I haven't got 2:35:00 (at the moment, anyway) to find out what that video has to do with my expectation that if we need to bust into a cellphone somewhere, NSA can do it without calling up Apple Computer or some Israeli company to do it for them. We live in an era where unfortunately it's possible for a bunch of idiots to blow up the world because they feel like it, and so it's nice if we have the ability to at least try to deter them before they pull it off. Nothing's guaranteed in life but we expect government to make the effort to protect us. Certainly that means keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to surveillance capabilities.
Does it mean we all sacrifice privacy, even to our own government? Yep. Am I happy about that? Nope, I'm capable of becoming furious about it all over again at any moment. But I still expect NSA to provide service for tax bucks rendered. So... I assume they've found a way to properly compensate people enough to put their brains to the task and get the jobs done. And I don't assume any privacy remains mine any more. And yeah, I'm past annoyed over that but I can't live in a rage without shorteninig my lifespan, so I'm over it a day at a time, for the most part.
As I said before, I can see an intel agency SAYING they need help to get data off (or onto) some device. Their sources and methods remain protected that way and poor Apple or whoever gets hammered on for assisting, if the request becomes known or must become known. Anyway, for example, Apple can't even help in some situations now with the newer iPhones, so... NSA needs to up their own game if they really have needed the leg up.
Either way I don't assume there's such a thing as privacy, and I sometimes laugh at myself for all the efforts I bother to make to deter tracking on the net by marketers who just want to sell me a book or a scarf or a car.
But I don't laugh at the idea of some other country having better surveillance tools than we do. I don't neeed to know what ours are capable of. I expect them to be very, very good though. God knows we pay a big price, in more ways than just dollars. I'm not sure there is another choice any more. I'll have a look at that film over the weekend.
I give you credit for typing up a detailed and lengthy reply, as you often do. I hope for your fingers’ sake you use a physical keyboard, not replying with your phone because that would be so tedious. But what Binney says, among many things, is that you are not getting the bang for your buck. That is one of the main problems: they are not trying to solve problems, they’re trying to obtain more and more and more money. Greed, not safety.
15:56-17:44
Grove: “So they’re spying on everybody; collecting metadata. They’re building profiles out of it. What is the reasoning behind pointing such an apparatus at the American public? And what type of money—combined budgets of these type of projects focused on the American people—what are we looking at?”
Binney: “The reason that I came up with that they were doing that, is primarily: for money and building an empire. Now, the reason I say that is because, if you take the position of collecting only targeted information against groups doing bad things, then you have a finite problem. So you don’t have to have large storage facilities like Bluffdale in Utah, or another 400,000 sq ft facility in San Antonio, Texas, or another one they just started building last summer on Ft. Meade (NSA HQ) in Maryland, 600,000 sq ft facility to store information. You wouldn’t need any of that. Plus, you wouldn’t need all the contracts for contractors and you wouldn’t need to have a larger workforce. You would be focused on a rich environment of information, which actually would mean you would succeed at preventing terrorism and preventing crime, international crime, and so on. But by taking in the bulk acquisition, that means you’re taking in everything in the world. That means you’re pulling in all kinds of—huge amounts of information, hundreds of terabytes per day, you know, going around the network. That becomes a main management problem of information to begin with: you have to build an infrastructure to transport it to storage facilities; you have to build the storage facilities; you have to have contracts for all this to happen and contracts to manage all the data once you’ve captured it; and then contracts to build other kinds of programs to manipulate the data and use it for analysts, and so on; and then hire more analysts to analyze data, because there’s orders of magnitude more data to look at. So it builds your budget so much bigger and so now you’re managing a much larger empire. So they did it in my sense for empire.”
20:36-22:44
Grove: [Asks question on Binney’s understanding of a Panopticon, relating to pervasive surveillance state. Binney doesn’t understand the question exactly so Grove then elaborates and describes it]
Binney: “I mean, that’s the state we’re in. Fearmongering is the way our government’s been operating. Fearmongering first, for terrorism: to build up the budget. And now that they’ve been playing that card too many times, now they’re looking at cybersecurity as the next fear. And then they’ll find something else later on. And they never really want to solve the problem, that’s been the basic issue with it [fearmongering]. Because once you solve the problem, you don’t have the problem to have justification to get more money. So my version of their vision statement came out like this, that for them: ‘Keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.’ I mean, otherwise, if you solve the problem, you don’t have that problem to justify more money and more of an empire, and to sustain your empire. So that’s really what they’re operating on [money; greed; power]. Originally I thought it was ‘Aim low and miss,’ was their vision statement. Because everything they ever did, they failed at. I didn’t quite understand it until the latter part of my career, that they were really not solving the problem because they didn’t want to [solve it]. It was a matter of keeping it going so they could get the next contract, or get the next set of budget from the Congress, and so on. Keep it going.”
33:48-34:57
Binney: “It was only in the later part of my career there, from about 1995 on, when I started getting involved with contracting and the shift from the problem that I had been working—Soviet Union, and so on—that I got into areas where people were getting lots of money and contracts. Solving problems in that arena was also my objective, because that was the main problem that we were facing, was the digital explosion at the time. So that got me directly into the solving problems that nobody really wanted solved there. And so when I did that, that kind of caused reactions that I didn’t think I would get. I thought people would adopt those solutions and run with them and try to improve on them, if they could. Which was an expectation that I was clearly disappointed at, because no one really wanted to do that. In fact, they still don’t. Because again, they’re still building their empire with different fearmongering topics, the latest of course is cybersecurity.”
01:17:40
Grove: “So some of the relevant information pertaining to what the NSA had prior to 9/11, consists of: communications that they’ve sniffed and stored and analyzed in some way. Was the NSA aware—did it have in its databases the traffic that would have told us this [9/11] attack is going to happen? And if so, what are the details?”
Binney: “Yes. Thomas Drake—who is a friend of mine, also a supporter of our [non-civil liberties violating] program—ran that program on the entire NSA database after 9/11, several months afterward. And he found all the data that was necessary to stop 9/11, in their database sitting there, that people didn’t recognize or bring to anybody’s attention or report in any form to anybody of authority. What that meant was, it got back to the unreliability of analysts being able to see through mounds of data. You make them dysfunctional by putting all that data on top of them and making them sift through it. First of all, humans can only do so much and that obviously there was just too much there for them to handle. That’s why they needed an automated process going through it and they didn’t have that [because NSA management blocked Binney’s program pre-9/11]. They rejected that entire [automated] process, that’s why I keep getting back to saying: They traded the security of everybody in the United States and the free world for money. Because they wanted—money was the issue, not solving the problem.”
Grove: “So potentially, NSA could have connected the dots prior to 9/11—stopped the terrorists from ever infiltrating the country—but they didn’t have enough budget money or they didn’t focus that budget money on the appropriate projects. Which do you think it is?”
Binney: “It actually had nothing to do with the budget. They had plenty of a budget to do it, they didn’t need any more money to make that happen. See, that was the issue. The issue was they wanted to build the budget up, so they wanted more money. So you don’t do anything that would take away the problem that you’re using to get more money. So you stop that [solution] and keep the problem going, is the issue. So you still have a problem, therefore I need more money: so you get a bigger budget. If they say, ‘well, let’s implement this other program, let’s solve the problem,’ well, then they don’t have that problem to argue for money. So that’s basically the way they viewed it and the way they operated, and a lot of contractors got rich off of it.”
~01:31:00
Grove: “Was there anything else with 9/11 that got your attention that you thought, this is really strange? And with all the budget power that we have focused on defense in this country, that there were multiple layers of failure that kind of coalesced to bring that event about?”
Binney: “Well, I mean, it was on virtually every level. They were all pretty much “out to lunch” for that attack, and they ignored basic things that they should never have ignored. Certainly, if I was aware of them, I wouldn’t have hesitated in notifying people. But I would do it on the gray phone.” [laughs]
Grove: “So we had multiple levels of security failures from our intelligence community on 9/11, and where is the list I can find of people who got fired because they didn’t do their job?”
Binney: “It would be on a blank sheet of paper, okay, there is your list. I mean, they all got promoted, I think. They all got elevated to higher positions and they got more money; budgets were increased triple, basically. If you looked at it from 9/11 on up [un]til now, we’ve spent almost $1 TRILLION in the intelligence community since that time.”
There is more, relating to NSA and 9/11. That they let thousands of Americans be killed for the multitrillion-dollar “war on terror” bonanza that has followed. We know from a transcript in one of the terror trials (I don’t remember which trial,
but it is detailed in this book and others, such as at least one by James Bamford), that NSA was monitoring al-Qaeda’s Yemen hub, when 9/11 hijackers were in the U.S. and phoning the hub regularly. That we know of, NSA kept their monitoring secret from anyone else in the USG; nearly 3,000 killed in one morning.
