thebigp

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the solar The Corruption and Compromise of the NSA With William E. Binney!June 29 2017
William E. Binney--JUNE 2017
FITTS=”F”
BINNEY=”B”
F- is Bill Binney and is a retired Senior NSA intelligence officer. He has been described by some of his colleagues as one of the finest analysts in the NSA history. !He retired in October of 2001 after a highly successful 30-year career with the NSA.
B- Yes they have – especially with all these unfounded allegations about the Russians. They are trying to start a new Cold War.
F- what you have accomplished with a Thin Thread system and NSA, ‘Let’s Go to the Movies’ this week on The Solari Report is Frederick Moser’s documentary on you and your experience called A Good American, and his sequel, The Maze, which gives a great deal of background. I would encourage subscribers to hear that because of the detailed understanding of the Thin Thread system that you built and also, the Trail Blazer system that NSA adopted is very much worth understanding and very helpful to comprehend current events. !Tell us a little about what you did at NSA, particularly the Thin Thread system.
B-: I am primarily working on solving codes and cyphers and similar things and also data systems for or against the Warsaw Pact Soviet problems. That was where my major emphasis was until the 1990’s when I got involved as the technical director of, what I called, ‘the world’; I thought that was a fun title. !I was having fun with that. At any rate, when I got to that point, I was looking to see what the real problem was that our analysts were facing. the Thin Thread program around 1997 and really started cranking along in 1998. So I was planning in 1997 and executing in 1998 and 1999. Then by 2000 we had it ready. !It was a program that looked at sessionized data off the fiberoptic lines where it would take in the fiber rates and sessionized data on any scale you preferred – 10 gigabits or however many you wanted to go. basically, that we could collect everything in the world. !My objective was to look at the data and examine it using meta-data to see what was important to pull out for our analysts to review, not bury them with meaningless drivel from other people in the world who weren’t even relevant to any of the problems. Primarily, it gave everyone in the world privacy upfront because none of their data was available to anybody in the intelligence community or in law enforcement. So that was the first thing that we did, and that was the first thing that they got rid of. So they removed that software from the filtering software, and took in everything. we encrypt your data so that nobody knows who you are until we can show that you are part of the criminal activity. . That was the second thing that they removed. !So they collected everything, and nobody had any privacy, whatsoever. The third thing was an audit routine that we had running across our entire network looking at who came into our network, what they did, how long they stayed, where they went, and what they did with the data. !In other words, Edward Snowden couldn’t have done what he did without us knowing about it if they had implemented that. It’s corruption and fraud and waste, and they didn’t want anybody to know where they move money around from program to program. They don’t want you to know what programs are wasting money, where they are throwing away money, and where they are violating the Federal acquisitions act or anything like that.
they could cut their budget and similar things, which they should have anyway, but they didn’t. !That meant they could take in everything, know everybody in the world – including all US citizens. My estimate is at least 280 million citizens. !The Constitution and the laws of the land meant absolutely nothing to them; they simply violated all of them. .
F-: So you actually retired because you were concerned about the Constitutionality of what they were doing
That idea that you had to trade privacy for security has been a lie from the very beginning. The difference is the magnitude of money necessary to achieve bulk acquisition on everybody on the planet: 1) Builds a big empire for you, 2) Gives you all the power against everybody in the world that you would ever need. and you can go in and investigate and find something against them and use that as leverage to stop them.
That’s what happened to Eliot Spitzer because he was going after the bankers for defrauding people. That would have led back to the Congress with Dodd Frank and all those programs. That had to be stopped, and that is what they did with him. !They also did it with the CEO of Qwest, Joe Nacchio. They put him in jail for it, so he became the poster boy for CEO’s. “If you don’t cooperate with us, we’re going to find something and put you in jail. after James Rosen, the Associated Press journalist. They have leverage on everybody and they certainly went after whistleblowers.
F-One thing that you brought out very well in A Good American is Thin Thread was operated and controlled by the civil service, and Trail Blazer was really turned over to outside contractors at a much greater expense.
B-YES
F-: I find that a lot of the shenanigans occur as soon as you can get it out of the hands of the civil service; not to say that one is all bad and one is all good, but if you’re going to maintain sovereignty, then you need it under the control of government employees. As soon as you can get it into the outside contractors, that is where much of the shenanigans start.
B-3YES, . In the 1990’s it was very clear to me that their whole concept was, “Keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.” !They’re not intending to solve the problem. If they solve the problem, they can’t see beyond that and can’t see what they’re going to do next and are afraid of that. Their concern is to get the next contract. It’s not to solve the problem; that is the issue. That is why I keep saying publicly that the people in charge at NSA and the CIA and the White House essentially traded the security of the people of the United States and the free world for money. because that knowledge of everybody gave them power over everyone.
F- When you retired, you started a business and they targeted your business and made it difficult to operate.
B-: Originally we were referred to the National Reconnaissance Office – the NRO – to do a task by the senior staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. We went there to do that, and were involved and starting to work on that. Then the NSA found out about it, and had, not only us removed from the program, but also they had the entire program cancelled. So the staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee went to the members of the Senate and said, “We need to investigate NSA because of what they are doing here,” The Senate members refused to do it simply because ‘they would look bad’“We need to support our intelligence agencies. , and all they did was squander the money. People who were known have murdered the people who have been assassinated since then. That was the whole idea of the Thin Thread program. That’s why these people are getting murdered all over the world. They’re not focusing and it’s not a disciplined, professional job now
F-So you said that the Germans and the Brits are also doing the bulk acquisition
B-. It’s actually a “Five Eyes” effort plus about seven, eight, or maybe even nine other countries in Europe and various other allies around the world like Japan and Israel
F- The tension between you and the NSA went to a new level. The New York Times published an article, and the next thing your house was raided and some of your many colleagues were raided as well.
B-: It was in July of 2007. It was July 26, 2007 to be precise. It was a raid done simultaneously against all four of us who had filed the DOJ complaint against NSA for corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse. We filed that in September of 2002, and so they were trying to find some way to get back at us. !When this New York Times article hit, they accused us of that and bamboozled judges, who didn’t know any better, to sign the warrants to come after us when there was no evidence presented in the affidavits. We have those now; it took us five years to get them. There was no evidence in the affidavits that pointed to us for anything, so there was no probable cause to do it anyway. He knew when the FBI and the NSA and CIA were feeding him information to request the warrant and saw that they already had wiretaps and were reading emails on everybody. Those were the felonies to begin with. They were supposed to go through the FISA Court to get that kind of information, and instead they already had it. they knew it was false to begin with, and this was all done under Comey and Mueller – the two guys who are there now and who were involved in the Department of Justice and the FBI at that time
F- The sweethearts.
B- Also, the current Deputy Attorney General was a part of the process. He was somewhere down the line involved in the investigations into the leaks. So his name was on the affidavits and the warrants, too.
F-: I don’t know if you knew this, but I litigated with the Department of Justice for many, many years. In my experience it’s the same thing. They all keep turning up again like a bad penny.
B- Well, they had to keep covering up for one another. When you commit crimes, you have to cover it up, and need everybody to participate because if any one of them falls,
F-: So you were successful in your litigation with them, which is quite an accomplishment. I know in the end, you received an immunity letter. I have no idea how you did that but it was a very impressive performance.
William E. Binney: The raid occurred on the morning of the second day after Attorney General Gonzales’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the President’s surveillance programs,. He didn’t talk about the rest of the Stellar Wind program or the collection of AT&T and Verizon and various other telecoms around the United States talk about the rendering program or the torture program or the kidnapping and torture and the murder programs that were being run at the time. . So they raided us to keep us quiet and off bounds. When that happens, you lawyer up and the lawyers say, “three separate times after the Department of Justice joined in; they tried to indict us under the Espionage Act – three separate times! Each time I had exculpatory data on them that I could show. I told our lawyer about it, and they backed off. The third time, however, they called our lawyer and said, “No, we’re going to indict your guys now.” Okay, now it’s time for me to pull my little number. I’m going to play them like a fiddle.” !I called Tom Drake because I’d been assembling evidence of malicious prosecution on the part of the Department of Justice of the United States. They were fabricating evidence, and I had proof of that. I had very clear evidence. !I called Tom and said, “Our lawyer called us and said that we are going to be indicted – all of us – and I’ve been assembling all this evidence of malicious prosecution. Here it is,” and I proceeded to read it across the phone to him because I knew that the FBI had his phone tapped. “Tom, tell your lawyer that we’re going to charge them with malicious persecution when they take us to court,” and then I hung up. !I waited, and finally a month later we received unsolicited letters of immunity from the Department of Justice.! . It wasn’t important for him to know; it was important for the FBI and the DOJ to know that I was going to come at them. They’ve never bothered us since then.
F-You did better because HUD, IG, and the FBI – and it’s a long story, so I won’t bore you with it – falsified evidence, and the property manager in our offices was a witness to it and gave us an affidavit
B-: I had to be fearless in the NSA. Every time I tried to do something, people opposed me. As I said in the movie, I never asked permission; I simply did it. Then if I had to, I asked for forgiveness. !If you tried to open up and say, “I’d like to do this,” everybody opposes you. So I said, “To hell with them! They don’t achieve anything. Why even consult them?” The point is that we have a Department of Justice that is fabricating evidence to put people in jail to keep them quiet. !Right now I’m supporting four separate lawsuits against the United States government for unconstitutionally collecting the data: One at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, : I feed all kinds of information into them so the This is really funny. I started when I got into the UK by saying, “Bulk data collection k**ls people. They can’t see anything in advance, so they can’t stop the attack, and people die as a result”. !Then I gave a testimony to the House of Lords. One of the members said, “You mean to tell me that you’re here telling us that all the members of our government and all the members of the agencies of our government who came in here to testify have been lying to us?” y can write up responses to motions by the government that try to hide what they’re doing.
F- Let me talk a little about your recent commentary, because that testimony reminds me that I’ve been watching many interviews you’ve done on the DNC hacking on allegations of Russian interference, etc. One thing that happens in the media is, whether it’s the governmental officials or the media, what you get is a completely muddled description of what has to happen and what doesn’t have to happen.
B-: It was very obvious from the very beginning the way the NSA and the intelligence communities were saying things. For example, in the cyber world, the NSA essentially owns the internet worldwide. They have programs called ‘trace- route’ programs. , which simply means that NSA has hundreds of switches in the internet around the world so that they are tracing billions of packets as they move throughout the world every day, they can trace all those packets as they leave any server anywhere in the US to anyplace outside the US. From there, they can trace it where it goes in Europe or Asia or wherever, including Russia and China.
The point is that they know where the packets are if they went there. So there wasn’t a question saying, “We think...” They should say, “We know, and here’s where it came from,” much like they did with the Chinese.
F- One of the problems with bulk acquisition is you can’t say that you don’t have it.
B-That’s right. !C. Austin Fitts: Russian interference – you’ve also commented on the allegations regarding Russian interference in 2016 campaign. There is simply no evidence of that. I don’t know what they did. Where is the evidence for it? !All we’re doing is getting a collection of hot air trying to divert from what the real issues are in this country, and I think we need to focus. We’re not focusing. That’s that loss of disc

thebigp

F- President Trump has held out in insisting that they were eavesdropping on him in Trump Tower and during the campaign. It seemed for a couple of weeks as though he was a lone voice, and then a variety of people jumped in and said, “Oh, guess what? This is really true,” and one of those voices was yours.
B-feed data to him through people who know him and know that this is going on. It’s no surprise and I think he very well knows what is happening. !We were part of the network trying to inform him of the realities of life in Washington – the District of Corruption
F-Yes, and they weren’t even subtle about it. Do you know what I mean? It was like a ‘in your face’ police state. That is the only way that I can describe it, but I became convinced that there was an integration of data cross-government that was being used by a variety of different industries – whether it was to sell consumer products or to manipulate the financial markets. I’m wondering if Trail Blazer was not just NSA empire-building but literally a c**p d’état. !
B- The NSA and the Federal government in general have been outsourcing to a private industry the business of government. The NSA, for example, outsourced all of the infrastructure – all the computer support, all the computer acquisition, and all of the database and database management systems. That’s why Edward Snowden was working for Booz Allen as a contractor. He could get into all those databases and take that data. That also goes for all the other contractors working for them, which are the same kind of companies. They have fragments working for NSA, CIA, FBI, and so on. All these companies have tentacles into all these agencies, and they’re managing a lot of that data for them. They basically have all the power behind the scenes. !Now, each of these companies is not restricted to only intelligence; they have other divisions that work in other areas. !If one of their divisions is having a contract dispute or wants to make a bid on a contract, that gives them the ability to look into everyone in the world bidding on that contract and see where they could leverage it. So industrial espionage is one of the main problems. !I objected to this when the NSA, under Hayden, started doing this. He was the guy who came in and advocated all this nonsense and, of course, so is Congress. They were advocating some of this, too. They were all making a big mistake, and now we’re paying for it. That is really what is happening here. This gives them the capacity to do espionage on a world-wide scale.
F- When Enron first hit, I was doing a series of radio shows on Enron. One thing that had happened was the Department of Justice had failed to assert jurisdiction over many of the Enron documents. What was interesting was that the chairman of the Finance Committee on the board of Enron was the chairman of an IT provider who provided significant services to DOJ and SEC enforcement.
B-nteresting
F- One of the interesting ideas that I saw in A Good American is that all of this could be returned to the civil service for a much more economic result – both a more productive result and an economic result.
B- Even the financial officers that were in NSA told me personally – one after the other – that it was impossible to audit NSA because of the shell game that they play with money once they got inside NSA.
F- There was one interview, and I think it was the one that you did with Kirk Wiebe, where you described the extraordinary accounting practices and financial practices at the NSA. It’s going to be one of the links we’re putting up. !One thing that has happened that I think is the most disturbing is something called ‘targeted individuals’. We’ve tried over the last ten years to put more and more up on the website about that.
S-: Over the years Kirk and I have been approached by various people saying that they are being targeted. There is such a groundswell of people who were saying these kinds of things, so we felt we had to organize to show in some disciplined, scientific way what is possible and what is occurring, and then provide some way of being able to prove that it is happening.. to assemble the different kinds of attributes or incidents that people were sensing that were happening to them, and then categorize those. Also, to assemble information that is being published publicly that is available through open source on governmental or military development of tools that are electromagnetic that control populations in terms of perhaps r**t control and similar things. That meant that once you could define it – if your symptoms mapped to a certain set of knowledge that we knew they were testing – then we would, hopefully, be able to show the spectrum they were operating in and then say, “These devices will detect that.” You could then use that and detect them and take them to a court of law
That program is, “Get me money and I’ll be happy.” Unfortunately the problem with that is that we have to pay for that as taxpayers, and occasionally some of us have to die to keep it going. : It’s a leach, that’s for sure.
F- There have been reports recently in the media that a portion of the Republican lawmakers are seriously considering not reauthorizing NSA’s full authority on reauthorizations coming up. Can you tell us anything about that.
B- Rand Paul and various other senators have been saying that they have been spied on. I’m here to tell them that they’ve all been spied on and there is nothing new here. these people are starting to wake up somewhere along the line, and they are beginning to realize how much leverage the intelligence community has on the members of Congress. They are all fundamentally under the thumb of the intelligence community, which I now call the Praetorian Guard. They are in charge, and they are the ones who are going to leverage everything. !They use the same tactics as the KGB. If they don’t have something on you that they can leverage to get you to do what they want you to do, then they will find somebody you care about and find something on them, and then leverage them against you. “You know, we are in a post-f*****t state and know it, and you are in a pre-f*****t state and don’t know it.”!It gets back to the concept that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. It’s a great quote, and I have three things to say about that. First, it’s a great quote from Joseph Goebbels. Second, what you think is totally irrelevant. What you think is irrelevant; it doesn’t matter. It matters only what the state thinks. Third, Goethe captured it very well a few hundred years ago.
He said, “No one is more hopelessly ens***ed than those who falsely believe they are free
F- One of the reasons I insisted that we go to court when I litigated with the Department of Justice is they kept making things up and throwing it at me and it was all fabricated. !I forced them to go to court because they had to put evidence behind the allegations, and they couldn’t. They cancelled the trial several times on the eve of trial; they loved to run up my expenses that way. He didn’t realize it, but he was describing the governance system in this country as basically the CIA or the intelligence community indicating that the President of the United States, and the Congress have to do what the intelligence agencies want. ; the intelligence agencies are in control, and that is a real governance issue.
B- That’s right. Schumer didn’t actually understand what he was saying. It’s much the same as the Director of the FBI, Mueller, who used to be one of my better sources of information because he didn’t know what he was saying either. !An example of this is when he went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on March 30, 2011. He said that he met with the Department of Defense, and they created a technology database that he could get into (‘he’ being the FBI), and, with one query, retrieve all past emails and all future ones on anybody as they came in. Well, that c*********d the entire collection system of NSA because he said they had all our emails. That was an outright compromise of the Stellar Wind program, which is what Comey had objected during the hospital visit in 2004. But they never fixed that and Comey agreed to something that wasn’t a fix. in fact behind the scenes under Executive Order 12333, they were collecting everything on everybody. !Even Representative Gowdy is under the impression that this is not happening
B- that the OPM got hacked and the various other people were hacked. Every time they were hacked, they would say, “Cyber security is really important. We need more money for cyber security,” but they never fixed the problems that they knew about. So this is what I call a basic swindle. Then maybe we’ll have some security. But in the meantime, stop asking for more money because you’re not giving anybody security. we are also seeing is a complete lack of integrity and security in digital systems. How is this supposed to work? How are we supposed to run everything through the internet when there are this many examples of lack of integrity? I’ve never been able to understand how this is supposed to work. !William E. Binney: It’s supposed to work in a sense that they get all the information and we get the shaft. That’s been entire point. The internet of things is very dangerous now because what that means is they now have the capacity to see a lot more into our lives and what we’re doing. That’s a very dangerous thing to do. !I would say that if you have a device that is connected to the internet, disconnect it. Make sure that you get it disconnected. If you don’t, it’s another spying mechanism on what you’re doing. : If you’re going to go on the web, it depends on who you want to protect yourself from. There are various levels of protection. If you’re interested in protecting yourself against NSA, GCHQ, and the Five Eyes; if they want you, they’re going to get you.
I always advocate inventing your own encryption system
When the Snowden material started appearing with the PRISM program and things like that, where you had companies that were participating in sharing data with the NSA, which was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of any number of countries around the world. I thought when that happened that was going to be a grand opportunity for other companies – in Europe especially – to begin to develop their own equivalency of Facebook and their own systems locally in the European Union and in the countries. now we are supporting the EU movement to mandate targeted collection of data and make bulk acquisition of data illegal in the European Union. The best thing to do, from my perspective, is to b***h and moan and gripe and groan to your local representatives and senators. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. I believe in being the squeaky wheel.
F- Are there any particular Congress people who are very strong on this issue and are providing leadership that we can support? !William E. Binney: Bernie Sanders, of course, seems to be very strong on it, as is Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. I believe President Trump. He has obviously demonstrated tremendous courage on this issue. He has clearly communicated – whether it was what happened during the campaign or the leaking since he’s been the President – and completely understands how destructive this is. It goes to the heart of a key governance question which is: Are our duly elected and authorized representatives the ones in charge, or are people who can fiddle with the communication systems and leak in charge?
F-is there anything else you would like to communicate to our subscribers? Is there anything we should have covered that we didn’t?
B- No. I just think that if you have the opportunity, sue the bastards! Get them into court. That’s the way to do it.