A former National Security Agency (NSA) official has been charged with giving classified documents on drone warfare to a journalist, amid a crackdown on government leaks by Donald Trump’s administration.

Daniel Hale is accused of leaking top secret files that were published by an online news outlet. The outlet was not identified by prosecutors, but the files described appear to match those published in a series by the Intercept.

Hale, 31, was indicted by a grand jury on five charges relating to the alleged leak. Each charge carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence. The US justice department said Hale was arrested on Thursday morning and would appear in court later in the day.

Authorities said Hale, of Nashville, Tennessee, worked as an intelligence analyst in Afghanistan for the NSA while serving as an enlisted airman in the US air force from 2009 to 2013.

He later worked as a contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Virginia, and allegedly began printing documents unrelated to his work. He allegedly provided at least 17 to the news outlet, 11 of which were marked “secret” or “top secret”.

The indictment said Hale met a reporter from the news outlet at an event in a Washington DC bookstore in April 2013 and soon began searching his NSA computer for classified information on subjects that the reporter wrote about.

Hale and the reporter allegedly communicated by telephone, email and text message over the following months. Emails and text messages sent to Hale by the reporter – some in the hours after Hale allegedly printed documents – were quoted in the indictment.

Prosecutors said Hale also repeatedly sent text messages to a friend excitedly discussing his early interactions with the reporter.

According to prosecutors, the reporter also told Hale to download Jabber, an encrypted messaging application. The pair are said to have had encrypted conversations on the program between communicating over less secure channels.

The Intercept declined to comment on its sourcing. But the site’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said in a statement that federal authorities were going after “whistleblowers who enable journalists to uncover disgraceful, immoral and unconstitutional acts committed in secret by the US government.

“At the Intercept, we stand firmly opposed to all such prosecutions,” Reed said.