NSA Whistle-Blower Tells All: The Program | Op-Docs | The New York Times

you I was breaking ranking different codes and and data systems and doing data analysis against the the Soviet Union after 9/11 they took one of the programs I would had done over the backend part of it and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country so that was a program they created called stellar wind that was the separate and compartmented from the regular activity that was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying all the equipment was coming in I knew something was happening but then when my the contractors I had hired came and told me what without the what they were doing it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do it was simply a different input instead of being foreign it was domestic input somebody told me if he can listen to what we're saying by by having this even if it's turned off yes there's that there's the real brand design every domain think of a domain as an activity a specific type of activity phone calls what banking is another domain so if you think of graphing each domain and then each graph and turning it in the third dimension the trick now is to map through all the domains in that third dimension pulling together all the attributes that any individual has in every domain so that now I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time you I understand why you're not right why should I I don't because what you're saying it was possible it would be revolutionary people would have a vested interest in preventing that from happening I'm tool up to all I'm not sure how many of you got a chance to hear Keith Alexander yesterday the head of the NSA I talk about the NSA's activities bill how do you reconcile is there some way to reconcile general Alexander's statements that the NSA is in keeping track of every American with the existence of a facility like the one in Utah NSA's charter and it was a legitimate one was to do foreign intelligence and I was with that all the way and I did the best I could in that job unfortunately they took those programs that I build and turned them on you I'm sorry for that I didn't intend that but they did that what you're describing really is hard to reconcile with the laws as the laws are generally understood by the lawyers who work with them most people are familiar with the Webster's definition of interceptors you said 18 has a different definition and that's a an intercept doesn't take place until it's actually listened to until somebody put some on some earphones or actually read some text on a screen so you can pull in all the communications you want position isn't the search the query later on is the search they can then keep it in their database and target after the fact by going back and conducting data mining searches afterward in other words to get the information that they couldn't target from the outset and there is another real problem unfortunately the software will once it takes in data it will build profiles on everybody in that data the purpose is to monitor be able to monitor what people are doing you build social networks for everybody that then turns into the graph and then you index all that data to that graph which means you can pull out a community that that gives the you that outline of the life of everybody in the community and if you carry it over time from 2001 up you have that ten years worth of their life that you could lay out in a timeline that involves anybody in the country even senators and House of Representatives all of them the dangers here are that we fall into something like a totalitarian state like East Germany well they came in guns drawn you know in my house they didn't do that to the others but they did to me I guess I don't know they thought I was probably the most dangerous at all so long I don't know what was in their minds okay so but they did that and they and they came in pointed the gun at me while I was getting out of the shower at the time so they point a gun right in my old head you know said hey so I wasn't too upset I just said yes beause I could get it I could get dressed here you know tried to they weren't intimidating me anyway so tell me something that will intimidate and implicate somebody in a crime that's what they're so I told them what the crime was that I knew about and that was that George Bush Dick Cheney at the Tennant and Hayden conspired to subvert the constitutional constitutional process and any number of laws and here's how they did it and I explained stellar wind on my back porch to all the FBI agents who weren't cleared so they had a problem I created a problem for them because they had a bunch of people now who weren't cleared for a very highly classified only because it was domestic spying by the way was the reason it was highly classified yeah you know they wanted to highly classify the extreme impeachable crimes that they were committee it needs to be out in the open we need to as a democracy we need to say do we want our government doing this or not and do we want our government to have this data or not and if so if we want them to have it then what kind of controls and they have to be a little bit more visible it can't all be done in secret you can't have secret interpretations of laws and and run them at secret not tell anybody or can't make up kill this and not tell anybody what the criteria is for being the kill is this is something that KGB the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had about their populations so I mean you know and just because we call ourselves a democracy right doesn't mean we can we will stay that way that's the real danger and we people may have absolutely nothing to say about it we haven't had anything to say so far you

Channel: The New York Times

Views: 291,908

Rating: 4.9161863 out of 5

Keywords: William Binney, William Binney interview, United States National Security Agency (Organization), NSA, n.s.a., laura poitras, filmmaker, film, documentary, top secret, top secret nsa, top secret nsa program, edward snowden, data collection, personal data collection, The New York Times, NY Times, NYT, Times Video, nytimes.com, news, newspaper, feature, reporting, Whistleblower, Edward, Snowden, Russia, Phone tapping

Id: r9-3K3rkPRE

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/mknlsn]

Here's a leaked video from Raytheon of a piece of software called Riot that allows you to track people via social media. Seems relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im2HycUMSbM

[u/[deleted]]

I heard it was called Prism? can anyone explain the difference between prism and stellar wind?

[u/PimpMogul]

pretty fucked up

[u/11251442]

He also was on the 29th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg as a speaker for "Enemies of the State" with Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake.

Heres the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBp-1Br_OEs (He starts at ~0:53:00)

[u/mrteapoon]

Seriously NYT? 480p is the best you can do?

[u/[deleted]]

http://www.imgur.com/oDuDB2B.jpeg

[u/Thebullshitman]

Yet they couldn't prevent the Boston bombing...I'm not gonna concern myself with the dangers of a system that is bloated up to be something it's not.

[u/IRBMe]

There are so many things I don't understand about this.

Firstly, how does all this data get from the sources to whatever systems the NSA supposedly has to process it all? Let's take banking, one of the "domains" mentioned in the video, as an example. Now I worked for an investment bank as a software developer for a while, and even transferring data between systems in the same bank was a monumental task. It required many teams of software developers, network engineers and systems administrators, not to mention millions of dollars worth of hardware to move data around internally. Moving the amount of data generated about customers of a bank even in a single day to an external data center would require even more effort. Who's writing the software to collate all this data from the various databases and software systems in the bank? Who's maintaining the hardware in the bank that this software runs on? Who's responsible for administering those systems? Who's paying for and maintaining the big fat network links that would be required to move that amount of data? And how the hell does this all happen without hundreds of employees of the bank knowing about it? Now imagine the same problems across every single bank, ISP, telecoms company and wherever else they're acquiring data from. I can't understand how they would manage this without large teams of insiders inside every single one of these companies. Also, the entire board of each company would have to be in on it too. It's not like they can just flip a secret little switch and magically start acquiring all of this data.

Secondly, who designs the protocols and data formats? If you've ever been involved in a merger of two companies as IT staff, an engineer or a software developer, you'll be well aware of the pain that results from trying to get two different systems to talk to each other! One merger I saw still wasn't entirely complete after even 3 years - there were still multiple versions of systems that did much the same thing, and other systems that had to be able to talk to both of them at the same time. So to built a system that can successfully talk to the systems in hundreds of other different companies? That's not something you can just do. That takes a huge amount of effort. You have to design protocols, procedures, data back-up policies, error-handling, fail-over systems and redundancy etc. Not to mention then processing all of the data to import it into your own system!

Thirdly, I don't see how they can have enough storage and enough systems to store 100 years worth of that amount of information. Take a second to think how much data Google stores about each person; now go research how many data centers they have, how many staff they have, how many failed hard drives they replace every single day. They've basically designed their own data centers to be able to cope. And we're supposed to believe that the NSA can store and process probably several of orders of magnitude more in a single data center, and keep it a complete secret? Really?

tl;dr The technical challenges of acquiring, moving, sorting, processing and then storing that amount of data every day from so many different companies and sources makes it extremely infeasible. Doing it in secret is practically impossible. We're talking about a system that would literally be several times bigger than Google, which employs over 30,000 staff across the world.

Edit: Why the downvotes? If there's something I'm missing, tell me...

[u/coprolite_hobbyist]

Anybody remember all those cold war movies where people in the USSR were always paranoid that telephones, radios or TV's were used as listening devices? Even the Russians never figured out how to get people to carry the bugs with everywhere they went or post their personal information in easily accessible databases.