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...
Binneyone of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA historyworked 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 ...
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.
/cues X-Files theme
[night!]
:)
I use the Alice Cooper search bar and get SWAG bucks.
http://blog.swagbucks.com/2009/06/search-with-alice-cooper.html
:)
And to the employees it's Never Say Anything.
So you’re saying they finally decided to sit this one out?
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....
BTW, I took a glance at your profile page - my son saw Alice warm up for Iron Maiden a month or so ago.
Looks like you're selling it to them, beats letting them have it for free though.
God bless government employee whisteblowers who have the fortitude to step forward and do what is right
Maybe this explains a lot.
No matter how many times I change it, my computer keeps changing my location back to Salt Lake City.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Stated as broadly as that? No, they wouldn't have the manpower to do that. But...
The Secret SharerEven 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. Its violated everyones 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 cant do thisthe possibilities are infinite. But he argued that at any given point in time the number of atoms in the universe is big, but its 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 collecteddiscarding 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."
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.
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).
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...
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