This is I Spy, the show from foreign policy, where spies tell their stories.

I knew going to the press was always an option

except going to the press is fraught with enormous peril.

You're touching the third rail.

The last thing you want to do is be accused of going

to the precedent unauthorized manner. But I knew ultimately after every single

channel had been closed out, the only other place to go to was the fourth estate. And I knew as soon as I did

that it was a matter of when, not if. I would be picked up, arrested, and or raided by the FBI.

From foreign policy welcome to I spy.

Real life spy stories told by the people who were there.

On Today Show, Thomas Drake was a senior executive at the National Security Agency,

the Bureau within the U.S. government that eavesdrops on

global communications.

His first day on the job was September 11, 2001. The day Al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Drake was hired to deal with the glut of data created by the huge rise of internet use around the world.

But he grew increasingly troubled by something else.

The way the US government was targeting its own citizens for surveillance after 9-11.

The NSA was formed by Harry Truman in 1952.

And so it was a Cold War creation

and it had a major identity crisis

after the end of the Cold War, like who's the enemy because the existential

threat of communism and in particular the Soviet Union no longer existed.

...