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Before you read this article view the movie on you tube “A Good American” details the problem!
Former NSA official William Binney at the Congress on Privacy & Surveillance in 2013. Former NSA officials turned whistleblowers say a discontinued program could have prevented some of the worst terrorist attacks in peacetime history, but agency bureaucracy and inefficiency got in the way.Weeks prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, a test-bed program dubbed ThinThread was shut down in favor of a more expensive, privacy-invasive program that too would see its eventual demise some three years later -- not before wasting billions of Americans' tax dollars.
NATIONAL SECURITY
NSA is so overwhelmed with data, it's no longer effective, says whistleblower
One of the agency's first whistleblowers says the NSA is taking in too much data for it to handle, which can have disastrous -- if not deadly -- consequences. Thin Thread. designed to modernize the agency's intelligence gathering effort, was cancelled. Speaking at the premier of a new documentary film "A Good American" in New York, which chronicles the rise and demise of the program, the whistleblowers spoke in support of the program, led by former NSA technical director William Binney.
Thin Thread was a program developed by a small team of people in NSA headed by Binney -- including would-be whistleblowers Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis. The program took the world's metadata -- from phone calls to geolocation, who is talking to whom and when -- and digested it to dig up connections between suspects and those on watchlists. , The small band of analysts were unable to convince NSA administration to fund the project -- largely because they say it didn't garner enough funds from Congress. "It cost $3.2 million to build it from scratch," said Binney. "And it was fully automated, and it didn't require people to run it. It was electronically downloadable... it wouldn't take any money to deploy it."
Was designed to spy on cellphones and email traffic."[Trailblazer] was the largest failure in NSA history," said Binney. "Fundamentally they traded your security -- mine, and everybody else's -- for money. It's that simple"
Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis all left the NSA in 2001 just weeks after the attacks. Binney said -- and the other whistleblowers agreed -- that the program could have "absolutely prevented" the attacks on New York.An NSA spokesperson did not return a call asking for comment. House staffer, Diane Roark -- whose job it was to oversee the NSA's account -- who came forward had little to gain but everything to lose. They would all have their houses raided in the near future for what they believe was speaking out against the waste in the wake of Trailblazer's demise. Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive, would later be charged with espionage by the Obama administration -- a case that was largely dropped -
The inspector general's report, released in 2004, contained significant criticisms of the program; however, many unclassified parts of the report remain redacted and unreadable. The government may face a legal challenge over the redactions. Snowden later said it was in part Binney and Drake's cases which inspired him to come forward.
Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, that now publishes the remains of the Snowden files1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article in The Baltimore Sun.[1] The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.[2]
The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections.[3] A consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop Trailblazer in 2002.[4]
They complained to the DoD Inspector General office in 2002 about mismanagement and the waste of taxpayer money at the NSA surrounding the Trailblazer program. In 2007 the FBI raided the homes of these people, an evolution of President Bush's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks" after the New York Times disclosed a separate program (see NSA warrantless surveillance controversy). In 2010, one of the people who had helped the IG in the ensuing investigation, NSA official Thomas Andrews Drake, was charged with espionage,[7][8] part of the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks".[8][9][10] The original charges against him were later dropped and he pleaded to a misdemeanor.
The result of the DoD IG complaint was a 2004 audit report that was released under FOIA in 2011.[6] Although highly redacted, the report contained significant criticisms of Trailblazer, and included some relatively minor criticisms of ThinThread, for example, citing a low "quality of service and support" from the ThinThread program team, a lack of documentation, a lack of a configuration management system, and a lack of a trouble ticket system. However, "The findings that led to the recommendations would not have prevented the successful deployment of THINTHREAD ... the recommendations were made to improve the operational efficiency of THINTHREAD after it was deployed ..."[11]
ThinThread would have bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools.:[1]
• Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.
• Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
• Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
• Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records. This component is known as MAINWAY and, according to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Risen, "MAINWAY [became] the heart of the NSA's domestic spying program."[13]
Intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.[1]
The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced. ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: One, the NSA had more information than it could digest, and, two, increasingly its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.[1]
Trailblazer had more political support internally because it was initiated by Michael Hayden when he first arrived at the NSA.[1] NSA dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance. Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor. Taylor has retired from the NSA.
One intelligence official told the Baltimore Sun that ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately."[14] However, Michael Hayden asserts in his memoir that in 2000 lawyers at the NSA and Justice Department would not allow the deployment of ThinThread because it would be illegal, despite its use of encryption for US citizen data: "The answer from Justice was... clear: 'You can't do this...
End of the project
As good as it was, it couldn’t scale sufficiently to the volume of modern communications the ThinThread program, like Trailblazer, was a "wasteful failure".[7] However, as noted, the MAINWAY component of ThinThread was deployed after 9/11. NSA even tried to put ThinThread into effect before 9/11. Hayden confessed in his memoir that in 2000, fearing further terrorist attacks like the Millennium Plot, he gave the order to put ThinThread into action: "Let me be clear: This was me arguing for a limited use of the Thin Thread approach prior to 9/11." The only reason ThinThread was not put into use was because it was deemed to be illegal under US law at that time.[17]
An essay on Privacy: Why giving up your rights in the name of “national security” may not be such a good idea
Human beings are easily influenced by social pressures, so I don’t question the validity of Singer’s suggestion, but I have to ask, what will this feeling of being watched do to people’s personalities and sense of identity over time?
In George Orwell’s 1984, Orwell introduces the concept of “Big Brother,” a figure that has become synonymous with the idea of government surveillance.2 Big Brother is government surveillance at its worst (if you so much as think about r*******n, The government may say that it needs to circumvent certain rights in order to crack down on terrorist threats, but there are ways to do so while protecting American citizens’ right to privacy and remaining within the limits of the Constitution. (NSA)’s pre-9/11 surveillance project, ThinThread. The NSA was falling behind, technologically speaking, as America headed into the Internet age. It was awash in more data than it could possibly comprehend with its information processing methods at the time. ThinThread, developed by NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney while working with the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC),
ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems.”3 ThinThread was so thorough and good at collecting information that it picked up intelligence on American citizens without the NSA intending it to. As a fix, Binney built in a set of privacy controls. With these controls in place, data on American citizens would remain encrypted unless ThinThread f**gged it as a potential threat. The NSA could scour the world for threats and pinpoint specific bits of potentially significant data.
The Trailblazer Project. Trailblazer was very similar to ThinThread, but lacked the privacy controls. , Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that when she confronted then NSA Director Michael Hayden about why he removed the privacy measures from Trailblazer, he reluctantly said after some prodding, “We didn’t need them. We had the power.”3 Hayden basically admitted that the NSA saw following privacy laws as a hindrance and thus, decided to circumvent them. President Bush actually gave the NSA permission through a secret executive order to go forward with the Trailblazer Project, even though monitoring American citizens without a warrant violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
ThinThread worked efficiently and effectively, so I have yet to see a true justification for why the program wasn’t used instead of Trailblazer, which went hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and was ultimately deemed a failure.3 ? The United States Criminal Code includes a legal definition of “terrorism,” but according to the Oxford Companion to American Law, throughout the rest of the world, “There is no generally agreed upon definition of ‘terrorism.’ ? I doubt the government cares about the average citizen’s sexual fetishes, but that’s not entirely the point.
These popular systems are now being used to keep track of who, when, and how we go about communicating with others. Thin Thread is the name of a project that the United States national security agency pursued during the late 90s. The program involved wiretapping sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the numerous sources, the program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11 2001, attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority. Thin Thread collected data and got rid of useless information on the spot therefore avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.”
Thin Thread has proven to be a successful system, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Thin Thread was supposedly intended to intercept foreign communications, yet it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S. This then become a big problem: due to the federal law forbade the monitoring of domestic communications without a court warrant. And a warrant couldn’t be issued without probable cause and a known suspect. In order to comply with the law, Binney installed privacy controls and added an “anonymizing feature,” so that all American communications would be encrypted until a warrant was issued. The system would indicate when a pattern looked suspicious enough to justify a warrant.
It has been debates numerous of times as to whether it should be discontinued because it goes against what we are supposed to stand for as a country. It is said to say that it is even being debated seeing that no one should have the right to just up and make changes to whether or not they have the right to invade our privacy. It has been said by government officials that it is hard to have complete privacy and be safe at the same time. I believe that the measure that are being taken are unconstitutional and stated to be illegal. The United States has painted an image that we stand for freedom but I think the definition of freedom has changed over time here in America. We are no longer free and the amendment stands to just be a document of words that we state when necessary or alter when needed. Yet it doesn’t stop at just the thin thread program.
. The government even went the extra mile to insert a program referred to as the prison program which includes phone companies such as Verizon, Sprint and numerous of other phone companies. This program also includes search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Skype, and YouTube. All of these companies are tied the thin thread program to help deliver information regarding the tone of the conver