where the fuck has legal whistleblowing gotten us re surveillance: Binney, Wiebe and Drake

[cali]

The Snowden affair has done more to bring the issue of illegal mass surveillance and NSA activities into public awareness than the legal whistleblowing. That's not to disparage Binney, Wiebe or Drake or to lionize Snowden. Nor did Snowden have a legal avenue to pursue.


William Binney is a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA)[1] turned whistleblower who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency. He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and was the subject of FBI investigations, including a raid on his home in 2007.

Binney has continued to speak out during Barack Obama's presidency about the NSA's data collection policies, and in recent years continues to be interviewed in the media, regarding his experiences and his views on communication intercepts by governmental agencies of American citizens. In a legal case, Binney has testified in a sworn affidavit that the NSA is in deliberate violation of the U.S. Constitution.

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n September 2002, he, along with J. Kirke Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[7] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[8] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[5]

After he left the NSA in 2001, Binney was one of several people investigated as part of an inquiry into the 2005 New York Times exposé[9][10] on the agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. Binney was cleared of wrongdoing after three interviews with FBI agents beginning in March 2007 but, one morning in July 2007, a dozen agents armed with rifles appeared at his house, one of whom entered the bathroom and pointed his gun at Binney, still towelling off from a shower. In that raid, the FBI confiscated a desktop computer, disks, and personal and business records. The NSA revoked his security clearance, forcing him to close a business he ran with former colleagues at a loss of a reported $300,000 in annual income. In 2012, Binney and his co-plaintiffs went to federal court to get the items back. Binney spent more than $7,000 on legal fees.[11]

During interviews on Democracy Now! in April and May 2012[12] with elaboration in July 2012 at 2600's hacker conference HOPE[2] and at DEF CON a couple weeks later,[13] Binney repeated estimates that the NSA (particularly its Stellar Wind project[14]) had intercepted 20 trillion communications "transactions" of Americans such as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data (but not including financial data). This includes most of the emails of US citizens. Binney disclosed in a sworn affidavit for Jewel v. NSA[15] that the agency was "purposefully violating the Constitution".[4]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Binney

3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so


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Q: Did Edward Snowden do the right thing in going public?

William Binney: We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress or — we couldn't get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general's office didn't pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand.

Q: So Snowden did the right thing?

Binney: Yes, I think he did.

Q: You three wouldn't criticize him for going public from the start?

J. Kirk Wiebe: Correct.

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/

Go ahead. Defend the NSA just because now we have a dem President. It's sickening. It's fucking gobsmackingly stupid, but hey, have fucking at it.