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!"'"

Comments

Re:Oh?

[IICV]

He's nowhere near the best Republican: Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower all come out way ahead of him. And all of those guys would be branded as complete and utter loonies in current US politics, especially their views on class, corporations and taxes. Heck, there's a good argument that Ronald Reagan wouldn't be accepted within the current Republican Party, because he allowed for some tax increases in the 1980's.

Fun fact: in the 1950s or so, the crazy idiots in the Democratic party migrated over to the Republican party because they didn't like the fact that we were starting to treat black people like people. Oddly enough, that's about when the Republican descent into madness started.

This means that when people say "the Republican party is the party of Abe Lincoln!", what they really mean to say is "I have no understanding of history, and how political parties can change with time, and how the continuity of a name does not imply the continuity of ideals".