Thomas Drake, a former crypto-linguist and senior executive at the National Security Agency, was indicted under the Espionage Act several years ago for sharing classified information with a reporter about a secret surveillance program. The Justice Department eventually dropped the felony charges, and he pleaded guilty to exceeding authorized use of a computer, and had to do some community service.

By day he works at the Genius Bar at an Apple store in Maryland. By night he’s getting his Ph.D. He also gives speeches and has become one of the most vocal opponents of the government’s surveillance programs and its prosecution of people who share classified information with the press.

“The blanket of national security has become the state religion; you do not question it,” he told Al Jazeera America in an interview. “It’s obviously extremely dangerous, especially under the Obama administration, to say anything about government conduct, particularly that which violates the law. They come after you with everything they’ve got.”

Drake was informing on the agency to Congress. He’d become a source for congressional committees investigating waste and intelligence failures. His testimony was suppressed, but he felt pressure to switch to a different position that didn’t deal with sensitive classified material. In 2007, FBI agents raided his car, his office and his house.

He said he knew when reporters started publishing stories about surveillance programs that he would get caught up in the dragnet. Having spent years working in government intelligence, including time on communist East Germany, he said he recognized that “the Stasi way of keeping track of its own people would be the primary template of the (U.S.) government” and believed the Justice Department wanted to make an example of him by charging him under the Espionage Act.

“I knew they wanted to set an extremely dangerous precedent,” Drake said. “I knew I was behind several eight balls. At the point I was indicted I had run out of money; I was declared indigent before the federal district court. I had to cast my lot with the public defenders because no one else would come to my defense. No one.”

Like Kiriakou, Drake has five children. Living with the indictment hanging over his head was “a nightmare,” he said. He is reserving many details about how it is affecting his personal life for a documentary coming out next year. But he said that part of the burden of living with that indictment at the time was the knowledge within his family of “the fears and uncertainty” that he might be going to jail, and “you’re the one that brought this all upon us, it’s your fault. There is that dynamic.”

“It’s splashed all over the front pages of newspapers; I’m dealing with family members who questioned me, saying, ‘They charged you with espionage, you must have done something,’” Drake recalled. “There were few people who would have contact with me. You’re isolated from your natural allies. I was literally standing alone.”

He called it “the white-hot spotlight.” People said he was a traitor. “There were people … in Congress looking forward to seeing me in an orange jumpsuit.”

He traveled to San Antonio several times to see his father, who was “having great difficulty understanding why they’d gone after his son,” Drake said. “Everything is gone. I’ve lost it all. He was trying to get his arms around why.”

Today he estimates his loss of income and legal fees for his defense at close to $1 million. “I put every ounce of energy into keeping my freedoms,” he said.

Should Snowden return to the United States? Drake raised his voice as he answered emphatically: “No.”

“Why would he? He had to escape the United States to keep some semblance of freedom and to disclose what he needed to disclose. He saw what happened to me. He saw what happened to Kiriakou. He saw what happened to (Stephen) Kim and (Jeffrey) Sterling and (Chelsea, formerly known as Bradley) Manning.”

Drake believes Snowden would face even worse circumstances than Manning, who was convicted this year of multiple violations of the Espionage Act and is now serving 35 years in jail with the possibility of parole in eight years.

The Obama administration, said Drake, is “apoplectic” about everything Snowden has revealed, and “want(s) to get (its) hands on him in the worst possible way.”

“They would have yanked him off the street,” Drake said, adding that he believes any attorneys assigned to Snowden’s case would have had great difficulty getting access to him.

In a statement to ProPublica in July, the Justice Department said it does not target whistle-blowers. “However, we cannot sanction or condone federal employees who knowingly and willfully disclose classified information to the media or others not entitled to such information.” The leaker or whistle-blower is not the owner of such information, the Justice Department argued, and therefore cannot unilaterally release it.