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

Oh?

[Troke]

I'm shocked. The US government would never do something like that ever! A shame this will never reach +5 Sarcastic

Re:Oh?

[nolife]

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot.

Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

Re:Oh?

[dkleinsc]

Barack Obama - best Republican president so far.

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.

Re:In other news

[Tumbleweed]

Binney had been acting strangely in recent weeks, according to unnamed sources. Reports of paranoid rants about "government monitoring everyone" were a common theme among associates.

Binney was found wearing nothing but a bathrobe and a cockring, although investigators found several hundred dollars sewn into his bathrobe, as well as two phone numbers - one for "Belle du Jour Exotic Dance Palace" and the other to "Dave's 24 Hour Falafel Delivery". Investigators also found a "huge" porn stash in his apartment, and several copies of porn star Ron Jeremy's auto-biography, "Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz".

What disturbed investigators most, however, was a hidden cache of 73 cases of Zima. "What could one man possibly need with that much Zima?," said one bewildered and slightly shaken-looking young investigator. Older investigators are wondering about the significance of the number 73.

Binney was quoted as saying, "I'm not dead yet!" but we were unable to confirm that at press-time.

Pen registers

[ciaran_o_riordan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register

A pen register is an electronic device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications.

The USA statutes governing pen registers are codified under 18 U.S.C., Chapter 206.

Last paragraph sums it up nicely.

[loshwomp]

The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.

Room 641A

[br00tus]

I don't think people unfamiliar with telecommunications realize how significant the Room 641A revelation was. Before the so-called Patriot Act took effect, the capability to tap all Americans phone calls and Internet traffic did not exist. Now it does - it is sitting in "points of presence" around the country - 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. This did not exist before 2001-2003. 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'm sure even an all data major carrier Internet transmission across the country splits off to one of these pipes before it goes over the high-speed continental pipeline.

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.