A WHISTLEBLOWER who exposed the extent of the United States’ drone assassination programme was sentenced for 45 months today.

Daniel Hale, a former US Air Force intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in March to breaking the WWI-era Espionage Act when he leaked secret documents exposing the workings of president Barack Obama’s administration’s assassination programme to the media in 2015.

During his time in the air force between 2009 and 2013, Mr Hale worked in Afghanistan with the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) and military identifying people for drone-strike assassination by hacking the phones of suspected combatants and pinpointing their location.