By NICK SCHWELLENBACH

Last month, The New Yorker magazine reported on how POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian told President Obama to his face that "prosecuting whistleblowers would undermine his legacy."

One of those whistleblowers being targeted is Tom Drake, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower who is less than a week away from his first day in court. Drake is being prosecuted not for sharing classified information with the media, but instead is being charged with having information—including UNclassified materials—in his possession that he used in cooperation with a Defense Department Inspector General audit of a program that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars and may have put your civil liberties at risk. As Danielle told the President, "Drake was exactly the kind of whistleblower who deserved protection."

Prosecuting whistleblowers for their cooperation with authorities will have a chilling effect throughout the federal government at a time when we need whistleblowers to identify waste, fraud, abuse, threats to our civil liberties, and other misconduct.