Daniel Hale blew the whistle on the US drone programme, allowing the public to understand for the first time how strikes are authorised, how the system works for those embedded in it, and its overwhelming inaccuracy. Documentary evidence Hale passed to journalists shows that, during one five-month period, nine out of every ten individuals killed in US drone strikes were unintended casualties – innocent civilians.

Hale’s disclosures were published by the Intercept as part of a multi-part 2015 investigation titled The Drone Papers. A book, The Assassination Complex, followed. It included a chapter titled “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,” which Hale subsequently admitted to writing.

On 27 July 2021, Daniel Hale was sentenced to three years and nine months in federal prison, having pleaded guilty to one charge of sharing classified information with a journalist. Like many national security whistleblowers before him, Hale was not permitted to raise a principled defence to the Espionage Act charges he faced – he could not raise his motivations for leaking documents, the inappropriate nature of their classification or the selective nature of his prosecution.

The Espionage Act does not permit the accused to present any information about the context or circumstances of their disclosures. The only defence a whistleblower is effectively allowed to offer is: “I didn’t do it.” In such circumstances, whistleblowers like Hale often feel they have little choice but to agree to a plea deal. This is one of the major reasons why many observers argue this law should be reformed.

Daniel Hale’s disclosures were indisputably important. Thanks to information he provided, the Intercept’s reporting outlined for the first time how targets for drone strikes were authorised unilaterally by the United States, a process which involved the president himself. The disclosures also underlined the drone program’s dependence on metadata – information drawn from phone and other online communications – to identify and track its targets. The potential inaccuracies of this approach were well known to those, like Hale, who were tasked with dealing with this information.

As a result, US drone strikes in reality were far from the “targeted” and “surgical” tool described by politicians. Analysts could find that they had misidentified the owners of the devices they were tracking. The overwhelming majority of those killed by drone strikes would be innocent civilians, something that the US military tried to systematically misrepresent by deeming all casualties as “enemies killed in action”, even where they were not the intended target.

While Hale was subject to investigation at the time the Intercept published his disclosures in 2015 and 2016, his prosecution had been dormant for several years before being revived by the Trump Administration in 2019. The unsealed indictment contained several Espionage Act charges, including one that treated the Intercept journalist Hale had dealt with, Jeremy Scahill, as an unindicted co-conspirator. These actions formed part of a broader pattern of threats to First Amendment rights pursued under President Trump.

In a written statement to the court ahead of sentencing in July 2021, Hale described the overwhelming sense of guilt he felt as part of the drone programme and his motivation for wanting to inform the public:

“I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe, and when I finally left the military, still processing what I’d been a part of, I began to speak out, believing my participation in the drone program to have been deeply wrong.”

Daniel Hale enlisted in the US military in 2009; the institution provided him with a way to escape the sometimes straightened circumstances of his upbringing and to gain an education. In 2012, he was assigned to the NSA and deployed to Afghanistan as an Intelligence Analyst, where he was involved in target identification for the drone programme. Hale’s work forced him to become aware of the problems in the way targets were selected, how strikes were ordered and the reality of their immediate aftermath. He has spoken about the difficulties he has experienced in coming to terms with what he observed.

In 2013, Hale left the military and used his security clearance to become a contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He found himself at odds with colleagues who were supportive of the drone programme but had little sense of what it entailed in practice. He became more outspoken in his criticisms of the US military. It was during this period that he first contacted Jeremy Scahill.

Hale pleaded guilty to one charge under the Espionage Act, admitting to disclosing 11 classified documents (8 secret, 3 top secret) to the media. On 27 July 2021, he was sentenced to 45 months in prison, making his the second longest sentence ever handed down for whistleblowing by a civilian court in the US. In his sentencing remarks Judge O’Grady recognised that Hale had wanted to speak out about the human costs of the drone programme, but said that he did not need to reveal classified documents to do so.

Although on bail, Daniel Hale had been imprisoned shortly before his sentencing due to concerns about his mental health. The abrupt nature of the move meant he had no chance to say goodbye to friends and family.

Upon his conviction, Hale was incarcerated at the Communications Management Unit (CMU) at Marion, Illinois. He is believed to be the first whistleblower in the US to be imprisoned in a CMU. These facilities are typically used for those serving sentences for terrorism-related offences. CMUs have some of the most onerous conditions in the US federal prison system – inmates are given very limited access to visitors, and communication with the outside world is severely restricted.Hale is allowed to make just two ten-minute phone calls a week.

The Intercept publications based on Daniel Hale’s disclosures caused the Obama administration to become more transparent about the civilian casualties of drone strikes, although the public remains largely dependent on external sources for information about a program that is still extremely secretive.

The US military does not appear to have remedied the problems identified by Daniel Hale. In September 2021, as its military forces left Afghanistan in haste, the US launched a final missile attack described by the Defense Department as a “righteous strike.”

The driver of the vehicle targeted was thought to be a terror suspect. Instead, he turned out to be an aid worker. The strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children. All those injured were civilians too. The US military had claimed that just three civilians were killed.

The top general of the US Central Command acknowledged from the Pentagon that the strike was “a terrible mistake”. A US official with expertise in the area described the 10 civilian deaths as an “astronomically high” number.

This final strike by the US and its allies in Afghanistan serves as an eloquent illustration of all that can go wrong with the drone program, as Daniel Hale revealed.

As militaries continue to invest in AI and autonomous weaponry, the evidence brought forward by Hale about the human cost of remote warfare, and the moral injury done to those engaged in it, will only grow in importance.

Congratulations to Daniel Hale for winning Blueprint’s International Whistleblowing Prize for 2021.