That escalated quickly.
This is the face of a man who does not coast to victory, but runs through the tape, every single time.
And we already demonstrated with their first one that it was not only detectable, but quite fragile. And sinkable.
Well, that's a little disconcerting.
It does, however, remind me of:
Q: Well done, patriot. Answer your phone.
Which is also a little disconcerting.
Couldn't happen to a nicer shill. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Delicious!
AM=?
BB=Bill Brinney
AM: Bill, you were one of the creators of the pre-9/11 data collection surveillance program called âThin Threadâ which actually did have privacy protections instated for American citizens. Why was this program abandoned and what kind of system replaced it?
BB: Well it actually wasnât abandoned. The back part of the analysis part, the part that allowed them to deal with massive amounts of data and index it was taken in to manage, that was the way that they were able to build surveillance on the entire world. That particular program was that powerful and thatâs why we put in those protections. So that it would be impossible for them to abuse it. That was the first thing they removed when they took it into the new program Stellar Wind.
AM: And Kirk, after you had found out what they did to âThin Threadâ how did you, Bill and other intelligence insiders address these concerns within the government and how were these concerns met from officials.
KW: Well, in reality we had been trying to address what had been going on within the NSA in terms of modernization for years and itâs kind of like 9/11, the events of 9/11, were the culmination in our minds of our failure to get those at the agency to see the potential of what we were developing, what Bill had invented in the âThin Threadâ project.
Within six weeks of 9/11 that we end upâEd Loomis, myself, Bill Binneyâretiring from NSA in absolute disgust because we had failed. We had been trying to tell them that they were going to fail and we lost the battle.
AM: And Bill, in 2007 the FBI raided both of your homes along with other officials who had spoken out on the false premise that you guys had leaked classified documents or information to the press. What was that experience like for your and were you surprised by the aggressiveness of the response?
BB: Well yes, you see I had been cooperating with the FBI in their investigation into the New York Times leak for months, several months, about four months before the raid and when they came at m⌠it didnât take me too long to figure out what they were really doing was trying to intimidate us because this was like the morning after the second day after Gonzalesâ testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the terror surveillance program that the president had talked about which wasâhe only talked about the warrantless wiretaps at the timeâbut there were many other programs that involved CIA and also NSA that included spying on everyone in the country and building knowledge and understanding of their lives of everybody as they were living them. ⌠So it was clear to me at that point that thatâs why they were there. To keep us quiet.
https://www.roughdiplomacy.com/?p=4757
BB: So I started getting mad at these people while they were still there. So that when I reported to the FBI the real crime why they were sent there which was Bush, Cheney, Hayden and Tenet, which was the core of individuals who decided to subvert the constitution and violate all the laws, basic laws that we had in statutes at the time and I told them what it wasâStellar Wind Programâwhat data they were using, how they were organizing, what it was doing and I was telling that to all the FBI agents on my back porch.
So the only one who was cleared for it was the one fellow who was the special agent in charge Paul Mauric [sic]. He was the only one who was cleared for that program. The only thing he could do when I was doing that was look at the floor because what I was doing was causing him a problem, cause it was telling all these other agents (FBI agents) what crime is being committed and that they werenât cleared for it. They were not cleared for this program. So now we had to have a meeting outside before they left my house of all the agents round the cars. They couldnât leave until he instructed them on what they could not say.
AM: Wow and Kirk, in the case of Thomas Drake, of course, it went a little bit farther to say the least. Talk about exactly what the FBI did to him.
KW: Well, let me frame it a little bit for you.
In November of 2009 Bill Binney and I received a communication from our lawyer. After we were raided in 2007, we went halfsies on a lawyer rather than pay two.
The lawyer was a former US prosecutor so we thought heâd know how to deal with the government.
He told us to lay low. In November 2009 he sends us an email that says âguys I just got an email from the Department of Justice.
Theyâre coming after you.â So Bill and I made an appointment with him an we went in to Baltimore and sat down at his desk and he was completely surprised by this move.
He thought it would go away. That was the end of that for the holidays. It was November when we got this message.
Come January, we get another email.
Thereâs a new prosecutor for the government.
The other one had left government, and we are being offered letters of immunity if we are willing to sit down with the FBI and the prosecutor for the Department of Justice and answer questions about Thomas Drake. And so Bill and I agree weâll do that.
We knew Tom had done nothing wrong.
⌠We go down to the FBI facility just outside DC in Maryland and separately address questions
. The questions were mostly questions like âDid you meet with Tom Drake? On what occasion?â And of course we had lunch with Tom, said hello but nothing very interesting. âDid he talk about mulching papers, destroying evidence?â No, no, sorry. Tomâs an honest guy.
So long story short we get letters of immunity in February saying we are under no further threat in this entire matter (Bill Binney and I).
They then threw their attention on top and we think itâs because heâs the one who went to the press. NSA was very much trying toâand the government for that matterâsend the message âIf you work in the intelligence community and you talk to the press youâre going to get hammered.â And so they wanted to make an example.
Whether they won the case or not was not important to the government. They wanted to send a message and thatâs why they went after him.
AM: And they actually said they reclassified this document that he had specifically taken was unclassified. Extremely shady.
BB: It was also material that they had independently released publicly and Jim Bamford provided that to the judge Bennett and the court.
AM: Kirk, I wanted toâactually Bill, letâs talk about Edward Snowden. Tomorrow of course is the anniversary of the leaks. I wanted to play a quick clip from his NBC interview. Letâs check that out.
ES: They found that we had all of the information that we needed, as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot. We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we werenât collecting information. It wasnât that we didnât have enough dots. It wasnât that we didnât have a haystack. It was that we did not understand the haystack that we have.
AM: And of course this is why you guys left in outrage. You agree with his assessment here?
BB: Yeah, I know the specifics of it. Like six or seven phone calls from San Diego back to the Yemen facility. And by the way, both ends were known. Both numbers were there. Thatâs how caller ID works. And youâre talking about switches. And the switches have to know exactly how to pass or where itâs coming from, how to pass the other line back. They have to have the information to make the connection otherwise it doesnât happen.
AM: Why expand the haystack if the haystack was already there, available and couldâve prevented the terrorism?
BB: Well the very simple reason they did that was for money. It was to build up an empire of an industrial complex around NSA and other agencies and thatâs exactly what theyâve done. They spend on the order of $70 billion a year on contracts.
AM: Well letâs go along with the NSA apologistsâHayden, Clapperâwho say that thereâs no tangible evidence that the NSA is actually using this data against us so why should we worry?
KW: Itâs a silly statement. NSA operates behind a wall of secrecy. You need a clearance just to enter the building. And so what goes on behimd those fences and facilities is unbeknownst to anyone except NSA. So NSA has a license to say what it wants to and no one has the ability to challenge it..
BB: I would also add that itâs not so much NSA using the data as it is law enforcement, FBI and DEA. Theyâre using this data directly.
They have ways and means of interrogating directly. Director Mueller testified to this to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said he had access to a technology database which he put together with DOD where he could go in and get emails with one query, get all past emails and all future ones as they come in on a person. What heâs doing is heâs going into the NSA database because NSA and DOD is responsible for communications, thatâs email. And so they got all these Narus devices around the network collecting all these emails. So theyâre going into the base theyâre creating, interrogating all this material to get criminal activity.
AM: Yeah, as Edward Snowden has said repeatedly this is about potential for retroactive prosecution. Kind of building this whole framework around people.
In 1999, the National Security Agency began a feasibility study to determine whether the agency could outsource the job of upgrading its massive IT systems to companies in the private sector. By 2000, the agency had decided to move forward with the project and began soliciting bids and contracts from major telecommunications firms and defense contractors. In 2001, the NSA chose Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to lead a large group of companies to implement the project, which the agency dubbed Project Groundbreaker. CSC led a group called Eagle Alliance, a joint venture including Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, ACS Defense, BTG, CACI, Compaq, TRW, Windemere, Fiber Plus, Superior Communications and Verizon.
The NSA announced in a press release at the time that Groundbreaker would update ânon-missionâ infrastructure in four areas, âtelephony, distributed computing, enterprise management, and networks.â The contract required contractors to hire up to 750 NSA employees to help with the process. Agency estimates said the project could take up to 10 years to complete and that the cost of the project would be around $2 billion, though the CSC CEO at the time assured stockholders the price would be more in the $5 billion range.
Scalia agreed with this rationale; that nobody could reasonably expect their cell phone calls to be private.
Very nice collection, even if it made me autistic.
So far, no evidence.