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NSA CS Man: My Tracking Algorithm Was 'Twisted' By the Government
decora writes "Crypto-mathematician Bill Binney worked in the Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center at the NSA. There, he worked on NSA's ThinThread program; a way to monitor the flood of internet data from outside the US while protecting the privacy of US citizens. In a new interview with Jane Mayer, he says his program 'got twisted. ... I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world. ... my people were brought in, and they told me, "Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on US citizens! They're putting pen registers on everyone in the country!"'"
I'm shocked. The US government would never do something like that ever! A shame this will never reach +5 Sarcastic
... cryptologist Bill Binney was found dead today in his New York apartment the victim of an apparent accident.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I'm more surprised that this guy went out and said it, and we are hearing about this, instead of the news itself. What happened to the binding paperwork and consequences?
The real risk is that it's now public and people are going to gradually accept it, which knocks down the door to more casual use.
It's understandable why this is a fantastic tool, but now that this particular line has been crossed how far are we from having typical law enforcement allowed access to it? Or lawyers in civil lawsuits? Or public investigators, hackers, etc.?
There is a much better link fest on this subject over at metafilter, maybe more informed comments too. ;)
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
All I've got to say to this is "Well duh.. what the hell did you think they would do with it, Bill?"
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Sounds like its working just as designed.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
he U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt. Weapons investors want war all the time. Financial institutions get rich.
We don't have rights. If you disagree ask WWII era Japanese-Americans.
What, did they think they could do that and get away with it?
"Well, YES."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
..... and who in their right mind would thing for more then 1 second it would NOT be used to spy on the US - lets face it, if you want to black-male people you might as well target the richest country in the world first :-)
Hopefully people will learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in the future. I am reminded of the professor from Atlas Shrugged.
I guess the people working at the NSA are the last to suspect that the NSA would spy on everybody in the world. But seriously what exactly did they think the NSA was building and doing this whole time?
The NSA, along with all the other agencies probably spy on as many people as they are technologically able. If they could watch us all for cheap enough they would. So what do technological advances mean? It means more people will be watched. It means more collection and more intelligence.
not that there's much to be afeared about? maybe the 'weather'?
the chosen ones' holycost could never continue without a whole bunch of bogus fear hate& deception generated by fictional dilemmas while overlooking world wide massacres.
disarm. no kidding. terrifying tuesday is being executed as planned.
Sent from my iPhone
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No more secrets
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
What can Americans do to put an end to this monitoring of US citizens? What steps should we take to stop this?
As I usually say: Surveillance will just keep growing and growing, because there is no ideology for which its masters don't feel surveillance is useful.
Right-wing? Got to protect that property from illegal sabotage and activists.
Left-wing? Got to monitor those social deviants so they can't threaten The People.
Religious? Got to discover that sinfulness and lack of fear of God.
Atheist? Got to make sure nobody commits the child abuse of raising someone religious.
Green? Still relatively useful as a tool because people mean shit compared to the planet.
Sure, your average person in the street might feel surveillance isn't needed, but the people who float to the top of any political movement tend to enjoy power and its tools.
I don't have the background to say what could avoid that situation though. Maybe a popular movement that aims to fill the channels with noise - a simple program that runs in the background and accesses various pieces of illegal/objectionable information on a running basis.
I think this is a particularly apt question for slashdot. This thing exists, it was developed and written. What would your implementation be?
Rights is what the government lets its citizens have WHEN IT IS CONVENIENT. What the government gives, it takes away. People that thinks there are some kind of inalienable rights is kidding themselves. As Der Fuehrer Shrub says, constitution is just a fucking piece of paper.
Green? Still relatively useful as a tool because people mean shit compared to the planet.
you dont need to make things off of your ass if you cant find anything against a particular ideology.
Read radical news here
So, in the vanishingly unlikely event that this technology had not been turned against US citizens, this guy would have had no problem? Wouldn't have felt the need to apologise to the rest of the world? That's some intense xenophobia he's got there.
For some reason US citizens always only think of themselves. Personally, I think it is great that they treat themselves as they do other human beings on the planet. It may bring some hard needed reflections on how technology is abused (but I'm not holding my breath).
If he'd just watched Good Will Hunting, he could have seen this coming.
Everybody knows that the US government intercepts the world's communications. If they now do the same to Americans, it just seems fair.
Oh, so it's okay to eavesdrop on everyone but it's not okay to do that to US citizens? How nice...
The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.
The NSA doesn't recruit people by telling them that they will be spying on Americans. I have met an NSA recruiter, and this is the story they tell you: As a cryptologist at the NSA, you will be working on interesting mathematics, mathematics you won't find in academia or in industry, and your work will help protect American lives. So say you are a 28 year old, you just finished a PhD in math or CS; wouldn't such a job be tempting?
The people who run the show at the NSA are not idiots. They know how to work with geniuses who might have a moral objection to spying on Americans. They know how to convince people that their work will only be used against foreigners, and how to get those people to put as much effort into their work as possible. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that most NSA mathematicians and computer scientists are aware of how their work is actually being used, except in rare cases where it is reported in the mass media (like the wiretapping scandal).
Palm trees and 8
I RTFA and this is pretty much what I got from it. A fellow developed a program to watch the flow of digital information on various networks. It was so darn good at what it did that it picked up American information too. So he built in a piece to encrypt and make the information anonymous. They decided not to use it. Then 9/11 happened and they took the powerful parts of his program, but left behind his safeguards. He suspects the government is using this bastardized software to not only spy on Americans, but watch ALL of them. Fearing this, he and others gathered together and tried to a bit of whistleblowing. As a result they became targets of the government. This surveying and whistleblower retribution essentially blows watergate out of the fucking water.
This is the most infuriating and horrifying thing I have read about the government Bureaucrats/Tyrants. The fellow suspects that every email sent in the USA is being saved in databases by the NSA. If you aren't encrypting, there really isn't an option anymore. It won't stop them, but it might slow them down.
Feel free, and obligated, to inform your representatives how terrible this is and that they won't get your vote unless they stand for American rights and privacy. Perhaps it will make a difference.
This Bill Binney guy is an idiot, apparently; what kind of organization did he think the NSA is? They don't sell sunshine and lollipops.
What do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?
Who knows about how this stuff works besides people like us and telecom people? Even this technician at AT&T didn't know exactly what was going on. Funny enough, the discovery came about because he wanted to make sure the people working in this room were working according to CWA union rules. The unions - the last remnants of ordinary worker's organization and input into a company, which is now almost totally under the control of the top corporate management and ownership, and apparently, the government and its spy agencies.
As far as people saying this is to keep Americans safe from foreign terrorists - is that why Nixon had his guys break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate? Is that why Clinton had the FBI send him various political opponents files, or Sandy Berger was sneaking documents out of the National Archives? Or why Martin Luther King had his rooms bugged by the FBI, when what he wanted was to non-violently work for the right to vote - a right blacks theoretically had under the Constitution? In 2006 a movie called "The Lives of Others" came out, condemning the Stasi in communist East Germany for creating a police state. While American critics feel good about themselves condemning the apparatus of a police state from ancient history, one is growing in the phone companies of America. Before 2001-2003, the US did not have an internal Stasi-like phone system - now it does. There's no reason to be hyperbolic about it, it is just that the government and corporate telecommunications monopolies are attempting to remove a right to privacy and freedom we once had.
I know RTFA is something most people never do around here, but...
This article happens to be full of interesting things. Your government is out of control.
Like liberty, freedom?
Instead we've got: nsa, privacy, usa.
Someone could write an algorithm to come up with these trivial categorisations.
Once again, no mention of Main Core, the 8 million citizen dataset, in an article on domestic spying in the US...
The media companies have bastardized versions of the monitoring software as well. They have also been simultaneously lobbying in Washington D.C. for years now so they can enforce their current monitoring practices. A police state indeed.
Everything you do in front of a phone or computer can pretty much be stored, analyzed, recorded, sold, and picked apart remotely from private companies.
From the Fine Article:
"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 collected—discarding 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.”"
From Arstechnica:
"Rajagopalan described how the ATLAS detector's software included what he called "event filters." Basically, the software can determine the extent to which the particles and energy that comes out of a collision matches a pattern that we'd expect to be produced by a given particle. These expectations can be based either on what we've already seen for known particles like the top quark, or that predicted by theory."
He's going so far out of his way to prove he's not soft on national security that he's compromising his values. Maybe if I knew what he knows I might see it differently but from the outside it looks like he's just afraid of looking weak.
No more secrets
Forgive me, but the correct quote is: "Too many secrets".
If you'll note the abhorrent lack of A's in "No more secrets", it's a slight tip-off.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
See subject-line. People in this nation aren't falling for your "std. disinformation protocol" crap anymore, get it? Fuck off with your ad hominem attacks against a person that's 1000 times as educated and smart as you are in the person who fessed up to this going on in the NSA. If you can't disprove his points, you instead, attempt to attack the man. The very SECOND they circumvented FISA is the second they showed their hand, along with all the other bullshit being enacted into "laws" by former lobbyists (bribers) who worked for wallstreet and the banks that infest our government.
The NSA doesn't recruit people by telling them that they will be spying on Americans. I have met an NSA recruiter, and this is the story they tell you: As a cryptologist at the NSA, you will be working on interesting mathematics, mathematics you won't find in academia or in industry, and your work will help protect American lives. So say you are a 28 year old, you just finished a PhD in math or CS; wouldn't such a job be tempting?
The people who run the show at the NSA are not idiots. They know how to work with geniuses who might have a moral objection to spying on Americans. They know how to convince people that their work will only be used against foreigners, and how to get those people to put as much effort into their work as possible. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that most NSA mathematicians and computer scientists are aware of how their work is actually being used, except in rare cases where it is reported in the mass media (like the wiretapping scandal).
I agree with everything you are saying. I would think this would be common sense but I guess a lot of really smart people aren't all that street smart. The military recruiters do the same sorta thing, to get people to enlist.
I thought that the system in The Dark Knight was a pretty blatant advertisement about how such steps are Necessary when what we're fighting is Super Evil and there's No Other Way to defeat it, the idea being that Our Dear Elder Brother will terminate any programs we might have qualms about as soon as they are no longer Necessary and also that they are naturally being used Only For Good.
The fact that our particular battle will never end of course being glossed over...
-FiloEleven, anonymous because I'm modding, not because I'm paranoid.
How did you crack that one? Now I'm hoping the NSA doesn't crack the anagrammatical obfuscation on my nicked hacks directory!
This is your democracy and "free" country. USA is worse than China, because China doesn't hide their actions, while USA does.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
did not exist... ...before a voice call leaves the LATA, a fiber split happens, where half your call goes to the party your calling, the other half heads to the NSA... ...As far as Internet traffic, half of your packets going out and coming in go to the carriers peering point like MAE West, half go the NSA....
I don't want to be rude but have to say that well you obviously don't know how it works. Why even write stupid shit like this?
Of course you're being monitored, all of you, me, "no one", and everyone everywhere to the best of all ability (which isn't that good but good enough to hopefully catch most things through automated analysis), of course they rather not admit it, do you understand why? Do you understand it has nothing to do with any particular enemy? Do you understand what kind of potential anyone and everyone has these days? That it only takes will and not knowledge or morals or anything else?
Do you think Obama negated his ideas and promises for the fun of it? Or that anyone else do? Or that they won't end up 20 years older after 4 years despite all the evidence they will from other previous politicians? They've got no choice: reality and facts give them no leeway except as to how they choose to obfuscate. US presidents aren't dictators, they're prisoners, and to a much lesser extent the same goes for many politicians in most free and/or powerful nations.
I don't like it; the whole omnipresence thing, in fact I oppose it, publicly and with full name (but not like this on the internet; I trust the NSA to understand and shrug or nod as they like but not the "average guy" who more likely than not has only just now glimpsed a little bit of reality and goes in search of Frankensteins monster --I'm stupid but not that stupid (hello style recognition software, you have a match by now)).
I oppose it because I think it will eventually become a losing game (on the issue of intent vs. accident, accident is by far the real worry and we're not dealing with it in any way that makes sense even under the assumption that there is no direct solution) despite the immense short term gains. But I have zero trouble understanding it, and also no problem with understanding why they do not want to admit it (admitting it replaces benefits with a double loss, nothing else, it only works if people believe they have relative freedom: which they do!).
There are smart, intelligent, and interesting people here (parent might be one of them just not right now on this subject), some of you will understand why this is happening everywhere and not just in the US or among "friends" or "enemies" because such classifications don't matter all that much any more (unless some retard goes full tilt in trying to use any of the old "solutions" that one knows only creates damage and self-defeat).
If we don't like it then ranting against it won't do anyone any good, and political opposition won't do anyone any good no matter whether it's successful or not. If we don't like it and want to change it we need to solve the same issues in an objectively proven better way (i.e. one that allows even more relative freedom not less) and we won't be able to get anywhere close to that if carrying torches and pitchforks (and dumb ideas about monster killing).
Welcome to the 21st century and leave your 20ieth century thinking behind.
If he (or any of his coworkers) thought the NSA was doing something illegal, they should have gone to the judge, not to the journalists.
is the coffee good at the NSA?
I met an NSA recruiter once, too. Wasn't my area, but I thought it would be fun to talk to them. She made it sound like it was going to be like a movie, or a CSI show. Wasn't my field (engineer), so I didn't much care. Kind of funny, though.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I've become too boring for anyone to care. Not on purpose, I just don't care enough that much about anything important besides my family. Yeah, I still vote. I'll write an occasional letter to the paper. I've even written my Congress/Senate critters. Does any seem to make any difference? Nope. I got one, just one, reply where the staffer actually read my letter and wrote back something not in form letter fashion. Bill still passed anyway. Bleh.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Thanks, Bush.
And thanks, Obama, for continuing it.
Why are so many people both rabid about protecting their own liberties, and at the same time totally unconcerned about other people's liberties? What I mean is, sure, the US government's primary responsibility is for the welfare of the US people, just like (e.g.) the Dutch government's primary responsibility is to the Dutch people. But I find it hard to stomach that the same people who are foaming at the mouth when there's even the slightest suggestion that the US government _might_ do something that _could_ be construed as spying on US citizens are completely and utterly OK with the same government doing the exact same thing to the rest of the world population. Surely even foreigners should have _some_ rights? Doesn't the US declaration of independence say something about all men being equal, and not about "all people who happen to be US citizens" being equal?
I'm not saying the US government has the right to spy on US citizens, nor am I saying the US government does not have the right to gather intelligence. I guess I'm just baffled by the fact that the self evident truths and god given liberties people in the US often demand so vocally and are so proud of are just as easily denied to other people. Concern about this simply don't seem to enter the public debate at all. It seems to be a non-issue.
I find that ... uncomfortable.
Jeroen
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
"Bill Binney .. worked on NSA's ThinThread program; a way to monitor the flood of internet data from outside the US while protecting the privacy of US citizens" ..
For a professional spy he does come across as naive. The US security services has been spying on the rest of the world and its own citizens for years before 9/11. All September 11th did was give them the pretext to massively expand the program. And I guess the rest of us don't really matter, we're not real countries anyway.
The secret of Room 641A
AT&T collaborates with NSA
Echelon
Folks, this is nothing new. NSA has had the equipment to monitor and partially interpret every single voice telephone call on the planet, in near real-time, since the early 1990's. It's what we pay them for. It's amazing to me that they missed connecting the dots to prevent 9/11, but I guess hindsight is 20:20.
TFA says that American activity would be anonymized until a warrant was issued, and that the system would monitor the activity until the system deemed it suspicious enough for a warrant to be issued, then it would be un-anonymized.
So... How is this different than monitoring people without the anonymization? The chilling effect is the same: You are subjected to increased threat of investigation merely by acting suspiciously where you should have reasonably been able to expect privacy.
You won't search for: 'How to build a kassam rocket' to satisfy your personal curiosity or for that spy novel you were thinking of writing since you don't want the Federales knocking at your door.
Maybe it was going to be a thrilling book, but it never got off the ground, and the world is poorer for it.
...
When I was trying to obtain my PhD, I had a similar experience.
I worked on facial recognition systems so that we could authenticate people going into and out of buildings. Today that same algorithm is used in the XM-25 rifle to push grenades toward the faces of 'enemies' / other individuals.
We have no control over how our materials are used, which might be expected--however, the bigger problem is this: We are actively lied to in what we are creating as researchers. The military does not have any remorse or moral compunction to allow its individual contributors any form of information which could lead to a decision of personal conscience.
i would be very interested in understanding more about this program, if you wish. my email is decorat at mail dot com
If you're listening (and presumably you've tweaked enough so that your are- what programmer isn't a bit of an egoist?), LGPL that shit. If it has a way of legally listening and we(US citizens) 'paid' for it- set it free.
This self-serving pimple is nothing more than a traitor. Fry him good and well done in the electric chair I say.
Hacked Nicks?
Cached Kinks?
Caked Chinks?
Keep working on that... would it help if I mentioned there are pictures of naked chicks in there? The steganographic experts would probably be busy for days trying to figure out if there's rootkits hidden in the ADS of tentacle porn...
"N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices."--this is false as of a couple years ago~2009. They were experimenting with facial recognition (had some contractors working on it) but it was by no means widely implemented. There was only one office in the research building (R) of the ft meade campus that had an Iris scanner as far as I know and that was also just experimenting. "The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year." Partially because the NSA mismanaged the power supply. Building compute farms without figuring out where to get the power to run them (while I was there they would have regular power outages). When google builds a data center the first thing they do is figure out where they will get the power (usually building near the supply ie a hydroelectric damn). Another thing to note is that in late 2007 NSA started looking at Hadoop which is an open source implementation of some of googles infrastructure, map-reduce in particular. Who knows how much google cooperates with the NSA, at least a little. I was at a meeting at the NSA that included Vint Cerf, a prominent google employee, and they were using a google search product internally. In general it is pretty hard to not witness fraud at the NSA. Here are some examples: http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html
Where can I find a handbook of the algorithm, and how can I implement it?