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NSA Whistleblower Details How The NSA Has Spied On All US Citizens Since 9/11
Business Insider ^ | Aug. 24, 2012 | Michael Kelley

Posted on 08/24/2012 10:02:21 PM PDT by george76

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency run its pervasive domestic spying apparatus...

Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution."

In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S. citizen without warrants under the code-name Stellar Wind.

(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; Government; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia; US: Maryland; US: New York; US: Utah; US: Virginia
KEYWORDS: binney; constitution; domesticspying; echelon; govtabuse; nsa; projectechelon; spying; stellarwind; tyranny; williambinney
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To: Salamander
Type in any generic search name in the www url address bar.

Look down at the bottom of the page to see what search engine is looking.

It is possible to get rid of the G. But it aint easy.

101 posted on 08/25/2012 1:41:30 AM PDT by rawcatslyentist (I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a Barack 0b0tt0my!)
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To: mkjessup

/cues X-Files theme

[night!]

:)


102 posted on 08/25/2012 1:42:09 AM PDT by Salamander (Happiness is a warm Python.)
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To: rawcatslyentist

I use the Alice Cooper search bar and get SWAG bucks.

http://blog.swagbucks.com/2009/06/search-with-alice-cooper.html

:)


103 posted on 08/25/2012 1:51:59 AM PDT by Salamander (Happiness is a warm Python.)
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To: Slyfox
In the Maryland area they call it No Such Agency

And to the employees it's Never Say Anything.

104 posted on 08/25/2012 2:32:26 AM PDT by Upstate NY Guy
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To: Salamander

So you’re saying they finally decided to sit this one out?


105 posted on 08/25/2012 2:46:02 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: FreedomPoster

My words, but a whisper, their deafness...a shout.

[Ugh...that’s gonna be stuck in my head ALL day now...the whole thing...both sides]

LOL

Skating away....


106 posted on 08/25/2012 3:38:06 AM PDT by Salamander (Happiness is a warm Python.)
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To: Salamander

BTW, I took a glance at your profile page - my son saw Alice warm up for Iron Maiden a month or so ago.


107 posted on 08/25/2012 4:09:38 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: Salamander
Dang, G has two tracking scripts running on that page. Not counting the Fb and Twit scripts.

Looks like you're selling it to them, beats letting them have it for free though.

108 posted on 08/25/2012 4:24:45 AM PDT by rawcatslyentist (I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a Barack 0b0tt0my!)
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To: everyone




Less than $2.2K to Go!

PUNCH HERE

109 posted on 08/25/2012 5:14:46 AM PDT by onyx (FREE REPUBLIC IS HERE TO STAY! DONATE MONTHLY! IF YOU WANT ON SARAH PALIN''S PING LIST, LET ME KNOW)
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To: HiTech RedNeck

God bless government employee whisteblowers who have the fortitude to step forward and do what is right


110 posted on 08/25/2012 5:18:06 AM PDT by jsanders2001
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To: george76

Maybe this explains a lot.

No matter how many times I change it, my computer keeps changing my location back to Salt Lake City.


111 posted on 08/25/2012 5:58:08 AM PDT by IMR 4350
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To: george76

I was surprised to learn from the video that the data acquisition itself is legal, and that surveillance doesn’t occur until someone queries or listens to the data.

I wonder about the legality of automated queries to bubble up “suspicious” activity.


112 posted on 08/25/2012 6:52:14 AM PDT by MV=PY (The Magic Question: Who's paying for it?)
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To: justa-hairyape
Sorry I don't buy what he is saying.
The processing and manpower to spy on every individual conversation aka 1984 style is beyond the realm of even NSA.
Now if someone used the country dialing codes and called the tribal areas of Pakistan or certain hot terrorist areas in Afghanistan, Yemen or Kashmir or other known terrorist havens. Then yes the dialing codes and the exchanges might attract attention. I guarantee that if one sent a international mail, telegram, teletype or was able to make an international phone to Germany, Italy, Japan or even the minor Axis powers during WWII you would also have attracted USG attention. Likewise during the height of the Cold War phone calls or any communication to the USSR, China, or Warsaw Pact areas would have also drawn attention. Thoose were adjudicated by the federal courts as legitimate federal “snooping”.
If you “case” a bank to rob and do it in a clumsy manner that says “I am casing a bank” you will get some questions.

In summary I think there is much much more to this guy's story then meets the eye. Just because his story appeals to those that have a conspiratorial frame of mind doesn't make it true! There are clearly some missing elements of the narrative.

113 posted on 08/25/2012 7:25:46 AM PDT by Reily
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To: Salamander
Or my mind-numbing back-and-forths about dog health/training/genetics/”look what cute thing Fluffy did today” blathering with my best girl friends.

I understand. The codes we use in my cell are embedded in conversations about gardening and the digestive problems of the over 50s generation. If they ever figure out what 'psyllium husk' really is ... well, I can say no more without encryption. ;^P

114 posted on 08/25/2012 8:15:26 AM PDT by TigersEye (dishonorabledisclosure.com - OPSEC (give them support))
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To: nicmarlo
What he said was brief actually. Just that he had been briefed on surveillance that spies on all Americans, he can't reveal details, he's pissed about it, he has legislation in the works to stop it and (naturally) he wants support primarily in the form of a contribution to Rand Pac.

I am not entirely cynical about his requests for donations though. He sends out e-mails on many topics and he is one of the very few politicians/conservative groups that puts substantive info in his mailings. Sometimes things I haven't even seen on FR yet which is almost always the first place I hear about things.

He's solid on pro-life issues, pro-2nd A. issues, anti-UN issues and smaller gov./lower taxes. What makes him different than others is he finds and promotes the most effective private orgs, has frequent petitions and submits meaningful bills on a regular basis.

I have no use for his daddy but Rand seems to be pretty grounded and rather relentless about a range of liberty focused issues. My apologies for the long winded reply.

115 posted on 08/25/2012 8:43:50 AM PDT by TigersEye (dishonorabledisclosure.com - OPSEC (give them support))
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To: Salamander

How is it that you can tell who is accessing your website? I would think the alphabets could hide or disguise their identity. But it is funny/scary that they would come after you. “Thick as a brick” is appropriate.


116 posted on 08/25/2012 8:51:17 AM PDT by Excellence (9/11 was an act of faith.)
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To: Reily
The processing and manpower to spy on every individual conversation aka 1984 style is beyond the realm of even NSA.

Stated as broadly as that? No, they wouldn't have the manpower to do that. But...

The Secret Sharer

Even in an age in which computerized feats are commonplace, the N.S.A.’s capabilities are breathtaking. The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress. Three times the size of the C.I.A., and with a third of the U.S.’s entire intelligence budget, the N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices. The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year.

(snip)

Drake, hoping to help fight back against Al Qaeda, immediately thought of a tantalizing secret project he had come across while working on Jackpot. Code-named ThinThread, it had been developed by technological wizards in a kind of Skunk Works on the N.S.A. campus.

(snip)

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

(snip)

In the late nineties, Binney estimated that there were some two and a half billion phones in the world and one and a half billion I.P. addresses. Approximately twenty terabytes of unique information passed around the world every minute. Binney started assembling a system that could trap and map all of it. “I wanted to graph the world,” Binney said. “People said, ‘You can’t do this—the possibilities are infinite.’ ” But he argued that “at any given point in time the number of atoms in the universe is big, but it’s finite.”

As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and 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.”

A small excerpt from a ten page article. Keep in mind that the software he is talking about is now several years old. No "eyes on" manpower needed until this "super" computer spits out a file on a "suspect."

117 posted on 08/25/2012 9:22:05 AM PDT by TigersEye (dishonorabledisclosure.com - OPSEC (give them support))
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To: Reily

Oh Reily?

Check out the publicly available info. There is quite enough processing power in that facility to do the job.

They are recording and key word flagging all electronic communications.

They are not “listening” to all of them, that is to say there is no human in the loop reading your emails and listening to your calls, but...

As you say, there is both more and less to this story than meets the eye.


118 posted on 08/25/2012 9:49:28 AM PDT by null and void (Day 1314 of our ObamaVacation from reality - Obama, a queer and present danger)
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To: TigersEye

Not long winded at all. Quite informative, in fact, about Rand (who I’ve always liked, now like even more after reading your post). I’m glad he’s doing something about this, too. IMHO, if he’s that angry about it, then I believe .gov has gone way overboard in its spying on innocent Americans (something I already felt too).


119 posted on 08/25/2012 9:56:56 AM PDT by nicmarlo
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To: Excellence; Salamander
“Thick as a brick” is appropriate.

I would have been tempted to go with Alan Parson's 'Eye in the Sky" or Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me".

But Tull is always a good choice...

120 posted on 08/25/2012 9:59:16 AM PDT by null and void (Day 1314 of our ObamaVacation from reality - Obama, a queer and present danger)
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