Memorandum for the President<\/u><\/a><\/em> providing a comprehensive account of the problems at NSA, together with suggestions as to how they might be best addressed.<\/p>\nThe purpose was to inform President Obama as fully as possible, as he prepared to take action in light of Snowden\u2019s revelations.<\/p>\n
On Jan. 23, 2015 in Berlin, Binney was honored with the annual Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. Ed Snowden was live-streamed-in for the occasion, and said, \u201cWithout Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.\u201d (Binney had been among the first to speak out publicly about NSA abuses; apparently that emboldened Snowden to do what he did.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Snowden had already said when he fled to Hong Kong in June 2013 that he had learned an extremely important lesson from the four years of government persecution\/prosecution of Tom Drake; namely, that he, Ed Snowden, had to leave the country in order to fulfill his mission \u2013 and to have some reasonable chance to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars. (Eventually, all the felony charges against Drake were dismissed.)<\/p>\n
An important take-away lesson from Binney\u2019s and Drake\u2019s boldness and tenacity is that one never knows what impetus courageous truth-tellers can give to other, potential whistleblowers \u2013 like Ed Snowden.<\/p>\n
In 1998, Bill Binney, with some 35 years under his belt as a senior NSA mathematician and cryptologist took on a staggering problem for NSA: how to deal with the vast amount of data available on the world wide web without burying intelligence analysts under a haystack of data.<\/p>\n
From Binney\u2019s long experience, it seemed clear that selecting information by using metadata relationships was the smart way to go. As he puts it, \u201cSmart selection is smart collection.\u201d<\/p>\n
This approach was totally different form the word\/phrase dictionary-select type approach in general use \u2013 even today. Binney\u2019s technique was to use metadata and some additional rules to define relationships. This enabled discriminate selection of data from the tens of terabytes twisting in the ether. The approach focused the collected data around known targets, plus some potential developmental targets, and yielded much more manageable content for analysts to deal with.<\/p>\n
Missing the Needles<\/strong><\/p>\nExperience had long since shown that collecting everything in bulk, and using word\/phrase type queries, end up burying analysts in data and making them dysfunctional. In some of the internal NSA memos released by Snowden, NSA analysts complain of the kind of analysis paralysis that makes it extremely difficult for them to find and address the real threats.<\/p>\n
As Snowden has quipped, \u201cThe problem with mass surveillance is when you collect everything, you understand nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The net result is that people die first. Only then do detectives and law enforcement go wading into their vast data, focus on possible perpetrators of the crime and often find related information. This is, of course, exactly the reverse of how the security services should proceed \u2013 assuming the main priority is to thwart terrorist or other attacks. And yet the U.S. government proceeds willy-nilly with its SOS (Stasi-On-Steroids) approach.<\/p>\n
In sum, success can come only from a focused, disciplined selection of data off the fiber lines, yielding usable metadata, as Binney and his NSA colleagues demonstrated. Indeed, there was quite enough electronic intelligence collected by THINTHREAD, the collection system Binney and his team created, before 9\/11<\/em> to have thwarted the attacks, as NSA senior executive Thomas Drake learned, to his horror, after <\/em>the fact.<\/p>\n\u201cSmart selection\u201d techniques can also protect individual privacy, as Binney and his colleagues likewise showed. More to the point, this approach can provide a rich but manageable data environment for analysts to use toward one of the most important intelligence objectives \u2013 predicting intentions and capabilities.<\/p>\n
This way, one is not reduced to watching attack after attack \u2013 and then wiping up the blood and searching data bases for clues to the perpetrators \u2013 primarily the job of law enforcement.<\/p>\n
Problems With Honesty<\/strong><\/p>\nSadly, recent history has shown that the directors of U.S. intelligence services lie, and that directors of the NSA lie blatantly \u2013 and suffer zero<\/em> consequences. On March 12, 2013 (less than two months before<\/em> the Snowden revelations), National Intelligence Director James Clapper lied under oath in denying that NSA was \u201cwittingly\u201d collecting \u201cany type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.\u201d<\/p>\nSen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, had put that question to Clapper that day at a formal, open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.<\/p>\n
Similarly, on June 27, 2013, three weeks after<\/em> the first Snowden revelations started coming, then-NSA Director Keith Alexander lied in telling the same Senate committee that NSA\u2019s bulk telephone surveillance program had thwarted 54 terrorist \u201cplots or events.\u201d On Oct. 2, 2013, Gen. Alexander admitted, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the number of terrorist plots thwarted was not 54, but one. (And that particular one cannot bear close scrutiny.)<\/p>\nThe failure to demand accountability for these deceptions proves \u2013 as if further proof were needed \u2013 that the Senate intelligence \u201coversight\u201d committees has long since become the Senate intelligence \u201coverlook\u201d committee.<\/p>\n
If democracy still means anything, we the people need to devise some kind of replacement for the sleepy \u201cwatchdogs\u201d in Congress who have forfeited their responsibility to oversee and verify what the intelligence agencies are doing. Again, Bill Binney has what seem the most sensible \u2013 and doable \u2013 suggestions toward that end.<\/p>\n
He has called for a properly cleared technical team, responsible to the courts,<\/em> with clearly spelled-out authority to go into any intelligence agency and look directly into and inspect data bases and the tools in use. This would be a giant step toward ensuring that we the people \u2013 through this intrusive inspection regime \u2013 could monitor in some rudimentary way what our intelligence agencies are doing.<\/p>\nBinney suggests further that intelligence agencies be required to implement software to monitor their own networks to detect automatically and to report immediately violations of law and regulation.<\/p>\n
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He is a 30-year veteran of the CIA and Army intelligence and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). McGovern served for considerable periods in all four of CIA\u2019s main directorates.<\/i><\/p>\n
Reprinted with permission from Consortium News<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Edward Snowden in early June 2013 began to reveal classified data showing criminal collect-it-all surveillance programs operated by the U.S. government\u2019s National Security Agency, former NSA professionals became freer to spell out the liberties taken with the Bill of Rights, as well as the feckless, counterproductive nature of bulk electronic data collection. On Jan. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-26262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26264,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26262\/revisions\/26264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26262"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=26262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}