Biography
Daniel Hale is a former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst and former contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He was assigned to the U.S. drone program at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2012-2013, where his work in target identification gave him direct knowledge of how U.S. drone strikes designated and killed people who were not on any approved kill list. Beginning in 2014 he provided classified documents to journalist Jeremy Scahill, which formed the basis of The Intercepts 2015 Drone Papers — the most consequential public disclosure of the U.S. drone-warfare apparatus.
He was charged in May 2019 under the Espionage Act of 1917, pleaded guilty in March 2021, and was sentenced on July 27, 2021 by U.S. District Judge Liam OGrady in Alexandria, Virginia to 45 months in federal prison — the second-longest sentence ever imposed on a U.S. civilian whistleblower. He served at the federal Communications Management Unit at Marion, Illinois, and was released in July 2024. Daniel E. Hale was a National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who was arrested and indicted on allegations that he disclosed classified documents about the U.S. military’s assassination program, believed to have been the source material for a series in the Intercept called “The Drone Papers.” On March 31, 2021, Hale pleaded guilty to a single count under the Espionage Act, on July 27, 2021, he was sentenced to 4 years in prison.
