The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is advising its defense industry partners that whistleblowers who could expose government wrongdoing are as dangerous as terrorists and foreign spies.

According to a report Wednesday from The Daily Beast, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake was listed alongside “Ft. Hood killer Nidal Hasan, Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis, and FBI-agent-turned-Soviet-spy Robert Hanssen” in a list of “insider threats.”

Drake however is not a murderer or a spy. In fact, as we’ve previously noted, he was the victim of government harassment.

Here’s the story:

For his efforts of trying to reveal problems stemming from certain NSA data-collection efforts to his superiors and Congressional investigators, NSA management cut funding to programs under his control at the agency, marginalized him and increasingly scrutinized his every action. Having earned himself a scarlet letter within the intelligence community, Drake attempted a different approach and began communicating with a Baltimore Sun reporter with the condition that he would provide the journalist with no classified information. The Sun story, lacking revelations of classified information, simply documented the NSA’s continuance of a costly, ineffectual intelligence-gathering program — a $1.2 billion failure that reeked of agency fraud, waste and abuse. Resultant increased public awareness over how American intelligence officials are using taxpayer money served as a catalyst for a separate major story about the NSA in The New York Times, for which Drake was not a source. The story documented wiretapping and all manner of disregard for American privacy from the highest ranks in the NSA. It also sparked a “leak” investigation that gave government prosecutors a reason to go after Drake — who had done nothing but point out matters of unclassified public interest — for making bureaucrats look bad with the original Sun story. Drake’s house was raided by FBI agents, and he was forced out of his job at the NSA. The former intelligence official took work at a local Apple computer store and dealt with more than two and a half years’ of harassment by government investigators before the government decided to levy 10 separate charges against him. Five of the charges brought against him were justified under the Espionage Act — a 1917 piece of legislation intended to be used against spies. Eventually, with help from the Government Accountability Project, Drake was cleared of all charges related to the government’s goal of putting him in jail for “the rest of his natural life.” He pleaded guilty to a simple misdemeanor of “exceeding authorized use of a computer” and was sentenced to one year of probation and community service. While, perhaps, the justice system didn’t completely fail Drake in the end, the government he angered effectively dismantled his career and disrupted his life in terrible ways.

According to Drake, the government continues to attack him because officials are “still ticked that I escaped prison or any conviction as a felon, giving others hope because I kept my freedoms when under the gun after so many years — albeit at a very high professional and personal price.”