I bring up ThinThread because the article paints Drake as someone who was motivated to blow the whistle based on the same concerns Snowden had. But that's not what happened. Both ThinThread and Trailblazer were in large part motivated by concerns that more and more SIGINT had a nexus in the US, and that large-scale systems needed to be implemented to capture intelligence that had a US nexus.

When you look at the Drake complaint to the NSA IG through the lens of Snowden, your natural reaction is that the NSA was pushing the concern aside out of C.Y.A., to prevent the public from learning that it was monitoring US comms. But in fact, Drake's complaint is about how Trailblazer was monitoring US comms; the privacy concerns it had were procedural and not substantive. It wasn't stark, the way the article makes it out to be.

I was imprecise about the word "concurrent". My frame of reference was "between the numbered steps in my outline". You're right to correct me. Either way, the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't the IG complaint that got Drake in trouble; it was the communication with reporters.

You can believe that the communications with the press were proper (I don't agree) or in the public interest to the extent that they overrode "proper" (I do agree). But either way, you should be able to agree with me that in an article that is entirely about what happens when insiders at NSA raise concerns through official channels, the fact that Drake got in trouble primarily for what he did through unofficial channels is important to the story, and should have been prominently included.