Kirk Wiebe
NSA analyst who walked out alongside William Binney in 2001 in protest at how the agency's surveillance was being expanded.
J. Kirk Wiebe spent more than thirty years at the NSA, ending up at the SIGINT Automation Research Center, where William Binney and Ed Loomis built the ThinThread analysis system. It could sift huge volumes of traffic while keeping Americans' details encrypted until a court approved otherwise. Management chose the far costlier Trailblazer programme instead, and after 9/11 parts of ThinThread went into use with the privacy protections stripped out.
Wiebe, Binney and Loomis retired in October 2001. In 2002, together with congressional staffer Diane Roark, they reported Trailblazer to the Defense Department's Inspector General. In 2007 the FBI raided their homes while hunting a leaker. None of them was charged, unlike Thomas Drake.