An Oregon woman warned that the U.S. government was eavesdropping on its own citizens. Then it turned on her.
SPOOKED:
Diane Roark says she no longer feels secure in her home. “Every time at
night when I go around and lock the doors, I think, ‘Well, if they want
to get in…’” - IMAGE: Tom Patterson
Warrantless wiretapping may have faded from the headlines
with George W. Bush, but one Oregonian is determined to focus attention
on the federal government’s spying on its own citizens.
Diane Roark, 63, is
an unlikely activist. More comfortable with Dick Cheney than Noam
Chomsky, the Stayton mother of two spent over 20 years inside
Washington, D.C.’s, intelligence bureaucracy—not exactly an anarchist
breeding ground.
But since the summer day five years ago when a dozen FBI agents banged on her front door, Roark has been a different person.
On
July 26, 2007, she had planned to spend the day arranging an outdoor
wedding reception for her son on her 3 acres in Stayton, a town 12 miles
southeast of Salem.
But at 6 am the FBI came knocking. According to a 2011 investigation by The New Yorker,
the agents sought classified materials from the National Security
Agency—any top-secret documents that might prove Roark had told
newspaper reporters that the federal government was spying on its own
citizens without legal permission.
The agents took at least 10 boxes of papers, a Dell desktop computer, and a combination printer and fax machine.
“They wanted me to
sit on the couch in my bathrobe,” Roark says. “I said, ‘I’ve got work to
do.’” She changed her clothes, went outside and started weeding—under
armed FBI guard.
For most of her
career, Roark was more likely to be helping federal agents than serve as
their target. She worked as a Republican staffer on the House of
Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She pushed
to fund NSA programs to monitor phone calls, emails and Internet use by
possible terrorists abroad.
Roark grew up in Sublimity and remains a moderate conservative—a Glenn Beck book sits atop a cabinet in her home office. But for the past five years, the U.S. government has held her property without filing charges—because she admits to giving The Baltimore Sun
unclassified information about two surveillance programs that were
never implemented. NSA officials also suspected her of blowing the
whistle on a third wiretapping program used on American citizens. She
denies doing so.
In July, Roark filed
suit against the federal government in U.S. District Court in Eugene.
She wants her computer back—and she hopes to prove the NSA overstepped
its bounds.
“They want to keep
making my life as miserable as they can,” she says. “I think it’s a form
of punishment. They wanted to get me. They wanted to get me really
badly.”
Warrantless wiretapping may sound like ancient history. But a March 15 Wired magazine
report shows electronic surveillance has increased under President
Barack Obama, with a huge NSA data center under construction in Utah to
store the fruit of government spying.
And the federal
investigation of Roark—along with concurrent raids on four other
government employees who warned about NSA programs—has been continued by
the Obama administration.
“The broad-scale
surveillance that the government has been doing involves the private
affairs of millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong,” says Dave
Fidanque, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of
Oregon. “The only way we know what we do is because a handful of
government employees risked everything to let the American people know.
And the government’s response has not been to stop this surveillance,
but to do everything it can to identify these leakers and send them to
prison.”
Roark’s relations with the NSA were combative well before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“They were wasting an awful lot of money, so I got really tough,” she says. “They hated me.”
Roark criticized an NSA electronic surveillance program called Trailblazer, which The New Yorker
says cost at least $1.2 billion and didn’t work. Instead, she pushed
for a rival program called ThinThread, which Roark says kept the
personal information of Americans encrypted.
But in February 2002,
Roark says, she learned the NSA had instead employed a spy program that
discarded protections for U.S. citizens. Wired later revealed it was code-named Stellar Wind.
“I thought it was a
rogue operation,” Roark says. “I just could not conceive that, even in
the wake of 9/11, they would do this.”
She says she went to
her congressional leaders and the NSA’s director, Gen. Michael Hayden,
and asked why the protections against warrantless domestic wiretapping
had been abandoned.
“We had the power,” Roark recalls Hayden saying. “We didn’t need them.”
But Roark says she
didn’t take her frustrations to the press. She retired and moved back to
Oregon in 2003, feeling “responsible” for advocating technology used to
listen in on Americans.
In 2005, The New York Times
revealed the existence of Stellar Wind, and warrantless wiretapping
became a political disaster for the Bush administration. Roark says she
never spoke to anyone at the Times; she had, however, given unclassified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote about Trailblazer and ThinThread in 2006.
When the FBI first
contacted her, Roark assumed she’d be a cooperative witness for an
investigation of illegal wiretapping. “I had no idea I would become the
main target for it,” she says.
But when FBI agents grilled her in Washington, D.C., Roark realized she was a central suspect in leaks to The Times. Then came the raid on her house.
Based on the list of items in the FBI search warrant, Roark suspects agents had been inside her house before that morning.
“It makes you feel very insecure in your house,” Roark says. “It’s not your refuge.”
The FBI declined to comment. Hayden could not be reached. NSA officials referred WW
to remarks made in July by the agency’s current director, Gen. Keith
Alexander, who denied monitoring U.S. citizens. “Congress knows we’re
not doing that,” he said. “All branches of our government see that we’re
not doing it.”
Although she did not vote for him, Roark says she hoped Obama’s election would end her ordeal.
Instead, the new
administration has prosecuted leaks at an unprecedented rate—more
Espionage Act cases than all previous administrations combined,
according to The New Yorker.
“It has been very
depressing,” Roark says. “What occurs to me is, if they do this to
us—who are educated, who have at least some means to protect ourselves,
who have connections—what are they doing to the guy in the street?”
The ACLU’s Fidanque says local political activists should be troubled—but so should average citizens.
“I imagine most
activists figure they’re subject to surveillance and act accordingly,”
Fidanque says. “It’s the rest of us that ought to be outraged.”
Roark says she’s
already spent $30,000 in legal fees, and is looking for a pro bono
attorney. She’s also fighting breast cancer, now in remission. “The
literature tells you to avoid stress,” Roark says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah,
right.’”
She wants her
possessions returned and to contest the feds’ argument they can seize
property if it contains any classified information—or even information
that hasn’t been officially released. If she can’t stop the government
from spying on its citizens, she wants to make it harder for them to
keep it a secret.
“Anything they want
to cover up—and they have a lot they could cover up, including just
plain incompetence—they can say they’ll seize all your stuff,” Roark
says. “I just don’t understand why nobody cares about the Constitution.”
Roark leans back in a
deck chair and looks over the fir groves that surround her house.
Intruders are again invading: Some burrowing animal—probably a mole—is
digging next to her driveway.
She’s determined to fight on.
“I guess I figured out what I can do with my retirement now,” Roark says.
FACT: The NSA is the Department of Defense’s electronic spying operation. Its budget is classified, but estimated by Wired in the tens of billions.
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