WASHINGTON — In a highly unusual legal action against an alleged leaker of government secrets, a federal grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.

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The F.B.I. executive assistant director in charge of national security, Arthur M. Cummings II, said the bureau would continue to aggressively pursue such leak investigations.



But Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a press advocacy group, called the indictment "unfortunate."

"The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will," she said.

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The indictment, handed down on Wednesday by a grand jury in Baltimore, does not name either the reporter who received the information or the newspaper, but the description fits articles written by Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that examined in detail the failings of several major N.S.A. modernization programs and problems with supplying its huge electric power demands. Some of her articles were honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists.

The N.S.A., which monitors phone calls, e-mail messages and other electronic communications, had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to update its systems to collect and sort the huge amount of data it was collecting. The modernization programs were plagued with technical failures and cost overruns, and Ms. Gorman, who now works for The Wall Street Journal, was the reporter who most aggressively covered the problems.

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But because the articles in question documented government failures and weaknesses, the prosecution could raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from public scrutiny.

If Ms. Gorman’s articles were indeed those involved in the case, Ms. Dalglish said, they exposed "a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that was of great interest to Congress." She called the articles "important public-interest reporting."

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