NSA Heavyweight Bill Binney Puts Snowdon Revelations in Context

Bill Binney, is a heavyweight whistleblower from the NSA who hasn't gotten nearly the media coverage that he deserves.

From the YouTube video notes:

Binney is a 32 year veteran of the NSA, where he helped design a top secret program he says helps collect data on foreign enemies. He is regarded as one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history. He became an NSA whistleblower in 2002 when he realized the program he helped create to spy on foreign enemies was being used on Americans.

In this RT interview he gives a lot of the backround and context for Edward Snowdon's revelations.

There is another thread on ATS with a video from Dutch television interviewing Binney on Snowdon, but I thought that this information should be in this forum as well because a key part of what Binney is saying, in addition to his very clear presentation of what the NSA is really up to, is his assertion that the NSA has been in his word, "bamboozling" Congress, in order to put in place the infrastructure for a totalitarian state in the United States.

As a side note, the RT interview demonstrates that a broadcaster can get a very intelligent interview out of a very attractive presenter, if it hires college graduates and not extras from the Dukes of Hazzard set. This in itself is very disturbing.

Does anyone remember bob newheart? The mannerisms and facial features are an uncanny resemblance! Not relevant, I know. But I'm just saying.... I said it first!!

My favorite RT segment ever:

www.youtube.com...

Thanks for posting this interview, OP. Very revealing.

Binney basically makes the case that the NSA is more than capable of spying on the bad guys without having to gather data on everybody. He knows how it is done. He wrote the programs.

According to him, the mere fact that they are gathering data on everybody, instead of simply on the bad guys, means that they want to be able to, in his word "leverage" anybody.

They want to be able to twist ANYBODY'S arm.

When he realized that, he checked out of the whole thing and left the NSA.

Bill Binney believes in the stated aims of the NSA. He believes in the power of judiciously applied surveillance to protect America. He's not anti-surveillance. He designed surveillance algorithms to spy on the bad guys and people within a degree or two of separation from them. This was more than adequate to keep tabs on dangerous people, terrorists and their fellow travellers.

This process was effective and left 99% of Americans untouched by surveillance.

But the NSA has gone way beyond that mandate. They now spy on everybody and piggybank huge volumes of data on a contingency basis for use should the need arise in future to twist YOUR arm.

That's a police state folks, like East Germany or Soviet Russia.

Here is another interview with yet another whistleblower who, like Bill Binney, has not received the media coverage that has been given to Edward Snowdon. Thomas Drake also comments on Snowdon.

From the YouTube video notes:

Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted for allegedly disclosing National Security Agency secrets years before Edward Snowden surfaced, says the U.S. government has an "industrial-scale" surveillance system that "the Stasi in East Germany would have drooled over."

reply to post by signalfire

I know. It's a funny one.

RT is making a splash by doing what the American media used to be known for decades ago, putting intelligent people on the air.

This new interview with Sibel Edmunds is great at bringing the NSA story down to the street level where the effects of their activities are felt by ordinary citizens. She shows us that there is no effective channel for "legitimate" airing of whistleblower concerns "on the inside". That legislators, government officials and important military officers are brought under the control of the masters of the NSA and the FBI by means of illegal surveillance on them. In other words, the J. Edgar Hoover era of routine blackmail of officials never ended.

The real coup de grace on the American system though, if it is true, is her report of the assertion by a government background checker that vetting of federal judges appointed by the President routinely inverts the standard selection criteria, by discarding "squeaky clean" candidates in favor of candidates with the most compromised backgrounds, thus guaranteeing that federal judges are "highly leveraged", to use Bill Binney's term, even before they are appointed and never likely to give the government any serious problems on any important case.

As a humorous side note, when the judge in her own whistleblower case was replaced with no reason given, by a new judge, her request for the financial background check on the new judge brought her a file in which every paragraph of every document in the file was blacked out.

What Edmunds says about federal judges dovetails very well with Kay Griggs's assertions that most judges are military reservists or ex-officers who still remain part of the military command structure and follow orders in court cases that the government wants determined in a certain way.

(I immediately thought of and wondered about the Bush era lawsuit where a judge refused to declare Saudi Arabia a "state sponsor of terrorism" and thus denied families of 9/11 victims the opportunity to sue for damages in the attack.

The "hijackers" were asserted to be Saudis, remember, some of whom had been connected by FBI investigators to a Saudi intelligence officer working in the US, if memory serves.)

Griggs's own interest is in divorce cases involving high ranking military officers working in sensitive areas of operations. Such divorces are unlikely ever to be tried fairly. The non-military partner comes to understand very quickly not to make waves in the proceedings and in some cases has been physically eliminated, according to Griggs.

Griggs's interviews are on YouTube and are worth listening to. She touches on many interesting aspects of American "black operations". She's a little scattered but brings an insider's perspective to a very troubling side of military life. She is, or was at the time of the interviews, a very frightened woman.

Reposting the original video link, which has changed:

ipsedixit
Bill Binney, is a heavyweight whistleblower from the NSA who hasn't gotten nearly the media coverage that he deserves.

From the YouTube video notes:

Binney is a 32 year veteran of the NSA, where he helped design a top secret program he says helps collect data on foreign enemies. He is regarded as one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history. He became an NSA whistleblower in 2002 when he realized the program he helped create to spy on foreign enemies was being used on Americans.

In this RT interview he gives a lot of the backround and context for Edward Snowdon's revelations.

There is another thread on ATS with a video from Dutch television interviewing Binney on Snowdon, but I thought that this information should be in this forum as well because a key part of what Binney is saying, in addition to his very clear presentation of what the NSA is really up to, is his assertion that the NSA has been in his word, "bamboozling" Congress, in order to put in place the infrastructure for a totalitarian state in the United States.

As a side note, the RT interview demonstrates that a broadcaster can get a very intelligent interview out of a very attractive presenter, if it hires college graduates and not extras from the Dukes of Hazzard set. This in itself is very disturbing.