focus on the key revelation that Drake and others went on the record to reveal in Mayer’s story: that the NSA chose not to integrate the privacy protections from a program called ThinThread into its illegal domestic surveillance program.

The government’s making outrageous secrecy claims again, this time in the Thomas Drake NSA leak case.

Is Steny really suggesting that Congressmen are not aware of who their donors are, are not intimately familiar with how much they’re raking in from contractors?

I’ve written two posts on the software that Bradley Manning is alleged to have loaded onto SIPRNet (here, here). Wired has now gotten a little more detail about what the software was: DOD says it was some kind of data mining software, though they won’t say of what kind. Wired goes on to suggest that presence of the software may make it easier for the Department of Defense to prove intent with Manning.

HBGary’s past governmental work has been about cybersecurity–assessing malware and finding intrusions. But they’ve been proposing collecting information about citizens’ First Amendment activity to use to target those citizens. And the Air Force–that entity with a cybersecurity budget bigger than all of DOD’s cybersecurity budget–is the service that was engaging cybersecurity firms to develop persona management software.

But aside from that, why should we be worried that such dangerous entities are organizationally such a clusterfuck?