Former NSA Senior Official. "slippery slope toward a totalitarian state". MUST WATCH

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Former NSA Senior Official about Edward Snowden (From Netherlands but with Subtitles - MUST WATCH)

"Intent from the beginning, before 911, was to gather info on all Americans"

"I call it being on a slippery slope toward a totalitarian state"


Longer, different interview with Amy Goodman a few days ago.

As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warns the recent leaks could "render great damage to our intelligence capabilities," we speak to William Binney, a former top official at the National Security Agency, and Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has broken the NSA spying stories. Binney spent almost 40 years at the agency but resigned after Sept. 11 over concerns about growing domestic surveillance. He spent time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. "The government is not trying to protect (secrets about NSA surveillance) from the terrorists," Binney says. "It’s trying to protect knowledge of that program from the citizens of the United States."

Watch Part 2 of Interview with William Binney
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our coverage of the National Security Agency, we are speaking to Glenn Greenwald, who has been releasing this remarkable series of exposés based on Edward Snowden getting these documents from the National Security Agency. We’re joined now by former senior NSA official William Binney, as well, who was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician, largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network, one of the two co-founders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, resigned after the September 11th attacks, deeply concerned about the level of surveillance. Glenn Greenwald, again, still with us, who has broken the series.

Glenn, before we go to William Binney, can you talk about the latest revelation about the cyber-attacks that was your most recent exposé?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I mean, I—you know, we read this document, and it was somewhat remarkable because it set forth this very aggressive policy whereby the United States could wage what the document itself called "offensive cyberwarfare" against any other entity or any other nation in the world simply in the event that it advances U.S. interests—not if we’re being attacked, not if it was necessary to prevent an imminent attack, but simply if, in the judgment of the president or various members of his Cabinet, including the Defense Department, it was in the judgment of them that doing so would advance national interests, they had the right to wage cyberwarfare. And the Pentagon had declared cyberwarfare as an act of war, which is a really aggressive war doctrine that the president codified. It also talked about cyber-operations used domestically inside of the United States. There were no planning details, no blueprints for how these attacks would be waged. There was nothing harmful about publishing it. But it was an extraordinary policy that had been secretly adopted by the president with no debate. And we believe debate was warranted, and we therefore published it.

AMY GOODMAN: There is a great irony in Snowden revealing his identity from Hong Kong, President Obama at the time wrapping up a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California. The outgoing national security adviser, Tom Donilon, said Obama confronted Xi on U.S. allegations of China-based cyberpiracy, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, that was one of the main reasons why we published the article is because the Obama administration has spent three years now running around the world warning about the dangers of cyber-attacks and cyberwarfare coming from other nations like China, like Iran, like other places, and what is unbelievably clear is that it is the United States itself that is far and away the most prolific and the most aggressive perpetrator of exactly those cyber-attacks that President Obama claims to find so alarming. And as you say, we published the story on the eve of his conference with the president of China, in which the top agenda item, because of the United States’ insistence, was their complaints about Chinese cyber-attacks and hacking. And it just shows the rancid, fundamental hypocrisy of the statements the United States makes, not just to the world, but to its own people about these crucial matters.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring William Binney into the conversation, as well. William Binney, you quit after almost 40 years at the NSA, deeply involved in developing the whole surveillance mechanism, and yet you quit over it, as well. Your response to these series of revelations?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s certainly an extension of what I’ve been trying to say, that we were on a slippery slope to a totalitarian state. And that was simply based on the idea that the government was collecting so much information about all the citizens inside the country, that it gave them so much power. They could target people in the—for example, use it, use the knowledge to collectively assemble all of the people participating in the tea party, target them, and do—they could even do active attack on them with, going across the network, taking material out of their computers. So it was a very dangerous situation, in my mind. And still is.

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, when you quit over a decade ago, would you ever think it would get to this point, or were we at this point a decade ago, as well?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Actually, it started about then. I mean, certainly 2003 was important because of all of the Narus devices they were putting and other equipment that would allow them to take whatever was on the optical fiber network inside the United States. They deployed those and started collecting all that material, so that became—that was content coming in. Emails, voice over IP, all of that kind of material was coming in and being stored. And then, before that, starting right after 9/11, they started pulling in all of the call records, which, by the way, some of the numbers everybody is talking about are pretty low. They’re just too low. The call records that I estimated would have been on the order of three billion a day.

Now, it doesn’t mean that they’re transcribing what’s being said on the phone calls; they’re just recording the fact that they occurred. They’re using a target list, I’m sure, to target people who are—who they want to record and transcribe. And that list is provided to the switch networks, and whenever the switches detect them, they route those audios—that audio to recorders, and then it gets recorded, stored and put in a priority list. Then the transcribers go through that and transcribe it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to return to remarks made over the weekend by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In an interview with NBC, he said the leaks would aid enemies of the United States.

JAMES CLAPPER: While we’re having this debate, discussion and all this media explosion, which of course supports transparency, which is a great thing in this country, but that same transparency has a double-edged sword, in that our adversaries, whether nation state adversaries or nefarious groups, benefit from that same transparency. So, as we speak, they are going to school and learning how we do this. And so, that’s why it potentially has—can render great damage to our intelligence capabilities.

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, can you respond to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper? And then I want to ask Glenn to do the same.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Sure. In my mind, that’s a red herring. I mean, it’s just a false issue. The point was, the terrorists have already known that we’ve been doing this for years, so there’s no surprise there. They’re not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that they’re—we’re not—the government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; it’s trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States. That’s where I see it.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Glenn Greenwald, I mean, this, of course, is the debate that’s going on in all of the networks right now, is that you’re compromising national security by publishing what Edward Snowden has given to you, and of course that Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower, but a threat to national security, they are saying. If you could also comment, Glenn, after you respond to that, on the fact that Edward Snowden did not want everything released that he had access to, that he was careful, for example, not to release the location of CIA stations and other information?

GLENN GREENWALD: The claim that the director is making is so ludicrous that I’m surprised he can get it out with a straight face. It really ought to insult the—it does insult the intelligence of every single person to whom he’s directing it. The idea that there are any terrorists in the world who pose any real threat who aren’t aware or who weren’t aware until our articles appeared last week that the United States government tries to monitor their communications and listen in on their telephone calls and read their emails, any terrorist who is unaware of the fact that the U.S. government was doing that is a terrorist who is incapable of even writing their own name, let alone detonating a bomb inside the United States. Exactly as Mr. Binney said, their only concern is—this has nothing to do with terrorism. They’re not trying to keep any of this from the terrorists; they’re trying to keep it from the American people. And that’s the point.

And as far as the documents are concerned, he had access to enormous sums of top-secret documents that would be incredibly harmful. He went through and turned over only a small portion of those documents to us, all of which he read very carefully. And I know that not only because he told me that, but also because the way we got the documents was in extremely detailed folders all divided by content, that you could have only organized them had you carefully read them. And when he gave them to us, he said, "Look, I’m not a journalist. I’m not a high-level government official. I am not saying that everything I gave you should be published. I don’t want it all to be published. I want you, as journalists, to go through it and decide what is in the public interest and what will not cause a lot of harm." He invited—in fact, urged—us to exercise exactly the kind of journalistic judgment that we have exercised. And so, had it been his intention to harm the United States, he could have just uploaded all these documents to the Internet or found the most damaging ones and caused them to be published. He did the opposite. The NSA and the rest of the country owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all of the work he has done to inform the American public without bringing about any harm to them.

AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, he understands the stakes right now. I mean, this is the first week of the Bradley Manning trial, who faces life in prison, possibly death, for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, on trial at Fort Meade—actually, the headquarters of NSA. Glenn Greenwald and William Binney, if you could give a final comment on this?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Who should go first?

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Bill Binney.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is why I find it so incredibly courageous—

AMY GOODMAN: No, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: —to watch what he did, because he knows—sorry, because he knows exactly how the government treats whistleblowers, and yet he went forward and did it anyway. And what I really hope is that his courage is contagious, that people get inspired by his example, as I have been, and decide that they ought to demand that their rights not be abridged and that they have the full authority to stand up to the United States government without being afraid.

AMY GOODMAN: Will there be more exposés, Glenn Greenwald, that we can expect from you at The Guardian?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yes, there will definitely be more exposés that you can expect from me in The Guardian.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Bill Binney, very quickly, 10 seconds.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I’m sure—I mean, it was a conscious decision that he made to do what he did, and of course the government is going to try to get him, and he knew that. So, he’s—he is doing his—

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us—

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —Bill Binney and Glenn Greenwald.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.


http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/on_a_slippery_slope_to_a

(Part 2 in next post)

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1. Part 2: Inside the NSA’s Domestic Surveillance Apparatus: Whistleblower William Binney Speaks Out

Inside the NSA’s Domestic Surveillance Apparatus: Whistleblower William Binney Speaks Out

William Binney describes how his former agency has built a massive system to track, monitor and record phone and Internet communications of U.S. citizens and people around the world. Binney resigned from the National Security Agency in 2001 to protest growing domestic surveillance. He was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. He was one of the two co-founders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center. He resigned after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2012 he gave his first ever television interview to Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest is William Binney. He served in the National Security Agency for almost 40 years, including a time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, a senior NSA crypto-mathematician, largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. He was one of the two co-founders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, resigned after the September 11th attacks, concerned about the increasing surveillance of the American people.

We are getting response to the massive series of releases and exposés from The Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post of information released by a 29-year-old information technician named Edward Snowden, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a military contractor, within the National Security Agency in Hawaii. In response to these revelations about surveillance, President Obama spoke on Friday and defended the NSA’s surveillance program, suggesting they help defend the country against terrorist attacks.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on, you know, net, it was worth us doing. That’s—some other folks may have a different assessment of that. But I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society. And what I can say is, is that in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, you worked for the NSA for almost 40 years. You’re reading all of this information that’s been released right now about the surveillance abilities of the NSA and what they’re doing right now. Can you respond to President Obama?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes. Personally, I’ve had the view for any—for quite a number of decades, that the Congress and the administration have been—have been fed by the intelligence community what I call technobabble. In other words, they’re being bamboozled into thinking a certain way, that they have to do this in order to get terrorists. And that’s simply false. There’s a simple way to do it that would protect people’s privacy and not invade anybody’s telephone records or email. And that’s to say, if you have a terrorist, and he calls somebody in the United States—I call this the two-degree principle—that’s one degree of communication separation. Then you look at that as a target, and you collect that, and then you look also at the person in the United States and who they talk to. That could represent the—that’s a zone of suspicion that would, in effect, be basically a support network for that person inside the country. That defines your terrorist relationship, and that’s how you look at that. And the rest of the communication of the U.S. people don’t mean anything, as relevant, and none of that’s relevant to what’s going on there. And you also have to look at the jihadi-type sites, those that advocate jihad or violence and so on, and you see who is accessing those sites. That’s easy to monitor that, and it doesn’t invade anybody’s privacy that’s been absolutely doing nothing of—that should be in any way considered suspicious.

AMY GOODMAN: On Friday, President Obama also refuted claims that the intelligence community is listening to telephone conversations.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks—if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. So, I want to be very clear. Some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so—nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls.

AMY GOODMAN: Is that true, William Binney? You worked at the NSA for almost 40 years.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s pretty—it’s pretty much true, yes. I think they are—my sense is that they are just looking at a target list. They have a target list that they input to the telephone network and use the switches to detect these phone calls going across the network and then download those to recorders and transcribe that. So that’s what they’re—I think that’s what they’re doing. But what Edward Snowden was talking about was having access to that network. What that meant was he could load—and what he was basically saying, he could load the attributes of anyone he wanted to target into the target list, and then that would start doing, executing and collecting all the information about them, including the content, and recording it, too. So they could—and someone would have to transcribe it, but they could, and all of that content for phones, as well as email, would be stored and collected in the base.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to what Edward Snowden had to say.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: You don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, your response to Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old NSA whistleblower?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yeah, that’s pretty much correct. I mean, when you pull in the call records at the rate of three billion a day over 12 years and you graph them, what that means is you now have the total communications communities that everyone has in the world, or in the United States, basically. And at that point, that shows you all of your relationships. And that’s part of what he was talking about. The other part was the Narus devices that they deployed starting, I think, around 2003 onto the fiber optic networks, were capturing the emails and voice over IP, and that was being stored. And so, then that’s why they have to—that’s why they have to build places like Bluffdale in Utah, that big storage facility, because they’re collecting so much data. The content is the real—the content is really the bulk that needs to be—that they’re storing. The call records and just graphing the relationships is a pretty simple thing to do, and it doesn’t take that much—you could put that in one room of storage capacity.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Binney, could you say a little more about Bluffdale, this site in Utah that’s being built right now? I don’t think most people are aware of it.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, what they’re putting together there in Bluffdale is a million-square-foot storage facility, of which only 100,000 is really going to have equipment to store data. But the rest of it, the peripherals, then are power generation, cooling and so on. So, but in there, there’s 100,000 square feet of storage capacity. And at current capabilities that are advertised on the web with Cleversafe.com, they can put 10 exabytes in about 200 feet—square feet of storage space in 21 racks. What that means is, when you divide that out, is you—that even at current capacity to store information, that’s five zettabytes that they can put in into Bluffdale. And if you—and my estimate of the data they would be collecting, which would include the targeted audio and perhaps all of the text in the world, that would be on the order of 20 terabytes a minute—or, yeah, 20 terabytes a minute. So if you figure out from that how much they could collect, it would be like 500 years of the world’s communications. But I only estimated a hundred, because really they want space for parallel processors to go at cryptanalysis and breaking codes. So—

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, we didn’t speak to you last week before PRISM came out, or we spoke to you before the revelations about PRISM, so I wanted to ask you about them today. I mean, these revelations are coming out almost every day right now, where the NSA obtains access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft and Apple and Facebook, The Guardian then exposing how the president had ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber-attacks. Could you respond one—each one of those, first PRISM, and what that allows the NSA to do, and what you think should be done about that?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, first of all, what they were talking about there is the Internet and the communications going across the Internet. And that really—the access of that data really started back with Mark Klein when he exposed the deployment of the Narus devices on the web. That was giving them the content of everything on the fiber optic lines. That was the collection that they had. Now, when they had that—deploy those collection sites all around, they don’t—still don’t get all of the data, so they have holes in their collection. They may get 80 percent, basically, of what’s being passed on the web. But by going to those companies and saying—they store everything they serve, so they’ve got a—if you aggregate them together, they’ve got a complete picture of what’s on the web. And so, going there allows NSA then to fill in the gaps that they’re missing from their real-time collection. So, that’s the objective that I think is going on there. But, I mean, it’s—in the meantime, that’s collecting all the data on U.S. citizens again. And if they went back to use the two-degree principle, they could, again, protect U.S. citizens and still find all of the terrorists in the world. So, I mean—

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Binney, can you comment on this period we’re going through right now, when you have Bradley Manning on trial at Fort Meade, which is the national headquarters of the National Security Agency? He faces life in prison or possibly death. Then you have this young man, Ed Snowden, who, 29 years old, understands the stakes, says he understands he may never be home again, now in Hong Kong, the last we know. The significance of what is coming out right now? And then, Julian Assange, you know, holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London—

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —afraid he might be extradited to the United States and face the same fate as perhaps Bradley Manning.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, all of that, plus all of the previous prosecutions of whistleblowers is really an attempt to intimidate the governmental workforce and the contractor workforce that’s associated with them, so that they don’t compromise things that the government doesn’t want the public to know. And so, that’s really their objective, and that’s why they’re coming after whistleblowers and people who turn over documentation of government programs and trying to, of course, give them as much of the penalty of the law that they can do and—if they can get a hold of them.

AMY GOODMAN: Which brings us to you, Bill Binney. Talk about what you attempted to do, in terms of getting out information, sounding the alarm right after 9/11, when people were willing to give a lot of leeway, that, you know, you’ve got to trade privacy for security, but what you felt, being inside the National Security Agency for the decades that you were, and the shift after 9/11, what you faced, as well as your other colleagues.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it was pretty hard for me to believe that my agency, that I had supported for so many years, and the country, of course, and the laws that we had, including the USSID 18 that has—which was our guiding documentation internally in NSA about not spying on U.S. citizens—when they started doing that after 9/11, it was just hard for me to believe they did it, but it—the evidence—I mean, I had direct evidence that they were doing it, so I just couldn’t—I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t be a party to that. And what I did after that was tried—I went to the intelligence committees first to try to get them alerted to it, so they would try—address it. I mean, their responsibility was to prevent the intelligence community from spying on U.S. citizens, based on the FISA laws. And after that, when that didn’t work, I even tried, with Diane Roark and others, to address this issue to the Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Supreme Court. But we weren’t able to do that. And so, eventually, I tried the—as well as Kirk Wiebe and I, we both tried to get to the Department of Justice inspector general’s office and alert them to this and say there are ways to do it without violating all the U.S. citizens’ privacy. But that wasn’t what the government wanted to do. I mean, when Qwest, the CEO of Qwest, was approached in February of 2001—that was before 9/11—to give over customer data, it was all—it was still targeting domestic spying, and that was call records they were trying to get from that. So, the—

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about that for a moment, Bill, the former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio, the only head of a communications company to—the only head of a company to demand a court order or approval under FISA.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes, and the consequence for him was they targeted him, and now he’s in prison. So, I mean, they succeeded in prosecuting him. But what it told me was that the intent from the beginning was to do domestic spying, accumulating information and knowledge about the U.S.—the entire U.S. population. So I thought of that as a J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids, you know? It wasn’t that he had information and knowledge to leverage just the Congress. You have information and knowledge to leverage everyone, judges included, in the country. So, that’s why I got so concerned. I tried to work internally in the government to get people to do something about it, but that whole process failed. So what it did was it alerted them to what I was doing, and they targeted me with the FBI, and they attempted to falsely prosecute me. Fortunately, I was able to get evidence of malicious prosecution every time, so they finally backed off trying to prosecute me.

AMY GOODMAN: If you would briefly, though I don’t like to have you relive this, tell us what actually happened to you, with the FBI raiding your home.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, they came in, and there were like 12 FBI agents with their guns drawn, and came in. My son opened the door, let them in, and they pushed him out of the way at gunpoint. And they came upstairs to where my wife was getting dressed, and I was in the shower, and they were pointing guns at her, and then they—one of the agents came into the shower and pointed a gun directly at me, at my head, and of course pulled me out of the shower. So I had a towel, at least, to wrap around, but—so that’s what they did.

And then they took me out and interrogated me on the back porch. And when they did that, they tried to get me—they said they wanted me to tell them something that would be—implicate someone in a crime. And I said, well, I didn’t—I thought they were talking about someone other than the President Bush, Dick Cheney and Hayden and Tenet, so I said I didn’t really know about anything. And they said they thought I was lying. Well, at that point, "OK," I said, "I’ll tell you about the crime I know about," and that was that Hayden, Tenet, George Bush, Dick Cheney, they conspired to subvert the Constitution and the constitutional process of checks and balances, and here’s how they did it. And I talked about program Stellar Wind, all the data coming in, about how they managed to graph it and also how they bypassed the courts. They didn’t tell the courts about this program, and they didn’t solicit any approval from the courts. And they also only told four people initially in Congress, that were the—they were the chiefs and deputies of the Intelligence Committee. That was on the House. That was Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi. I don’t remember the Senate side. But when you do that and—I mean, Senator Rockefeller, when he got briefed into those programs in 2003, said he wasn’t capable of understanding any of it, because he wasn’t—he wasn’t a technician, he wasn’t a lawyer, so he couldn’t do anything about it. That was in his handwritten note to Dick Cheney. So, I mean, it was clear they were doing something that was unconstitutional and against any number of laws that existed at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, what most surprised you about the latest series of revelations that come from Edward Snowden?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, the only surprise I got—I mean, the PRISM program, I had assumed was going on anyway. But the court order that was published that showed the—it showed the serial number at the top, on the top right side of it. It was 13-80. That meant it was the 80th order of 2013 of the FISA court. And if that order was typical of all those other 79, which was authorizing them—or ordering them to turn over records that would—to NSA, even though it was the FBI doing the request, it shows you the relationship between FBI and NSA. It’s really close, and they’re depending on NSA to do their processing. But what it is, what that tells me, that serial number told me that, gee, if all those orders addressed individually every quarter—this was the second quarter of 2013—then there would be, at a minimum, 40 companies involved in this activity. So, it would be telcoms—it would be a mix of telcoms and Internet service providers.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there’s been a lot made of the document that shows that Verizon is handing over its information.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: But that’s just because that’s the document they have.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you assume we’re talking BellSouth, we’re talking AT&T and the other corporations?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yeah, plus the Internet service providers, and that would add up to 80 orders from that court that—this year so far, for two quarters. So, each company would get an order each quarter to do that. So that’s—you have to divide 80 by two. And that’s the minimum, OK?

AMY GOODMAN: Edward Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. That’s a military contractor. He worked in the NSA offices in Hawaii. He had also worked at the CIA. He had also worked with Dell. He’s only 29 years old. In fact, actually, he didn’t graduate from high school, but a very smart, young, intelligent technician. Can you talk about that relationship between the military contractors and the NSA? I mean, how this young man has this kind of access, it’s very similar to Bradley Manning sitting in the desert in Iraq.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I think it gets back to what Glenn Beck was—or, Glenn Greenwald was talking about: the outsourcing of the intelligence process to contractors. I mean, that’s what’s been going on for about at least 10 years. They’ve been outsourcing the dependency on contractors to run their programs. So that means these contractors all have access to all this information about U.S. citizens in all these programs that they’re running. I mean, they’re depending on them to support it and make it happen and operate so their analysts can access the information.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people have access to this information, if Edward does, 29 years old, can do all the things that he said he could do sitting in an office in Hawaii?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, if you’re counting government employees, that could be thousands, depending on how many—how many agencies are involved in looking into that data. I mean, the FBI certainly is, and the fusion centers they have around the—around the country, with the FBI integrated, are probably all part of that, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of the FBI, in 2008, actor Shia LaBeouf appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. During the interview, he talked about an FBI agent showing him a recorded conversation from two years prior to meeting him.

SHIA LABEOUF: I remember we had an FBI consultant on the picture telling me that they can use your ADT security box microphone to get your stuff that’s going on in your house, or OnStar, they could shut your car down. And he told me that one in five phone calls that you make are recorded and logged. And I laughed at him. And then he played back a phone conversation I had had two years prior—

JAY LENO: Come on.

SHIA LABEOUF: —to joining the picture. The FBI consultant. And it was like one of those—it was one of those phone calls—it was like, you know, "What are you wearing?" type of things.

JAY LENO: Really?

SHIA LABEOUF: Yeah, so it was—it was mad weird, but—

JAY LENO: Can we—no, wait. So you mean they had a record of you from—

SHIA LABEOUF: Two years prior to me joining the picture.

JAY LENO: —even being associated with the movie?

SHIA LABEOUF: With the movie.

JAY LENO: Well, that seems creepy.

SHIA LABEOUF: It’s extremely creepy.

AMY GOODMAN: Shia Labeouf. It was 2008 that he was speaking on The Tonight Show, so I think he was talking about the film Eagle Eye that had just come out. William Binney, your response?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, you know, I would assume that they—they, for whatever reason—I’m not sure, I didn’t see that movie, but he may have been saying things that were objectionable to the administration, and so they put him on the target list for monitoring. The same thing would happen to—happened to Laura Poitras. I mean, she was, because of her movies, showing—you know, My Country, My Country, basically—I think that was the one that did it, that—

AMY GOODMAN: About Yemen.

WILLIAM BINNEY: This—that one was about Iraq and the Iraq War and how the Iraqis were surviving and how they—in the war zone.

AMY GOODMAN: Right.

WILLIAM BINNEY: So, I think—I don’t—I think if you’re doing something like that, that—

AMY GOODMAN: And then she went on to do a film about Yemen.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Right. So, if you’re doing something that irritates or is against what the government wants to be expressed to the American public, then you can become a target. That’s what that’s saying.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Edward Snowden used the codename VERAX, which is Latin for "truth teller." Do you see Edward Snowden as a truth teller, as a whistleblower?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I think he’s telling the truth. I mean, he’s got the documentation to back it up to, so I think certainly what he’s saying is correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you applaud what he has done?

WILLIAM BINNEY: I wouldn’t have done it that way, OK, because I would have tried to work the system first. So, but, I mean, if you make the decision, you have to suffer the consequences. And with the government we have, they’re going to be pretty harsh, I think. So, they’re going to try to do whatever they can to him.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Binney, Bloomberg Businessweek recently disclosed how a secretive unit inside the National Security Agency called Tailored Access Operations conducts massive cyber-espionage on overseas computer networks, the Pentagon hackers harvesting nearly 2.1 million gigabytes every hour, the equivalent of, oh, like hundreds of millions of pages of text. Do you know about this?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I think they would refer to that as active attack on your computer, and it’s like hackers. You know, it’s this—that’s how you can—what they’re doing is going across the network and going through your weaknesses or holes in your operating system and then getting into your computer and then looking at whatever data you have in there, selecting it out, and using your unused CPU to send it back to themselves. So, that’s—that’s pretty much what they’re doing. That’s, of course, what the Chinese are doing to us, so that’s—and I’m sure other countries are doing it—the Israelis, the Russians, all of them, you know? So that’s standard hacking into the system that we hear about, too, so...

AMY GOODMAN: For people who have not been following the story of whistleblower after whistleblower after whistleblower, and it goes on from there, who have been cracked down on under the Obama administration, can you tell us about the coterie of folks who worked at the NSA, like you? And also, then, would you do this again, what you’ve done, considering what you’ve gone through?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, first of all, let me take you—the population at NSA, about 85 percent of them, I think, are ISTJs on the Myers-Briggs scale, and they’re very strong introverts, you know? They have a very focused job to do. Breaking a crypt system or something is a very focused effort. You—it’s really intense. So it’s really something that’s really compatible with their character. And so, when something happens and they see things happening to people who get involved, like myself or others, they get afraid. And being introverts, they even go further as—further into themselves and staying isolated. So, that’s—that’s the primary character of people. And the others, the others are probably part of it and believe that it’s the correct thing to do. And they don’t try to find a reasonable, constitutionally acceptable, legally acceptable way to do the—to achieve the objectives that they want. They simply felt that they had to go to the far—the other far side of the spectrum and get as much as they can about everybody they can.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you have done again what you did?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Uh, I probably wouldn’t now. But if I were—if I had—if I wasn’t—if I was facing a similar problem, I would still try to work a system—if it was a different system, I would still try to work within the system to try to get it changed. But if that didn’t work, I’d probably do exactly what I’d done with the other situation, in NSA. So, I probably would still stay in character and try to get it worked out internally and then—and try to stay within the system, initially anyway.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, William Binney, I want to thank you very much for being with us, NSA whistleblower, 40 years almost at the agency, for a time NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, deeply concerned about the level of surveillance of Americans, ultimately was almost prosecuted, FBI gun at his head in the shower, as well as his wife and child, but in the end he did not face prosecution as others have under the Espionage Act. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.


http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/6/10/inside_the_nsas_domestic_surveillance_apparatus_whistleblower_william_binney_speaks_out

[DirkGently]

3. Note the analysis that no, this isn't effective *defense*.

It's offense. The utility of this kind of surveillance is not protection from foreign enemies.

[Catherina]

5. No. Definitely not. He even admitted so. Freedom, Privacy, respect for civil rights, LMAO!

Don't look over here Dirk, look at China

[DirkGently]

15. Chinese Democracy?

[TakeALeftTurn]

25. K&R

.

[TeeYiYi]

45. k+r ..nt

TYY

[Yo_Mama]

2. Reccing and kicking n/t

[Catherina]

6. Thank you. And to quote you

And to quote you from DirkGently's thread: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

"I currently alternate between slackjawed amazement and great grief. This is not safe and it is not going to work out well."

I don't really do the grief part but I'm alternating between slackjawed amazement and something. Not sure what it is but something.

[cantbeserious]

4. Reality Worse Than Imagined

eom

[Catherina]

7. I'm just sitting here giving the finger to them through my computer lol

and wondering if they'd mind forwarding me a copy of some emails from an old friend I accidentally erased.

[cantbeserious]

8. Great Idea - Transform NSA Into A For Profit Data Recovery Service - Now That Might Have Merit

eom

[Catherina]

9. We're paying trillions for this. We might as well get something out of it n/t

[cantbeserious]

10. Right You Are - Kudos

eom

[DirkGently]

18. "NSA Helpdesk. Who can we surveil for you today, ma'am?"

[idwiyo]

11. K&R

[zeemike]

12. K&R

And thanks for the through coverage you have given to this most important matter.

[Catherina]

14. You're welcome. Thank you and all my friends here for all the support

by friends I mean everyone who's on the right side of this fight and have been coming together, even regardless of past differences, to unite on this one. I don't think we've ever dealt with anything this important here.

Even war is secondary because this is the war machine that spits out the wars.

Please forgive me for posting this again because the enormity of this is staggering.

Wow!!!!! Edward Snowdon...just stunning

[zeemike]

17. You are right, this is the most important issue.

And it transcends all other issues including war,, because it gives them the power to do what they want with war and silence any critic.

Don't apologies for posting that again....I love that guy....if I were in London I would buy that guy a pint or two just to hear him rant.

[Catherina]

21. Me too. I did't realize he had cancer

It's why he was pushing a pig with his nose to the hqs of the NHS recently. He chose a pig because he said all those politicians are pigs at the public trough. I was sad to learn about the cancer. Thanks

[nenagh]

53. Thanks for this as well...

I missed this the first time you posted it. I must email it to my children ...

[Catherina]

54. I hope they know everything you're doing to make it a better world for them

[nenagh]

55. You might chuckle that our Pharmacy computer program is by Kroll...

Who I think I read about in data collection... I'm in Ontario...

Binney's description of domains for each individual, graphed originally in two dimension, then added domain data points in three dimension, progressing forward with time.. to create a detailed profile on each individual...(that's prob now old technology)

Fascinating, and such an honourable man..

Thanks again...

[snappyturtle]

13. Here's another video in William Binney's own words by Laura Poitras..Aug. 2012

I can't recommend this one enough My. Binney points out that just because we are a democracy it doesn't mean we'll stay one. I liked the video because it gave more more insight to William Binney as a very believable person.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=0

[Catherina]

19. You rock! OMFG. His resignation declaration is a must read

The video at your link is a MUST WATCH. Here it is from youtube

It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”

...

“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=0

From his unclassified declaration:

...

8. The NSA could have installed its intercept equipment at the nation’s fiber-optic cable landing stations. See Greg’s Cable Map, cablemap.info. There are more than two dozen such sites on the U.S. coasts where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If the NSA had taken that route, it would have been able to limit its interception of electronic communications to international/international and international/domestic communications and exclude domestic/domestic communications. Instead the NSA chose to put its intercept equipment at key junction points (for example Folsom Street) and probably throughout the nation, thereby giving itself access to purely domestic communications. The conclusion of J. Scott Marcus in his declaration that the “collection of infrastructure … has all the capability necessary to conduct large scale covert gathering of IP-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but .for purely domestic communications as well,” is correct.

9. I estimate that the NSA installed no fewer than ten and possibly in excess of twenty intercept centers within the United States. I am familiar with the contents of Mark Klein’s declaration. The AT&T center on Folsom Street in San Francisco is one of the NSA intercept centers. Mr. Klein indicated that the NSA’s equipment intercepted Internet traffic on AT&T’s peering network. It makes sense for the NSA to intercept traffic on AT &T’s peering network. The idea would be to avoid having to install interception equipment on each of the thousands of parallel data lines that eventually lead into and out of peering networks. By focusing on peering networks, the NSA intercepts data at the choke point in the system through which all data must pass in order to move from one party’s network to another’s. This is particularly important because a block data is often broken up into many smaller packets for transmission. These packets may traverse different routes before reaching the destination computer which gathers them and reassembles the original block.

....

13. The sheer size of that capacity indicates that the NSA is not filtering personal electronic communications such as email before storage but is, in fact, storing all that they are collecting. The capacity of NSA’s planned infrastructure far exceeds the capacity necessary for the storage of discreet, targeted communications or even for the storage of the routing information from all electronic communications. The capacity of NSA’s planned infrastructure is consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications.

http://info.publicintelligence.net/NSA-WilliamBinneyDeclaration.pdf

[snappyturtle]

22. I thought it a great video....thanks for the you tube link although some of us

cannot get any video on DU the last few days without right clicking the blank (black) video square and copying and pasting the link on properties! So, I can't give much but a URL.

I think we should be very worried. Over reach doesn't quite describe it!

[ReRe]

27. Dayam... just when I think I've heard it all...

... and understood everything... I learn something else! This is a continuation of what J. Edgar Hoover was doing with the FBI, only exponentially.

This is what he said that was most important: They've been collecting all this data on each and every one of us. If they ever want it, they can stick your name, etc., in their computer, and print the story of your effing life out. From cradle to present day and indeed to your grave.

You know, Drake and Binney, Ellsberg and Chris Hedges have been on DemocracyNow many times over the last year or two, well say ever since they let Drake out of prison for whistle-blowing. DemocracyNow.org archives are your friend! Go look them up and see what they were saying "pre-Snowden" when you have some time...

[Catherina]

31. "pre-Snowden" DemocracyNow files. Where will we ever find the time now?

I am going to try to do that, even for just an hour every day, because it's important.

My mind boggles that it took a 29 year-old to really get things moving, and how he had to do it.

[ReRe]

32. Catherina...

... there might even be MORE whistle-blowers to come out. We will NEVER get caught up on all of our "homework." Maybe if the house of cards comes tumbling down, we can go on a vacation and relax.

[Catherina]

33. I was just thinking the same thing

are you in my head or something lol?

I was just thinking that more people are going to come forward now that one person took a very brave first step. And was also wondering when our lives will go back to normal so we can rest again.

[ReRe]

36. Danniel Ellsberg has been begging...

... for intel-types to come out ever since the GWB cabal was in there. Really, just yesterday I was thinking what an orgasm for democracy it would be if 10 or more came out and blew the whistle? My hopefulness gets the best of me sometimes, and then I see the dishes and the laundry staring me in the face and that snaps me right out of it.

[beevul]

16. WOW. Just WOW. K&R

Truly frightening stuff.

[blkmusclmachine]

20. I have seen the enemy. And he is us.

We're all Germans now

[Harmony Blue]

23. Wow the floodgates have opened

sad and scary indeed.

[Catherina]

34. I think so too n/t

[forestpath]

24. K&R

[snappyturtle]

26. Kicking! nt

[ReRe]

28. William Binney

K&R

[struggle4progress]

29. Binney resigned in 2001. In a generic way, of course, most of us will agree with him

about the real danger posed by these programs, but is there any reason to thing he's really up-to-date about current practice? He hasn't been with the agency for about a dozen years now

[steve2470]

30. great video, thanks for posting that ! nt

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

35. K&R Thanks for sharing Catherina great info in your OP

It is much appreciated

[Luminous Animal]

37. Nice!K&R

[leveymg]

38. Bill Binney is an important figure - he invented this thing - well worth listening to him.

[Catherina]

40. That right there should make people stop in their tracks and listen n/t

[lindysalsagal]

39. In these, Binney does not reveal a political agenda.

Not that I know anything about him. But I always distrust "experts" who are obviously disgorging political talking points.

I suspect Obama's not getting alot of sleep these days. With everything he knows, and with his tremendous powers of understanding and information synthesis, he's probably turning over dozens of next move options, none of which he's happy about.

[leveymg]

43. Binney was head of development at NSA. He invented "The ThinThread Program" that became PRISM

There's a very good profile about him by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. If you want to understand NSA surveillance and why there are NSA whistleblowers, please see, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer

[Bonhomme Richard]

41. It's all blown out of proportion.

At least that's what some around here would say.
Oh yeah! Legal to boot.
I simply don't get the attacks on the messenger while ignoring the message.

[Catherina]

50. That's what a lot of Germans said too a few decades ago

When you don't stop the slide to tyranny, when you remove safeguards just because you trust a personality you don't even know, well don't be surprised a few years later... And we have had a history of doing that, back and forth, back and forth, both parties.

[woo me with science]

42. Huge, huge K&R.

[magellan]

44. k&r

It's amazing to me that even here, people can't see this. It's not about a personality. It's about the GD law and how it needs to be changed to protect us from unnecessary and extremely intrusive surveillance. The sort that's meant to do nothing but control people.

"Patriot Act". Just take a damn lighter to the thing. It's oppressive, tyrannical bullshit.

[think]

52. Spot on /nt

[WillyT]

46. HUGE K & R !!! - Thank You !!!

[TheKentuckian]

47. Do Da bump

[nenagh]

48. K&R...

[marions ghost]

49. K&R

---

[Fantastic Anarchist]

51. Kicking and reccing.

This is the most important issue of our time.

[Catherina]

56. I think so too. Doesn't mean we should lose focus of any of the others

or that everyone should drop what they're doing but this is THE issue affects all the US activists and can bring many groups together.