William Binney is an absolute hero. I have absorbed everything this guy has ever said or done[2]. He was not only employed at the NSA, but he was a director who designed the software that is being used right now to dragnet all the communications. It is difficult for anybody - congressman, president, republican voter, etc. - to argue that what the NSA is doing is fine when the guy with all the technical details and design of the program says it isn't. That he is against what is happening is a big deal and needs more attention.
This video is on the front page of USA Today, so these guys and the topic is starting to get the recognition they deserve.
[1] The New Yorker did a great feature on him called 'The Secret Sharer' - good for background http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...
[2] Search YouTube for Binney - he was the keynote speaker at the 2600 HOPE conference last year - a presentation that everybody must watch. Apparently Snowden decided to go the route he did after watching Binney in Laura Poitras' "The Program" for the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... Potras is the same person who was the first journalist Snowden contacted.
The rest of the platform is ThinThread (which was a lot cheaper than the failed TrailBlazer project).
Also interesting that a lot of the NSA platform is open source. OpenCloud for server management and Hadoop for distributed computing.
[1] I can't recall which one, in his keynote at HOPE he does make another reference to the crypto privacy shield being removed
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
I have a feeling that the NSA deals with access control just like the rest of us...very poorly. Even more egregious is that Snowden was a contractor...if we're going to leave open the possibility of the NSA targeting us at their whim, can't they at least do that in-house?
For example, we store virtual machine root passwords in an encrypted database for last resort purposes (so that someone can log in using virsh console as root when nothing else is working). There are three layers of encryption and as far as casual access goes (assuming nothing is reconfigured), mere root access to the box is not enough to reveal the information. However if you can change what is logged by PostgreSQL and reconfigure PostgreSQL's authentication options you could grab enough information to effectively read this data.
People with the sort of access required to make sure things are secure can effectively get the data off the system that they want, and the alternative in designing a system is to have one with no superusers and the possibility that information is irrevokably lost when someone forgets a password. The most secure systems end up somewhere between them.
It does seem absurd if there isn't politico-judicial rationale.
I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake
[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0616/Dick-Chene...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/politics/campaign/01CHEN.h...
I have observed what I've seen commented on elsewhere. There is a certain type of person who managed to skip the draft for themselves, and then proceeded to become overly supportive of the military and military aggression. Possibly as a reaction to the guilt of having not served when given the chance. There is a certain cowboy element to their approach. Prominent examples include Dick Cheney and George Bush.
By contrast people who actually served often, like John McCain or Al Gore, are strongly supportive of the military. But they tend to treat military service and action as the serious matters that they are.
The phrase that sums this up best is "chickenhawk".
So if mass surveillance didn't prevent 9/11, is the rationale to expand it to TOTAL surveillance, if necessary?
| Perhaps even more important to note
| "before 9/11."
ps. Do not use satellite phones unless you want everything listened too:)
If developed countries can't trust each other not to spy on their diplomats where does that leave us?
I guess they should all assume they are being spied on at all times while on foreign soil, but airing that in public is likely to worsen his chance of avoiding jail time—or worse.
It leaves us precisely where we are - developed countries have been spying on each others' diplomats and using their diplomats for spying for, well, just about ever.
US Secretary of State Henry Simpson famously said "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail" some 80 odd years ago. A quaint attitude, even back then.
I'd argue that US v USSR spying during the Cold War, particularly PHOTOINT and SIGINT and other forms of technical intelligence, largely averted a global thermonuclear war. Gov v Gov spying is just another form of transparency. (obviously as a US citizen I'd prefer the US to have an edge there, but generally for something like Brazil v Argentina I don't particularly care)
I hate autoplays as well.
I'm surprised that USA Today put this out and I hope they do more like it. The contrast with typical news pap could not be stronger.
Binney's take on what they'll do to Snowden.
"Binney: First tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed."
I hope they have him employed as a Genius.