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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?
All I've got to say to this is "Well duh.. what the hell did you think they would do with it, Bill?"
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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
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
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).
The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
More like A Beautiful Mind
You do realize a lot of these cryptographers are borderline psychotic while they are employed by agencies such as the NSA, and eventually progress into genuine mental illness.
From TFA:
"Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet, tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case."
At that age, if his diabetes is bad enough to have taken his leg, it has probably also afflicted him with dementia. The fact he is making accusations using such vague terms as "twisted" is another clue there's something not quite right upstairs.
Also TFA, it seems like the issue is that the ThinThread is so good it picks up everything of interest including data about Americans. So the NSA decided not to use it, even with filters and anonymizing controls, because those controls could always be turned off. After 9/11, they realized they desperately needed ThinThread, they started using it without any privacy controls. Computers don't discriminate, if ThinThread sees a patten it records it. That doesn't mean that data it gathers has been abused.
First of all, warrants are not needed for pen-registers and other metadata like IP addresses and email sender/recipient data. Never have been.
Second, even though FISA warrants were not always obtained like they should have been, it has been shown every time an American involved in a NSA wiretap, it was because they were communicating with a non-American person of interest. The wiretap was on the foreign national, not the American.
Everybody knows that the US government intercepts the world's communications. If they now do the same to Americans, it just seems fair.
who in their right mind would thing for more then 1 second it would NOT be used to spy on the US
Who works for the NSA without trusting that the US government aims to protect the rights of its citizens? It takes a certain mentality to actually agree to government work, particularly as a cryptographer -- you are barred from working on cryptography as a civilian after being exposed to cryptographic secrets. To accept that means you believe that you are doing the right thing.
Now, I agree, any outside observer could have told you that the government would turn that technology against its own citizens and that writing it was the wrong thing to do, but the man in question was not an outside observer. He was probably told that he was working on a project that would help track dangerous people and that his work would save American lives.
Palm trees and 8
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
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.
he U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt. Weapons investors want war all the time. Financial institutions get rich.
Yes, we were warned about this a very long time ago. The term used was the "military-industrial complex". The fear was that its interests would become better represented by government than any interests of the people. Sometimes all you have to do is read the handwriting on the wall and they will call you "prophet".
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Here's a better link to the article, the whole article on one page instead of entering on page 3 of 10.
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.