An Open Forum with Bill Binney: Reflections of an NSA whistleblower

okay thanks thank you very much it's a pleasure for me to be here I especially at law schools because I think you know if you can it's kind of infect the law schools in there and they the people are going to take over the law physicians in the and the courts and so on then you can infect and and change to do the right way instead of what's happening today so I thought I needed to go through the process of how this all this mass surveillance started and and how it evolved around the world not just we didn't keep it to ourselves we spread it like the metastasizing malignancy around the world but it all started with four people Bush Cheney Hayden and tenet was Hayden who was director of NSA and Tenant the director of CIA who got together and said after 9/11 what can you do and tenet told Hayden don't don't pay attention to the law just think of what you can do so he came back with a statement from the people in NSA who knew what we were doing in our lab which meant we were collecting everything we everything in other words we had the capacity to collect everything in the world already and we had a capacity to filter out what was not relevant not just for US citizens but for everybody else because the problem in NSA I was also the technical director of the intelligence analysis and reporting shot for the world so I like to call myself the technical director of the world I thought that was a cute title anyway the main problem they had with the new and even back in the early 90s it started and and at that time all those analysts and there were about 6,000 of them okay so they were buried by data every days take would come in they would have their selection routines those routines would produce 10,000 20,000 returns so that's their daily work job well they couldn't get through it so they were all saying we were just too overloaded by our overburdened by overload meaning too much data and they wrote articles about this internally in NSA and I used them to give to other countries so that they would they would know that this is really what the problem is that's why they're failing to stop anything because they're just overburdened they can't see the threat coming in time well that was the whole objective of the thinthread program was to filter out what was important and we did that by looking at human behavior and how human behavior act how its reflected in communications and so we use the deductive inductive an abductive approach deductive meaning if you're looking at a social network of the of the world for phones or emails which we were then you could see the bad people the bad actors and anybody they had a relationship to so that meant that we could focus in on filtering out based on the metadata that represented those entities and only pull that data out the rest of it they just look Google by that gave privacy no we did US citizens but to everybody in the world so and that was a that was the thing they saw that would help and that's what Hayden took her to a de nuke the tenant and said we can actually capture the the communication of the world and I'll show you some of the evidence to show that how they're doing it because it's all illegal it's unconstitutional the violation of many laws in the u.s. so and I keep saying this in the US so if they don't do anything about it you know it's like well you know we're all culpable so we can't really if this Congress is entirely culpable with this so you know they're all criminals in my view hey I mean I look at it as they're violating the founding principles of our nation the Constitution so that needs to be they're all committing treason and they know it so I speak out openly about this I'm trying to get them into federal court where I can merely put it to them they they aren't there yet so in fact they're trying to block what we're doing the last motion they gave was to to the judge to dismiss the argument based on the the prison program now the prison program was never I mean our affidavit the updated I sign gave the specific programs that were involved and the president program is just the front charade that they put in front of the public under Eric you know 702 group guidelines and rules the government can ask the different companies for data on certain people if they have a warrant things like that so it's all upfront that but that's what they put out there is the version but that's not really the bulk acquisition program the bulk acquisition we mentioned in our affidavit and also in the filing of the courts and all the all the filings and what they have done is try to confuse and bamboozle the court into thinking it's really we're talking about the prison program when we're not that that's a charade it's put out there for people look I'd say our government's doing the right thing well it's not because in the background of the upstream programs and them and the other programs of tapping unilaterally the communications between these major companies not just to get what they asked for but to get everything they have when they back it up they collect at all those are the programs that our bulk acquisition and so those are the ones that I was really that was the basis for Hayden going back to saying we could collect the whole world as software we did in an in our lab and so of course they knew they knew the Ed Lewis and I wouldn't wouldn't couldn't agree to that because there was a simple violation of our Constitution if they had applied it to the United States we by the way were the first targets well you're included too in the network too so I mean you know we're all together here in the northern zone one of the world that zone one was the target first and so they agreed to that this was generated because and that Cheney really loved this because it gave him all the data on everybody so if he had any enemy politically or any otherwise that any opposition whatsoever he had the ability to see everything they were doing everything any electronic transmission everything so and that's basically how they got rid of Eliot Spitzer when he was going after the bank's after the 2007 eight financial crisis he was going after them for fraud so they had to protect their bankers right you got you gotta save your bankers so they went into this data and found trying to finance going to a prostitute so they that's how they got rid of them I asked people and in the government they said well what was the probable cause to look at data about Eliot Spitzer he was only trying to apply the rule of the law but they had to protect their their bankers so they were the ones funding all this and the technology people are all helping to implement it and the government that basically was co-opted in the way they did that was Bush and Cheney well Bush gave it to Cheney to run Cheney was basically this whole program is called a Cheney blood oath at NSA so that when you signed up that a program you were like this is a loyalty like they did to Hitler you know the same thing is this all that they really called it a Cheney blood oath and the and what that meant very simply was that Cheney was directing at all and his Addington was his lawyer so they had to figure out a way to justify this so what they did was they got you at the OLC the office of legal counsel at the DOJ who basically the responsibility there is to review policy by the government see that it's legal and and certified it's legal so they need him they also had Gonzalez the president's attorney and Addington the vice president's attorney these three attorneys were the ones who set up the legal basis in secret all classified they wouldn't even give it to the intelligence committees nobody knew this in the background so all these all these and some of them had been exposed now I think by the effort of the Judicial Watch and so on they've gotten some of them out they don't have them all of them but it was all done basically in secret as the justification as to how they could do this bulk acquisition of data and so that was their background and it was all secret even even the Hayden the director of NSA had trouble getting copies of it because again they didn't want to release it or have the chance that it would might might be you know elite so that was the that was the way it started and from there on Hayden of course this fit into Hayden's plan too he wanted to build an empire get more money in a budget you know be a bigger bureaucrat I say you know at the expense of our rights so that started the programs for upstream and than some of the other programs to do the tapping unilaterally the upstream program started with and this is the it started with the AT&T which is the closest telecom to NSA they'd been cooperating for a number of years this by the way overlays the 1960s microwave network for AT&T it's direct overlay so not only do I know all the locations but I also know all the addresses of the buildings they're doing this in and they gave it to one of your professors up here in Ottawa I think he was in the University of Ottawa he published this in his all the addresses the US government would not affect I gave all those locations to Laura Poitras who was connected with the New York Times and she gave to New York Times and they said we can't publish this I said because if we do and somebody attacks one of these locations then we'll be held responsible I said well so much for informing the government or the people of the United States so that's this is just one of the programs there the other one was the law the large one is storm brew and that's a Verizon and you saw the the initial release from Edward Snowden the the warrant request to the FISA Court to have all of the data transferred to to the to NSA this is the FBI asking for it this is a combination of FBI and NSA working together the FBI has jurisdiction internally so they they are the ones requesting but NSA is the repository for all the data and NSA allows FBI CIA and the five eyes intent and the third party countries access to that data because not only they are they the repository for data for the US government they're also the repository for all those countries involved in its collection and they all use it to query so it means that all the data even I'm sure they must be partitioning I'm sure they did that because of and that's why I do it anyway partitioned by access giving access to country's individually as to what we think they should be seeing or looking at that's generally the way things were built we we of course tried to originally with thinthread we tried to say everybody involved with the thinthread program sees everything in the program so they didn't like that either so they ended that so but that was the that was the way it started in these tap points you see if you look at them the little green dots around are the ones that are surfacing points for transoceanic cables what that means is and they claim that they're after foreigners by looking at using this program well if they're looking at foreigners that's the only place they need to tap because all the incoming data goes through those cables and surfaces at those points anything going out goes out through those points to foreigners anything going in and I and transiting the u.s. goes through those points also so if you're only after foreigners those are the only points you need well this basically says that everything that is talking about that way is a lie what are you collecting in in Missouri or what are you collecting in Nashville Tennessee or you know st. Louis sir Chicago what are you collecting there they're collecting zone 1 communications that's everybody you us everyone so we were the first targets so that's the and then how they start using this data is another crime you know they're first this is a violation of the constitutional rights of the you know first and fourth eventually 5th and 6th and amendments to Constitution first because it says you have the right to free association not under this program they know everybody you associate with and when and the end of 4th says your your data papers and effects are private then you need a warrant to get them not under this program they collect everything you wrote in emails everything you sent around in files everything that you communicated over the phones everything you may think that's impossible but with the technology today it's not I mean it's actually one of the main one of the main problems with technology it's gotten too good and and the storage now is getting even better so it's storing this data is not problem so that's why they built a million square foot facility in Utah to store it now they have another 2.8 million square foot facility storing for storage and coming on in Fort Meade that was brought they broke ground for that one a year and a half ago we know this because they can see there are always weaknesses in government they always have a way of compromising what they're doing in this case in order to make a big building like that they have to file an environmental impact statement so when they do that and you look at who's filing it then you know what it's for in this case it was for the Maryland - procurement office and it was on Fort Meade and so therefore you know this is NSA so and and and from that you could actually see it if you went on Google Earth and looked at their pictures you can see they wiped out a 36 hole golf course to do this program so and it only attests to the fact that they're storing all the data why because the you know I mean a year after year the data keeps growing and growing so it week they locked our government into spending more and more data to get that and to store it so that means you have to keep building larger and larger storage facilities so that's that's the reason that that's the reason they did that and then and then they keep they don't have they don't control the access of the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Administration or certain other CIA or GCHQ or even the five eyes rs.25 ice so and then they use the data in in the u.s. they use it to to arrest people and these are the rules from this was compromised and produced by Reuters after they you notice a very small print down at the bottom it's law enforcement sensitive that's the classification for legal but for the law enforcement area of the US these are the rules for the Special Operations Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration - using the NSA data to arrest people and then to take them into criminal court it - basically says you cannot you cannot put anything in a in written form of the source of the data you can't tell the attorneys or the judges the courts you know none of them can know and you can't tell you foreign counterparts because they have relationships around the world FBI and DEA have relationships with the similar organizations all around the world so now I'm allowed to tell them the source of information but they can tell them to go arrest people at certain point you know so then once they do that then they do a parallel construction this is how they take and use this data to in court and they've done this according to senator Feinstein when she was arguing the importance of the program back in 2013 and when they was supposed to testify to the to an independent group of Amos and Conyers the tooth representatives in the house they had organized a collection of people to oppose this bulk acquisition and they wanted to unfund it that's one way to get rid of it so I was supposed to testify to them before the vote and what happened was when they first scheduled a vote they put it on the calendar for the Congress right the house and when they did that the president called a meeting of all the Democrats in the house at that time so that killed that meeting and then four days later they had a vote on the bill and they lost by 12 votes so I but I think if I talked to him they they would have won that bill so that would have been unfunded now it's I mean it's all right this is massive funding we're talking about a ten billion dollar program for everything associated with it so but here can you see what it is the parallel constructions you use the normal policing techniques to around and find data that will justify the arrest then then what they do is they substitute that data for the NSA data in a court of law that's called perjury I you know I'm just a simple country boy that sounds like perjury to me so no and they did this just to cover up the source everybody's cut trying to protect this source of bulk acquisition data because it gives them power over everybody power over many members of all the parliaments in the world power over buddy even Merkel who would Stantler Merkel when she was complaining about the surveillance of her phone she thought it was done from the US Embassy which is only like two blocks three blocks away from the Parliament building but it wasn't it was done anywhere in the world because her her phone is a particular target so that anywhere she goes any of the tap points and they've got tens of thousands of them around the world implants also in switches servers and networks everything so they have controlled that network so they can do anything with it they want they can change data they could capture it change it send it along you know delay it in transit but this this program basically produces and puts into courts and it subverts our entire court court system I mean destroys our into the integrity of our judicial process this is perjury this is lying to court in the gut this is government policy that's the other problem I see but to my mind if you want to get really bad guys the best way to do it is targeted approach yet when you produce only the relevant data that's important for analysts to look at that reduces their problem in you know orders of magnitude further down to something that's really relevant and then they have a chance of succeeding by doing what they're doing they don't and they're violating every every law that that but that governs communications like the pen registers law or Electronic Privacy Act electronic security act all the government FCC regulation and all the laws backing that they're violating all that so I mean this is what I told them personally directly in the face I told him I was really pissed at them all this is exactly how I said it because I am you know they're destroying our democratic process our republic is being destroyed and we're sitting here not doing anything about it so anyway that's why I speak out that's why I go any world and I say anything I want let them take me to court that's where I want them you know so that's that's my story I didn't get into the FBI because they they're apart they're just so deep into it's not funny and you could see some of the we recent recent exposures of some of the emails that were written in are like showing all the corruption and violations of law in the FBI and the DOJ so I call the Department of Justice now I call them the Department of just us we're not included okay I'll start asking up some questions sure so what compelled you initially to career in US intelligence what were your original beliefs about the roles the purpose of the NSA well I thought it was all to protect the free world and you know the citizens of the United States so I thought it was a worthy effort now it started in looking at the Soviet Union I solved a few things when I was in the military in 66 to 69 well 65 to 69 a Russian you were the top code breaker well I wouldn't I wouldn't I at that time no I was just I discovered a few things that put it that way so I so that and that man NSA wanted me out of the military so they requested me so I got into NSA that way and I saw a lot more puzzles you know I mean I'm a mathematician you know I don't think in terms of infinite I think if turns of open-ended things you know finite problems you know everything's finite the point is if you can get your mind around it you can solve it so the question is how do you get your mind around it and that that I did with all kinds of codes and it even say to certain I actually worked every cipher in the Soviet Union so it was a lot of fun doing that to him so that just enticed me to stay there and keep doing those things because it was the bad guys the Soviet Union Yeah right when did those when did your beliefs and the sort of democratic United States when did that start shifting from your you know inside the agency when your work well I think mmm-hmm the movie explains some of it so if you look at the movie you could see that it's free on the web you can go just google a good American you'll find it and it was done by a dutch director see I did it in I did it with him because under I'm still under a pre-publication review on anything I write so that they can NSA can review it and say whether or not you know and I wouldn't have those bozos look at anything you know so so I said gee this is a movie it's not written and it's being done by an Austrian director not in the jurisdiction of the United States great let's do it so it took me about three seconds to make that decision so that was the that was the way I got into that but the the point was that in in in NSA I mean for mathematician you know puzzles the real enjoy a joy about thing to solve and when you saw them you really get a it's like a I guess it's like a high when you take dope or something you really do get a high I mean it's really you know I broke they say but you can't tell too many people I mean when you break something you have to go through a classification review and compartmentalization and all that stuff and so I basically tried to avoid that by saying anything i penciled out on my desk was secret and i exposed it to everybody I looked at it because it showed a technique of solving a problem that everybody needed to know not just me I mean I could only do so much but if I infected the knowledge to everybody then everybody could do that kind of thing and we we would benefit on a much larger scale so that's the way I looked at that but the agency didn't it was compartmentalizing we can't tell anybody about this you know so that was the fundamental thing that started me to decide that there's something wrong here you know tell us a bit more about your program thinthread and compare it to trailblazer so program ultimately adopted by the East government what were the main differences and also maybe a more general question can privacy rights ever really be compatible with meaningful and intelligence and effective intelligence yeah okay well the thinthread program had basically when we achieved the ability to session eyes fiber optic rates in 1998 that meant that that meant that we could session eyes that was a matter of space and power then you can just stack and session eyes everything so the same excuse me at the same time we were developing the programs to go through automatically and select out of that flow what was important but in order to get it to get to the point where you could do that you needed to be able to see it which meant we had to session eyes the data so that that that was the biggest problem we had because that that gave them the opportunity to collect bulk bulk acquisition but we had a filter process there that only filtered out what was being that what was relevant and what our analysts needed to see so that meant we had like three fiber lines being collected totally automatically and we used one common telephone line 64 kilobit line to bring back all of relevant data from that collection so all the rest of it went right by because it wasn't relevant so we didn't collect it then the other part was if we collect in that collection we pulled in if there was somebody in there that we didn't know for sure was they was they related to a terrorism operation or something we encrypted there and we did it with our multi-dimensional encryption process which nobody else knew about so and I'd ever tell them tell them how to do it so but that meant they called me in when they needed something encrypt decrypted so but the point was it was a way of protecting even from NSA analyst who was involved in that transmission so we protected their identities until we could prove that they were involved in a criminal operation once we did that we're trying to stay within the law you know and do the things the right way based on human activity that is based of a basis for probable cause you know and so that selection routine and encryption routine were the main main issues with thinthread but after that we had another program that we were developing to monitor everybody on our network and and see what they were doing when they came in what they looked at how long they stood there how long you stay and look what what kind of information they were taking out and it gave us the ability to we were looking at developing the ability to automatically detect violations of law or anything else those were the three things that NSA objected to so they removed the filter process which meant the entire collection came in they removed the encryption because everything then became paying it came in was totally identifiable and then they removed the the operational monitoring so they didn't want anybody to know what they were doing with this bulky encrypted data so it was all I mean when I left I thought I could go to Congress and just tell him what was going on which I did some of them believed it some of them didn't but but because I they knew I was developed this program so I didn't think I needed to take anything with me that's why I didn't take any data documentation or anything because it all came out of my cabeza you know so so I when you raise your concerns about the corruption and waste with Trailblazer in 2001 as well as the warrantless spying on citizens with stellar wind you went to the official channels right you know to the House Intelligence Committee the inspectors general for both the Department of Defense in the Department of Justice tell us about your initial hopes in reporting to those bodies and looking back would you do things differently that's aardman well my experience I mean I went to the staffer I knew in the House Intelligence Committee and there was Diane Roark and she she understood what was going on immediately and when she when she eventually went into challenged Hayden about it he told her in the name of the program stellar wind and it was bulk collection on communications of US citizens I mean and you saw later on in the in some of the compromises of where NSA analysts were looking into the data to find out if their better halves were cheating on them well that's local phone calls and local emails and stuff like that so they're collecting everything and that's by some of those tap points in the in the inside the United States there's about a hundred of them for that as for the for the fairview program that's 80 but there's also the there's like 30 other telecommunications companies involved in this through the storm brew Fairview Blarney that's was a big Larney as most of them that's the tap points from the other companies and and also they they have the the tap point input from the five eyes and like nine other third-party countries Japan Germany Israel probably and because there's a story here about that the programs we were developing in the 90s the first one was would do a ds3 like forty forty four megabits of data would and we called it P 24 I think that's what that was the one we call P 24 that was the first attempt and then we needed to expand to the fiber-optic race and that was Pete to five wait a little joke here we we also had a p1 program but we were letting everybody else in NSA guess what was between one and twenty four we didn't have anything we just it was just a joke we were stringing them along so we had them guessing we never told him anything about it so but any rate some of the people in NSA fellow was I guess fairly close to the unit 8200 in the Israeli organization that's the equivalent of NSA for Israel so he was passing the source code for all these things to them at that time in 97 and 98 so later on in 97 we had two new companies formed very very variant and I'm losing the other one well it's a vein main one used by in it by AT&T those two companies were formed by people who came from unit 8200 so they were they had the software doing basically the same thing that we had internally in NSA and so they were producing commercial equipment to sell around the world and Hayden bought into that so he spent a lot of money to get software he already had but didn't know okay so you know yeah the guy's a history major what can you expect so then any rate so he spent a lot of money bringing that into just you know put the equipment in all these tap points because that equipment would collect everything on the lines it's a it would take you know ten gigabit lines and and session eyes everything in those lines so that allowed them to capture everything so we could have done that too but it would have taken you know an effort from Hayden to help us do that but he didn't want to do that so he wanted by commercially so that's what they did a little bit about the inspector general's report from the Department of Defense and then what the Department of Justice yeah the in fact this this is the our complaint at Department of Defense the Inspector General was basically saying this is corruption fraud waste and abuse at NSA and criminality so we put all that in a complaint and so they sent about twelve inspectors and it took them two and a half years to look at the you know inspect all the information related to that and talk to all kinds of people involved and they also caught the NSA modifying documents to give to them you know as a way of justifying what they were doing so they're taking out the things that were would be you know indicate the crimes they were committing so so they did that and the Inspector General's inspectors found it and also said in the response in their original in the it's it's the dod IG intelligence report three - it's three - Intel - oh five or five that's the third intelligence report by the Department of Defense inspector general 405 but they're their inspections started in early 2003 and lasted into mid to late 2005 and then they documented it in December along with all the stuff that we said that our complaint was fully correct but they read a redacted and limited the distribution of it in fact very few people in Congress know about it that's what I brought up the director of Pompeo and when I went to see him I said you need to read that report you don't believe there's corruption here read a report and you'll see it you know I mean it's not I see the whistleblowers as I we have talked before whistleblowers bring forward problems that need to be solved that would make the organization better and what they're doing is saying instead of looking at them and addressing them and changing them and making the organization better they say if I do this that'll see that I have a wart on my organization you know I didn't fix this problem I didn't know about it and I'm just exempt so they say it's a bad mark on my reputation so I've just crushed these whistleblowers and that's the way they operate the US government that's that's the same also with private industry they do the same thing too so instead of addressing and making things better they crush the people trying to make things better can you tell us that you've spoken link about the mass surveillance of US citizens we're here now in Canada can you tell us about how the impacts of people outside of the United States so our Canadians in communications with Americans similarly affected by yes and if you looked at if you looked at the I'll give you the file a file of all the locations of all those tap points for AT&T for example some of them are in Canada so those are all operating up here the five eyes are doing this that means you or your people are involved and so you know you're a part of it just like we are in the US are I mean we were the first ones to be put into the bulk acquisition pit and just take some questions from the floor so if we have some microphones over on the side so just raise your hand and then the mic will come up your way should I stand mmm should I stand up or okay hey bill thank you so much for coming really enlightening talk and thank you for all your work my name is Abby Martin and I'm the host of the Empire files and a journalist quick question before I ask my other question what is the status of your litigation right now against the government is drawing it out they in fact the latest motion they put to the court which the court accepted by the way was to dismiss our argument mmm it was based on sub putting forward to the court that the prison program was the program we were talking about and it wasn't you know that's the upfront fake but that programs you know all the upstream and secret unilateral tapping that's what we're talking about and so I suggested to our lawyer that we inform the court that they need to hold the government in contempt of the court by playing them for fools which they are and I know that the Trump camp has kind of made the notion of a deep state kind of a ridiculous idea right and it's been ridiculed but talk about this kind of unchanging apparatus that continues through administrations that there is no differentiation between you know the surveillance state and u.s. foreign policy why does this neoconservative ideology kind of dominate you the US government well you say that's one of the foreign policy is one of the main reasons they do this because it gets of all the collection of everybody in other countries and who they're communicating with including all the members of parliament so that when they talk about issues that they're thinking about and what they're thinking it's captured and so they get an idea of what the inclination of foreign countries is in terms of issues so that gives them leverage against them and how to how to create an argument before the word surfaces publicly you know so you can combat it and be ready for it or maybe just even change it and influence it it's lying yeah Obama is a it was it is a constitutional are you I I was hoping for more from him for hope and change but I'm left with hope I got the change it's only doubled down on everything you know I mean he just he just went off on it I mean I power see the problem is this is power and people are corrupted by power at three three I have three words that describe everything everybody does in our government power control and money that's the issue has been all along you know and this program gives them power not just of people in our country your country or any other country in the world but also gives them the ability to leverage them any way they want for example if if princes in the Arab states go on the web and look at pornographic sites we collect that and use that as leverage against them because in their countries it's not a good thing to do Oh what maybe went right here and will come up thank you two questions artificial intelligence transparent opaque engines are now on the market and opened at NSA for usage can you actually program privacy models inside that yes second question is there an ethics model frame where that exists for a eyes and Opaques and transparent engines no but I've been giving talks to university computer programming like in Cambridge I addressed their college for computer program I said what you need to do and not document in a software you need to implant rules that will detect their misuse of the data and you have to plan for what I call evil at the top because this has always happen any time this kind of power is collected together somebody use it even evil and it for an evil intent they don't use it properly you know and you can't trust people because people are weak I mean it's the eye I'm surprised we made it this far really is it as a species thanks for being here I'm just wondering with everything that you know and you've seen what is your online presence like I I encrypt nothing because I want them all to see what I'm doing and saying you know in fact they have a very bad tap on my cell phone and I keep telling them about it I keep saying can you hear me now why don't you fix your tap you know what's the matter with you you incompetent people come on you know so well and you've also mentioned that you will you know you've told the world that you will never commit suicide right right and you're sort of very open I made it clear who would do it you okay can we go to the center here yeah thank you yeah the United States has a reputation for being maybe the first and having the best whistleblower protection legislation in the world given your experience it sounds like it hasn't really protected you very much and I wondered how you might explain that well see for me it's pretty simple I mean they give those whistleblower protections do work well for the private industry but when it comes to the national security area or the you know intelligence area there the exemption to that and so they don't they don't really abide by those and the reason of course is because they need to cover up their crimes that they're committing and all the evidence of it is and in the data bases of the intelligence agencies so are you saying then that culture plays a large role in whether or not this legislation will be welcomed and rigorously applied it sounds like sure of secrecy cover up keep the power for ourselves and never admit we do anything wrong yeah that's a cultural issue in the intelligence community yeah because we protect yourself basically yeah thank you I'm Chris just had a question about because I've been studying the whistleblowing regimes in Canada and a big fear that it seems to exist among Canadian lawmakers when they're drafting these legislation seems to be that if we don't make it really hard for whistleblowers to blow the whistle or for them to prove the case then we'll just get this slew of frivolous claims from whistleblowers now having gone through the whistleblower system in the u.s. yourself do you think that's a reasonable fear for lawmakers to have or do you think it's right it may depend on the area the whistleblowers blowing the whistle on you know but in in the in the u.s. that up until recently it's getting better especially with the as we talked about the private industry but with the intelligence it's really still pretty bad and yeah that's a legitimate fear I mean you can't it can't allow them to set the rules in private or in secret those rules have to be open and debated and agreed to by you know different different areas in your government and the public needs to know what those rules are if they disagree then they would say so you know but that's the thing that's the fear they don't want this knowledge out there and they don't want that kind of thing known by the public who could basically have a revolt against them either bill yet my name is yun and um i heard you mention values and laws many times in your speech and i think that's wonderful that we're getting a lesson on values and laws from somebody who's so technically adept and you know many countries in the world aren't hindered by those values and law as many institutions so there's the crux of what you're saying we need to find a better way to find leaders who will respect the values and laws and that's where we should be putting some of our efforts and into how we decide those people essentially yeah i think that's the that's the major issue and you need to I mean you need to find somebody you can trust I mean who can you trust in the in the u.s. virtually nobody nobody no politician anyway because they're all influenced by money and control and all that buy from different directions you know so that's why I thought when that when if Trump became president we had this is the first chance we have to correct this because he's not he's not a member of a political party he doesn't need money you know all those factors you know power control and money the the two of them at least go away the power issue is still there it does give him the powers that Obama had that Bush had you know so but that's a real issue you need to have somebody you can trust and he needs to be open and transparent Obama who was open you know everything he did he did in secret so you're finding out some of it in terms of what's coming out now in the u.s. about emails and things that are being written between the DOJ and FBI and various conspirators of this problem you know so I wanted to I wanted to add something about the about the whistleblowing in our case there's a case of the NSA whistleblowers and Diane Roark from the highest Intelligence Committee they threatened to indict us for 35 years under the the Intelligence Act of 1947 1917 sorry and they they started producing an affidavit and they told our lawyers they were going to indict us so they didn't know I was assembling all this evidence of malicious prosecution on the part of the Department of Justice of the United States so I had all this evidence that could prove in court that they were maliciously attempting to prosecute us and so that would that would basically deny their I mean I would throw them out of the law altogether they would lose their law license all of that for what they're doing so I told them about it by this is a good story in order to get the message across the Department of Justice I called Tom Drake because I knew his phone was tapped by the FBI okay so what I did was say Tom these guys are our lawyers telling us they're going to indict us all for conspiracy you know and so I said now here's what I've got I've got all this data showing and proving malicious prosecution on the part of the Department of Justice of the US and so I read it to him over the phone okay so and I said you know I you know oh and I said the FBI has all this data to see they thought we didn't have this but I did because I'm backed myself up so do you know many people I guess but I was right now I'm backed up in about six different countries out of the jurisdiction of the US and four or five places inside the US so you know anything they do is not going to work sorry but so I told him all this over the phone and I said so Tom when they take us into court and under this indictment we counter charged them with malicious prosecutors and at the same time and produce the evidence to show it in and I hung up and one month later because our lawyer he didn't know what was happening I was playing a pull the strings spy thing but you know that our lawyer didn't have any idea what's happening and so one month later first he was told we were going to be indicted then one month later they give him letters of immunity for us unsolicited so the only way you can you couldn't defend yourself is find evidence against them and be prepared to take them to court that's the only way you can do it they were fabricating evidence against us affects somebody felt so bad in the DOJ that they gave us a copy of their draft indictment so we had that too as an evidence thank you very much for your talk I will maybe I've missed it but I was wondering like do they collect and store every email call and message yep everyone in North America yep only about 90 billion a day okay so like even if the person is not of interest maybe like some student then you'll be safe some future future use future use okay okay for the future maybe they will be muted if they become active anyway and you don't like like the Tea Party they usually against the Tea Party yeah right or the Occupy group they used against them or the reporters like Jim Rice and Jim Rosen The Associated Press yeah they use it against them okay okay so maybe things like I'll keep by Wall Street or something yeah thank you very much hi there first of all I apologize that my phone went off I did switch it off beforehand so it turned on switched off okay so my question is quite simply and what point would you say a whistleblower has crossed the line for instance I've been told but I've not verified that Chelsea Manning led to the deaths of agents across seas so the question of course is like if I was in a position where I had the opportunity to be a whistleblower maybe it wouldn't be a very clear-cut like morally right thing to do but like where's the boundary where you say okay this is what I should be doing what this is about yeah the first thing you need to do is consult a lawyer okay that's that's the first thing then they need there are certain avenues for whistleblowing that are created like senator Feinstein said we did that we stayed in those in those channels for like six and a half years and even then that mean they wanted to silence us but they just didn't want anybody to know what we knew so when they sent the FBI at us which they did they raided us simultaneously Dianne was in the West Coast and C and Washington state we were in Maryland the three of us NSA people and they raided us at nine o'clock and her at six o'clock three hours different so there's a simultaneous raid so that nobody could call somebody lookout the FBI is coming you know it's something like that and you were in the shower yeah I was hey they came out and said the guy came in the shower and he's got his Pitt pistol on his pistol at me you know what you know what do I have you know so but any rate when they did that that was the first declaration of war okay I now at war with my country so and it takes two to agree that settle the war and I'm not done yet I built my name is Ali Riza I'm a PhD candidate at civil engineering department and that data analyst which is something that I've been working on for quite a while I'm actually working on a proof of concept from IOT based earthquake early warning platform for PC and the idea is to tap into everyone's a smart meter at every every single house and get some data and you know produce some sort of early warning for the citizens so I was wondering to what extend we can push the limit of using this analysis that metadata that as you as I've learned from you the data about the data to what extent it's not a clear fine line there are some areas that I don't know personally if I'm crossing the boundary in that in that case I think it's more a question of invading personal privacy of people like that if you're just monitoring the vibrations and you're trying to correlate the cross area then it's not I don't see that as an issue it's not because you're not in invading their privacy looking at you know what they think what they feel there there are papers and effects and things of that nature so you're not really you're not really doing it I mean for that purpose and the only thing that that kind of thing I can't I can't really think how they would use that I mean against a person it just seems like universally available information there are applications that we you're not really sure if these applications can come through because the IOT based platforms are exponentially growing and I was wondering is there any general symptom or something that we can think for the second time and think deeper if this application is violating people's privacy or not it is it yeah I don't I guess well my guide is the Constitution if you're violating any statement in the Constitution or the laws then but if you're looking at just the vibrations and I don't see the law that it would violate you know you don't have a Constitution I don't think but that's the one thing that set us apart and that's been destroyed hi bill so it's clear that the data that was obtained post 9/11 was used to inform the rendition detention interrogation program since then senator Feinstein was the driving force behind pushing for the Senate Intelligence Committee report which has been redacted all of the partner states but it seems clear that in looking in doing that report and looking at the partner states everyone on that committee would have had to have looked at this source of data and so it just seems it seems crazy to me that there hasn't been information coming out about this I mean I know what they're politicians that are on the committee so there have their own self-interests but that there would be no one within that committee that would look at that and say look how much harm that's caused in innocent people around the world and how that could affect citizens of our country it just it blows my mind well if we had a first investigation of this under the church committee in 1970s and it just came out recently of course that one of the main targets of NSA was Senator Church so also his committee so that the you know the idea was that they and they do this with the entire Senate in the house also judges and and even members of the the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Supreme Court so they're all being monitored no one is exempt so that gives them leverage against them and I when they do certain things I keep thinking there's they've got something on them and they're they're told what to do so and that's why they can get through all of this because there's so many people who are involved in the in the this crime but they have to cover up for each other if they if one Falls they all start to fall for example this is why Nancy Pelosi when she was Speaker of the House said impeaching George Bush was off the table that's because she was one of the first members of Congress briefed on it she was co-opted in early they co-opted the four members of the intelligence committees right and she was the the the minority rep on the House Intelligence me so she when she agreed to those programs in early October 2001 then she was culpable so if she allowed Bush to get impeached you'd say you have to include yourself so you know that's the leverage now they have against them so and the same is true for all those who are in those positions right now they're all co-opted in so they have to defend one another the the intelligence I mean the foreign raisa I mean I was on that I was on the Geraldo Rivera radio show on WABC in New York City once and he invited me on through gap and I went to get get up to it and talk to the government account government account and so I was on that I was on the phone with them and we were just having small talk and then he tells me he says now I'd like to work welcome to the show my my dear friend x4 star General Michael Hayden and so on first thing to flash this is a setup ok and being set up and the second flash comes to me know this is the grand opportunity I get this guy 2 million people maybe you're listening to this ok so I'm gonna I'm gonna put it to him so I wait for him to come on and he says oh you know all the people their identity they're all really good people and all this and I said I agree totally the vast majority of people there are hard-working dedicated patriotic people trying to do the job to help people my problem there was with NSA management when they started spying on every US citizen and everybody else in the world and he said but it's all legal and I said if you're talking about the FISA Court that's the Foreign Intelligence command tell it foreign intelligence court what part of foreign is domestic and you know he's trying to put him on the spot hey so he kind of after that he never said a word so I wouldn't have said you know all this stuff needs to be argued on the Supreme Court out in the open where everybody can see it and they do have a ruling on whether or not you're allowed to do this or not because in my day it's the Fort violation of Fourth Amendment and all this so you know let's said let's have at it out in the open and trend be transparent about it so after that are all the VRA the ended the show and then we run on the podcast you know to find a copy of it so he could say here listen to this and he deleted that podcast Geraldo Rivera did because of his dear friend X this is how they cover up mainstream media's it part of this they're all covering up for it I mean it was Casey the director of CIA you said we've been and we have an effort to infiltrate the media and we're well you know how it's how successful we've been when 70 percent of what they believe is false so that was back in the he said that in the early eighties okay so all of that and that's why the mainstream media doesn't they won't any of this they won't show I sure I gave them like a fox you know the your times all this all these tap points and locations and everything they should publish that but none of them did the only one who would show the the very you slide what does he think of it Buneary he was the only one to do it was on you know a cable TV for many Canadians in the post 9/11 period the face of the modern whistleblower has come to really just mean Chelsea Manning Julian Assange Edward Snowden all standing on the shoulders of people like Daniel Ellsberg but these are all figures who in one way or another really did challenge American state power I was hoping you could share with us a little bit how what you feel the role of the modern whistleblower is in protecting democratic rights well I mean there's central to it I mean where else are you going to learn about all these violations of your rights you're not going to get it from your government the other ones violating it so in the only view you have any only transparencies from a whistleblower you know that's why I participate in every about it once at least once a month I go on to a Joe Lauria who is the editor of consortium news has a program from 4:00 to 7:00 every Friday to people come on and talk about justifying what Julian Assange has done that's why I go on there because Julian Assange is one of the one of the main places you could get the truth you know and so if you if you I mean what they're after him because he did he exposed their crimes that's the problem with him so and part of that was Chelsea Manning the data is that she gave out I mean if you looked at the collateral murder clip it's on the web it's clearly a you know a crime a military crime you know in it's not even a war there I mean look those people were just walking along with no guns they just shot them all then they use the DoubleTap principle the double tap principle and with do he know this or not once you hit the target you wait then if people come around you assume there so part of it because they're trying to help then you kill them too that's what they do with drones with two missiles that's what they did with the helicopter gunship they waited til somebody came around and some poor guy stopped to write help this guy bleeding on the street you know with his in his car with his his kids taking him to school and then they killed him and and wounded his kids I mean this is insane these are war crimes he dead nobody's doing anything why because they're all part of it hi I had a question concerning your recent work on like the Russia gate stuff okay namely with like the VIPs memos and stuff which I'm full disclosure like fully onboard with what you produce but I was curious as if you could explain some of the your small faction of colleagues that disagreed with with it maybe explain the merits of their argument and also maybe why they're wrong yeah well for the Russia gate we looked at only published data like the goose for two day they was on posted on the web and looking at that we calculated all the transfer transfer rates for every file that was transferred and the highest rate we had at that point was forty one point or forty nine point one megabytes per second so we basically knew that that couldn't go across the international web to Russia and they they were claiming Crysta through was claiming was a hack from Russia so that means you come across the web get into a system and drain it out well it can only go to a certain speed across the web the web only allows you a certain amount of space they don't allow you to take up any large fibre for example you're not allowed you're only allowed a certain limited amount of space and I calculated what that was that did so but so we said it wouldn't go across and we had a few people I heard to them as the mentally impaired by a motion people because they're so they're so emotionally impaired by emotion okay you know because it's the they're so emotionally it attached to this argument that because they don't like Trump okay it's not like Trump you know fine but you I still have to be objective about evidence and you have this is the only evidence we had for gusta too so when we looked at that we calculated the high speed rate and we had a lower speed race we had them all all of them so he show the distribution of it and then we said well this wouldn't go across the web and some of our people disagreed they said well you know on this network they're talking about local networks that are high-speed and so on where they can do a large transfer but going across the web means you know thousands of miles and that's not that you don't have that kind of capacity all the way over to Europe let alone to Russia so we said well okay if you want to do that we're gonna try it so we're gonna say okay let's have an experiment to see how fast we can get that data across so we had I had a hacker in Europe that was willing to do it he traveled around a bit so that gave me the opportunity to look at different places so we tried it from Belgrade Yugoslavia and from Albania from the Netherlands and a couple places and from the UK for data centers and the fastest we got for that transfer was between two data centers one in the US and one in New Jersey well I mean one in London and one in the New Jersey so that that was and that one gave us 12 megabytes per second less than 1/4 the necessary capacity to transmit that data and the highest rate so we knew it couldn't it wasn't being transmitted over there so that that told us that and then we looked at the data that he put out if you looked at that day there were two sets one day to the fifth of Joe and one day to the 1st of September so if you looked at it and just looked at minutes and seconds you know those two files merge like this without a conflict now the random probability of that being a possible it's pretty low it's like if for any given second I mean they all have to be taken in order to it's like it's like one chance in 60 seconds here one chance in 60 ending minute by the next file that comes from the first group when it starts and then at the end you know you had that one in 69 one in 60 starting and one at 61 it so you ended up with like there were nine batches and those nine badges fit together with the previous data like that so that was one chance in 62 the I mean not 62 the ninth times times 2 to the 18th power just of randomly doing it so that told us just from the data we're not we're not there's no emotion here at all it's all just fact these are this is Randa this is this is forensics analysis you know it's just the data anybody can do this you can Oh check this you know it can validate it so but that told us that goose or two was made one database pole separated into two and set out two batches saying one coming later saying that he once he said put the first one out you know that he thought there would be they would try to do protections to stop him that was the idea behind the thought and the second one was to say you can't do anything about it I've got the data anyway you sure you can't stop me so that told us he was manipulating the data which told us he was faking it so he was a fake we knew it didn't go in transatlantic but all those speeds were compatible with a download to a thumb drive that we rejected his argument you know just based on the facts be again bill the US has been pretty open about its regime change operation in Venezuela right now there was just a widespread blackout that lasted several days now Maduro is actually pointed to allegedly evidence of US intelligence interference with the electrical grid talk about if that's a possibility and and what agency you think would be carrying that out if oh sure I mean that's an absolute possibility I mean the vault seven involved eight data can show all kinds of attacks then on you know grids and servers switches you know networks everything it's basically all that's up they call cybersecurity they don't fix them because they want to look into what everybody's doing and when they don't fix them everybody's vulnerable so when you know some other country I mean they have their mob monopoly on smart people you know somebody's gonna find that somewhere in China Russia Germany somewhere and so you know when they attack they can get through so the point is they they don't fix those things because that gives them ability to get into things right and what they don't understand so can other people and that's why we had to tack on the OPM I know all the all the data on every everybody in the US that ever was had a classified clearance all that data the sf-86 is which is your entire life history organization where you work everything and supervisors and all that so it allowed them to reconstruct the entire intelligence community of the United States including you know where everybody worked all the members of all the embassies around the world everything they now know they are and you know who they work for so yeah it's a it's absolutely possible so I mean that's the thing they should fix that's the first window was in my mind that my first window was you have to give up privacy for security absolutes window they already knew that too it just was a matter of gaining power control and money and the second one was cyber security you know they knew all these weaknesses they didn't fix them and so when cyber secure when somebody got attacked but you know they could they kept coming out saying we need more money for cyber security right why don't you fix the problems you have then maybe we'll have some cyber security that's the real issue but they don't want to do that because it gives them the ability to poke into what other people are doing and the third one is the Russia gate the attempt to create a new Cold War for a few more trillion dollars you know so I I didn't talk about the latest one the which showed that the DNC data was downloaded to a thumb drive that's the posted DNC data by WikiLeaks we went in to analyze that and found that the last modified x on all of the files that we looked at five hundred you know plus we only went to the first 500 and gave up so because it was all consistent the times ending for last modified would all even ending in even numbers that's a function of a fat file format it will round everything off that a nearest even number which means that's what it evidence of download to a thumb drive or a CD ROM that's the storage program there download to its storage device so and we found it all on all 500 we looked at which was means the random probability that happening is two to the 500 power which is like one chance out of a one followed by a hundred and fifty zeros at base ten it's pretty pretty small so we said you know obviously these were downloaded to a thumb drive and transferred physically or some distance before WikiLeaks posted them so we gave that it's evidence to the president's lawyers as well as published it to questions here and then I think that'll probably be all the time that we have thanks Bill when it comes to the mainstream media just to follow up on the questions about Russia gate and you know I think a lot of us kind of looked at this whole thing and went that this is impossible in the first place you have a group of people like CNN MSNBC Young Turks whatever on one side you have guys like Dan bunch you know Fox News on the other side the truth is the truth whether you like it or not right what is going on why can't these two talk like is this deliberately divisive are they doing this on purpose in order to create something or is it something else is it just basically everyone's just losing their minds because we're at that point but hey you know think of it this way CIA infiltrated the mainstream media right so they're giving the narrative from CIA not necessarily the president so and they're a part of the deep state part of the they're a part of the nonviolent coup attempt to get rid of Trump some of that's coming out between the it was all between those people in the Department of Justice and and and the FBI they were all part of this soft coup if you want to call it that so but they failed at that and now they're being exposed and so I think you're gonna see a lot more on that coming out that's that actually scares me yeah I think one I think this scares a lot of people because a lot of us realize that this whole thing is a joke but the problem is that I don't know if the world is ready to hear this I think they're just gonna lose their mind yeah well I mean the point is we have to tell them openly and be expose it I mean otherwise they have no chance of knowing they'll just fumble along blindly following the bail who's got the bail you know it's like how you control people that's what I meant about control I mean you you you you select only certain information that they allow the public to know that way they're uninformed or misinformed either way I mean in the intelligence we call that disinformation or manipulate Ziya these are standard procedures for intelligence standards I mean that goes back hundreds of years may I have two questions oh I I think they were actually time so I just wanted to ask one final question and then I think we have to wrap up so we're at a university what lessons or advice can you share with students who are thinking about how to channel their energies after leaving University well I think wherever you go to work you need to carry values and principles with you and make sure they don't you know the first thing they try to do is corrupt your values and integrity that's the first thing they do have to fit in with the organization and its theme I never did that at NSA I mean it didn't get rid of me because I was solving all kinds of things that they couldn't do and so they kept me around you know so that's the reason they did anyway so yeah because they were afraid if I left that they wouldn't be able to do these things you know so that's the way I survived but not everybody can you have to be careful you want to survive in your organization right so I would say you have to try to maintain your integrity and and principles of you know and values somehow and try to maybe influence that organization to change in that direction too I mean that's the only thing we have to try it you can try to do it from the bottom up I guess what I'm talking about I believe in infiltration and there's other words that all right will everyone please join me in thanking [Applause]

Channel: Allard Prize

Views: 5,444

Keywords: Binney, NSA, Corruption, Privacy, Surveillance

Id: YqSQaJfz9GY

Length: 73min 43sec (4423 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019