Elon Musk and The Security State's Uvalde Moment

“We have a Constitutional crisis, period," says NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, who can't help but notice how the three-letter agencies that went after him aren't stopping this.  

Edited by Sam Thielman

JOHN VOORHEES AND BRIAN MCGILL are the exceptions that prove a highly sobering rule. 

Voorhees was the head of internal security for the U.S. Agency for International Development until Saturday. McGill was Voorhees' deputy. They're on administrative leave after attempting to prevent young minions of Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive and someone possessing zero Constitutional authority, from accessing personnel and security systems, "including classified systems" beyond their clearance level, per NBC News.

Voorhees and McGill did their jobs. In doing them, however, they exposed how few people within the vast, powerful and well-funded apparatus of "national security" are even trying to stop the acolytes of an unelected billionaire from rampaging through classified systems for nebulous purposes. And, to be clear, not only classified systems: They have seized the Treasury Department's payment systems, which threatens congressional government under Article 1; and see my friend Jessica Valenti's reporting on how they're deleting reproductive-health, LGBTQIA and domestic-violence data from the Centers for Disease Control and related government websites.

In many, many other contexts that we have seen, post-9/11, the Security State considers its classified systems so sacrosanct as to protect them at gunpoint. National Security Agency whistleblower Bill Binney was in the shower when the FBI raided his home and pointed a gun at his head. I am sure no one reading this newsletter needs a refresher on what happened to Chelsea Manning, or Daniel Hale, or Reality Winner, or Terry Albury: their whistleblowing was treated as espionage. That very recent history renders the complete inaction of the FBI in this high-stakes moment of Constitutional crisis not only conspicuous, but something like surrender. 

This is the FBI's Uvalde moment. The danger to the Constitution is running amok inside government buildings. But the Security State stands outside, deterred, and will present any number of rationalizations about how this isn't their job. With retaliatory purges underway at the bureau, the FBI looks, much like the CIA, as though it simply doesn't want to risk blowback from defending the Constitutional order. 

And not just them. With Trump promising to end what remains of the Justice Department's independence from the White House, what prosecutor is going to try to indict the Musk crowd for unauthorized access to classified information? Better to keep your head down and let Musk do what he's going to do than be a Voorhees or a McGill. And all of this is happening before Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are confirmed. 

"We have a Constitutional crisis, period," says Tom Drake, another NSA whistleblower, one who was charged with five counts under the same Espionage Act that Elon Musk doesn't need to lose sleep over. "This is not reform, it is a coup cloaked in bureaucracy." 

Drake, a former senior NSA executive who possesses one of the sharpest and fastest minds I have ever encountered, had his career and his finances destroyed over the exposure of post-9/11 warrantless surveillance. Fixated as I am on the discrepancy between how the FBI and its sister agencies treated him and how they're treating Musk’s cronies, I gave Drake a call. 

"As I watch the unfolding crisis surrounding Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration's blatant disregard for Constitutional norms, I am haunted by echoes of my own past battles with an unaccountable state," Drake says. (I have to interject that there is no "Department of Government Efficiency," just Musk's agenda, people and operations under a deceitful name.) "What we are witnessing now is not just history repeating itself. It is an escalation into dangerous new territory." 

Some of Drake's NSA whistleblower colleagues have gone over to MAGA territory. Not him. Drake, who has "lived through the crushing weight of government overreach," considers Trump not an overdue corrective for a corrupt system but a symptom and accelerant of its corruption. To him, the Constitutional order is "still worth fighting for," and that's coming from someone who fought for it against the post-9/11 NSA. 

I asked Drake what he wanted to tell his former Security-State colleagues. "They took an oath, like I did five times, to support and defend the Constitution," he replies. "That oath is to a piece of paper, it is to the ideals, the aspirations, for all its faults and foibles and challenges over the years, to a great experiment. It's an oath to support and defend—that's it. That's what makes us American, good, bad and indifferent. If you don't have that, we increasingly are no longer America, we become something else. It's an Amerika with a K. That's what we're facing. … We're seeing raw power now. I grew up in the 70s, with Nixon, with all the scandals."  

Yet, to Drake, Musk's "access to classified systems and sensitive data" is "perhaps one of the most egregious abuses of power I've seen in recent history. Granting a private citizen—someone with extensive corporate interests—unfettered access to government databases is a recipe for corruption and conflicts of interest on an unprecedented scale. It reminds me of when I witnessed how surveillance tools designed for national security were turned inward on American citizens after 9/11. Once that line is crossed, it becomes nearly impossible to walk back. What DOGE represents is not reform but consolidation of power—power concentrated in the hands of a few individuals who operate outside traditional checks and balances."

And not only is this a constitutional crisis, Drake continues, "it's also a national-security crisis. … It obviously affects [the] outside, but it's an internal national-security problem." 

Speaking for myself, I would say it highlights the poverty of the Security State's conception of "national security," and reveals how willing it is to expose Americans to death, detention, deportation and democratic demolition. Except, that is, for people like John Voorhees and Brian McGill. And, two decades earlier, Tom Drake. 

"The cost of inaction is staggering," Drake says. "When institutions fail to hold power accountable, they set precedents that erode democracy itself. After 9/11, the surveillance state expanded unchecked because no one had the courage to say no. That legacy persists today, enabling figures like Musk and Trump to exploit systems designed for accountability and turn them into tools for autocracy."

NOIR NEWS' IAIN CARLOS AND SAM CARLEN have confirmed, in a blockbuster piece, that the Justice Department and not just the Chicago police operated out of Homan Square. And I am absolutely kicking myself, because they found crucial evidence for that in the deposition of William Kilroy, one of the Chicago police officials whom my FOIA lawsuit deposed. My embarrassment aside, their piece is thorough, rigorous and righteous, doing the thing that I had expected/hoped would happen when I first did the Homan Square expose: that others would advance the ball further down the field. Bravo to Iain, Sam and Noir. 

Perhaps this helps explain why former Attorney General Loretta Lynch didn't include Homan Square in the Justice Department investigation of the Chicago police after the murder of Laquan McDonald. 

And it so happens that "Hellman Circle" is part of the setting for IRON MAN #4, currently available from Marvel Comics! I can reveal that all of issue #5, out later this month, is set at the warehouse. Check these issues out when you're done with Iain and Sam's story. 

DANIEL LARISON makes a crucial point about the role of the Coalescing China Cold War in the nakedly imperialist—down to the crisis-manufacture—Trumpian threats to seize the Panama Canal: 

The rivalry creates incentives to exaggerate Chinese power and influence to make China seem more menacing than it really is. “Chinese control” of the canal has been invented out of thin air to serve the larger story that China hawks want to tell about Beijing’s ambitions. Trump and the China hawks are fighting shadows of their own creation, and in the process they are doing real harm to U.S. interests in this hemisphere.

THE FIRST DEPLOYMENT OF SOLDIERS AND MARINES TO GUANTANAMO BAY under Trump's plan to cage 30,000 migrants there arrived this weekend, reports my friend Carol Rosenberg and her colleague Eric Schmitt. They note that as yet, no decision has been reached about caging some of them in the wartime detention facility, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that's a possibility.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.