(HigginsBlog) – Diane Roark, accused by Bush of leaking the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, is suing the government for violating her constitutional rights

Since the NSA was revealed to be secretly wiretapping the conversation’s of many millions of common ordinary Americans in 2005 the federal government still hasn’t figured out who originally leaked the story to the press.

One of the Bush Administration’s suspects is Diane Roark who war raided by the Fed’s and had her personal computer equipment and other personal property seized.

Now over a half of a decade later the government still hasn’t pressed any charges against as she continues to standby her claims of innocence.

While she openly admits she brought her concerns about the illegal constitutional violating activities of the Bush administration to her superiors in the NSA she denies ever divulging the information to the press.

Now she has filed a lawsuit demanding that her seized property be returned and her named be cleared of any wrong doing.

Wired reports:

A former congressional staffer and NSA whistleblower who the authorities suspected of exposing the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program is suing the government, saying her constitutional rights are being violated because her computer seized five years ago has never been returned, and the feds have refused to clear her name.

In a Wednesday telephone interview, Diane Roark, 63, a former senior staffer at the House Intelligence Committee, said she was privy to the warrantless wiretapping the administration adopted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“I found about it. I knew about it. They knew I knew about it. I told everybody they needed to put civil liberties protections on it or eliminate it,” she said from her home outside Salem, Oregon.

But she emphatically denied she divulged it to the press. “I have absolutely no idea who did that,” said Roark, who retired in 2002. “My reputation has been completely smeared.”

Five years ago, the feds, suspecting that she leaked the program to The New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2005 story, searched Roark’s three-acre property. The authorities took her computer and printer. The printer was later returned, but the computer was not.

Her suit, (.pdf) filed last week in Oregon federal court, demands the return of her property, and she also claims her due process rights are being breached because the government has never cleared her of wrongdoing.

[...]

The so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program was first disclosed by The New York Times in December 2005, and the government subsequently admitted that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on Americans’ telephone calls without warrants if the government believed the person on the other line was overseas and associated with terrorism. The government had also secretly enlisted the help of major U.S. telecoms, including AT&T at its Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, to spy on Americans’ phone and internet communications without getting warrants as required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

After the secret program was finally submitted to a court for approval, the program was quickly found to be illegal. Congress subsequently legalized much of the program, in a bill that expires at year’s end. Committees in both the House and Senate have approved nearly identical bills extending the powers for roughly five years.

Roark and three former NSA officials wrote the inspector general of the Defense Department in 2002 that the NSA had “defrauded the American taxpayer of hundreds and hundreds of millions.” According to the Washingtonian, the NSA was “investing in a computer system known as Trailblazer, which was designed to help the NSA pluck valuable clues on terrorist plots from the billions of phone calls, e-mails, and other electronic signals it intercepts on a regular basis.”

One of the whistleblowers was Thomas Drake, who the feds subsequently alleged to have “mishandled” classified documents in a rare Espionage Act prosecution that some suggested was brought because of his criticism of the now-canceled “Trailblazer” project. All charges were dropped last year and he pleaded guilty to a count of exceeding authorized use of a computer and sentenced to one-year probation and 240 hours of community service.

[...]

Source:Wired

Here’s more from whistle-blower Thomas Drake referenced in the Wired article above.

Source: Higgins Blog

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