Posted on 05/15/2016 5:34:36 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Former National Security Agency technical director and surveillance state whistleblower William Binney has long said 9/11 could have been prevented had the NSA not capitulated to big-money private contractors less than a month prior to the attacks. Mainstream media, perhaps capitulating to its own monied corporate owners, relegated Binney’s explosive claims to the backburner for years.
However, on Thursday — two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee began debating whether or not to reauthorize massive and controversial NSA surveillance programs — Salon finally headlined Binney’s damning claim and its backstory.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, could have been thwarted using information the NSA had available but didn’t catch, as well as through communications with other agencies it simply didn’t bother to undertake. And, according to Binney — who is often called the ‘original’ NSA whistleblower — most of the failure boils down to private contractor cash.
Binney spearheaded an elaborate metadata analysis and surveillance program named ThinThread, which promised both efficacy and privacy protection. But just a few weeks before the attacks, the NSA pulled the plug on ThinThread in favor of private intelligence contractor SAIC’s Trailblazer — a more expensive, privacy-invasive, and worse, less effective surveillance tool.
On September 12, Binney decided to find out who had carried out such a nefarious plot — and why it hadn’t been stopped. Because NSA director Michael Hayden sent staff home both on the 11th and 12th, Binney snuck into work disguised as a janitor to attempt to glean any information that might help explain how the agency tasked with protecting the security of the nation could have missed hints such a major operation was impending.
As he explains in the forthcoming documentary about his experience, “A Good American,” cited by Salon, some contractors working in the same unit as Binney received a warning.
“While I was in there trying to look at the material on my computer,” Binney said, “the president of the contracting group that I had working on ThinThread came over to me and said he’d just been in a contractor meeting” with a former top SAIC manager who’d returned to the NSA to work on Trailblazer. Those contractors had been advised not to criticize firms like SAIC for failing precisely what their job putatively entailed — preventing terror strikes like 9/11.
“Do not embarrass large companies,” Binney claims the SAIC manager told a contractor. “You do your part, you’ll get your share, there’s plenty for everybody.” In short: keep quiet, get paid.
Binney and his like-minded NSA colleague, Thomas Drake, suspected SAIC’s Trailblazer — and thus SAIC — shouldn’t have missed the mark.
Though Binney and a number of others left the NSA when it instituted the illegal wiretap program, Stellar Wind, Drake remained at his post — and tested ThinThread to “find out if there’s any information of the 9/11 attack that we should have known about but didn’t,” he explained.
“We discovered critical intelligence, al Qaeda and associated movement intelligence that had never been discovered by the NSA,” Drake says in “A Good American.” “They didn’t even know that they had it in their databases.”
As Salon put it, “The NSA’s clunky systems not only didn’t prevent the attack, as Drake’s test of ThinThread suggests Binney’s program might have, but it couldn’t identify relevant data about the attack in NSA’s possession even after the attack.”
Trailblazer was an utter failure. An investigation and subsequent report by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General — conducted following complaints from Binney, Drake, and their colleagues — led to the shuttering of the program. But Trailblazer wasn’t the sole failing of the NSA in the September 11 attacks.
Several former NSA employees accused the agency of failing to share critical information with the CIA and FBI prior to 9/11. More contentiously, former employees have intimated both the communications failure and the choice to proceed with SAIC’s inept surveillance program might not constitute such an accidental error.
Whether or not ill intent underlies the NSA’s failings in the 9/11 tragedy will likely never be known — but the fact Binney’s experience has now hit mainstream headlines denotes a step in the direction toward the truth.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1462140/posts?page=86
It referes to independantly developed intel that could not be used against the protected person of Mohammad Atta. Gorelick’s Wall was not the issue at hand and played no role here.
Thanks for reminding us about Able Danger.
If I remember correctly ABLE DANGER was a Pentagon run programme.
THIN THREAD run by NSA.
Your post 17 makes no mention of how he was “inpedendantly” protected. It only refers to not being able to go after him because of the illegality of information sharing. Maybe provide link to full article if you have it.
A lot of people don’t even know about the further treachery this b!tch perpetrated on us. She was Vice Chairman of Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and she was part of the 9/11 commission that investigated herself, among other potential terrorists.]
She is a millionaire several times over as a result of bonuses from Fannie Mae. Last I heard about her she was a lawyer on the Duke University team leaving it in 2011 after the team lost in the Lacrosse scandal.
Former National Security Agency technical director and surveillance state whistleblower William Binney has long said 9/11 could have been prevented had the NSA not capitulated to big-money private contractors less than a month prior to the attacks.
...
Bush and Clinton cronies.
Sorry do not have the link - search newsmax perhaps. That he is protected is plain in the language used. One does not need to spell these thing out. You would never find any document to that effect - not ever. Meaning is all in the language and in who is speaking and who is listening.
The plain language of your post only indicates that the reason he was “protected” was because the independantly developed military intelligence could not be shared with the FBI. Lawyers told intel folks “you can’t touch him” in that context. Again, based on what you posted.
If you’re going to make the leap from the obvious to the paranoid, you do have to spell it out if you think you’re going to convince somebody of what you claim.
“I’d still like to know what Sandy Berger removed from the archives”
I’m glad you reminded me of an accepted, yet seemingly uncontroversial story. Berger’s actions were bigger than Watergate, but it gets the “what does it really matter now?” treatment.
I give up. You are obviously correct. I must completely forget all the years I worked at NSA.
At no point in history has any government ever wanted its people to be defenseless for any good reason ~ nully's son
Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!
To get onto The Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping List you must threaten to report me to the Mods if I don't add you to the list...
So who was heading the NSA at the time? Was it one of those Clinton holdovers?
Biggest take away is the fact that the NSA did not even know they had the data. With even greater volumes being captured they will miss even more
Sure.
You are asking me to forget all the years I have developed the ability to reason.
An old, sarcastic tag line of mine
ABLE DANGER?!?...What’s an Able Danger?
There was no Gorelick wall.
Congress had her investigate 9/11, and she found that the wall she put in place didn’t exist.
No. No wall.
” The Salman Pak plane is the same thing we do here to train emergency personnel”
It’s also been suggested that Saddam used them for anti-terrorism drills.
We know Saddam supported terrorism. He paid families of suicide bombers who targeted Israel. Iraq was a safe haven for retired terrorists. Initial intelligence reports identified Salman Pak as one of three terrorist training facilities. President Clinton went to war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. There was a long pipeline of people prepared, probably trained, in airplane hijacking. Where did they practice?
9/11 did involve Saudi nationals, that in itself proves nothing.
Reasoning has nothing to do with this, despite the need to make it somehow make sense - these things have their own logic and internal reasoning that, unless you have been there, seem nonsensical.
No, you needed to read the rest of the sentence:
Though Binney and a number of others left the NSA when it instituted the illegal wiretap program, Stellar Wind, Drake remained at his post — and tested ThinThread to “find out if there’s any information of the 9/11 attack that we should have known about but didn’t,” he explained.
Binney left, but Drake stayed. Drake tested the system that Binney had developed, and found that it did indeed identify information that would have warned of the 9/11 attacks. The system that replaced it (only a few weeks before 9/11) missed the info.
A number of people have posted that this is Monday-morning quarterbacking. But, in data analysis and data mining systems, "look-back" testing is essential to determine the effectiveness of algorithms and methodologies. It's typically called a "validation" exercise. If it doesn't identify known events, then it is likely to miss unknown events.
I doubt the original system that was cancelled has been updated since 9/11. So, it's very likely it would have identified the information warning of a terrorist attack. However, it's worth noting that doesn't mean the information would have been acted on.... we already know that one of the future hijackers had been detained by the FBI and despite an agent's best efforts, they didn't follow up on the possibility of a larger plot.
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