March 13, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
12:20
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| Time | Text |
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| My guest today is William Binney, a whistleblower, former National Security Agency official. | |
| He was one of the first to reveal the agency's massive domestic spying program. | |
| Mr. | |
| Binney revealed that NSA sought and received access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, that it has intercepted somewhere between 15 to 20 trillion communications. | |
| Mr. | |
| Binney also claims that in order to cover its warrantless surveillance, In light of the Petraeus slash Allen scandal, while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama, one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. | |
| I mean, if we take General Alan, thousands of his personal emails have been sifted through private correspondence. | |
| I mean, it's not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. | |
| Does this scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state? | |
| Well, yes, that's what I've been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of virtually everybody in the country, and the FBI has access to it. | |
| All the congressional members are on this surveillance, too. | |
| No one's excluded. | |
| They're all included, so yes, this can happen to anyone if they become a target for whatever reason. | |
| If they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI or other agencies of the government can go into that database, pull all that data they've collected over them on them over the years and reanalyze it all, so retroactively analyze everything they've done over the last ten years at least. | |
| And it's not just about those who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those who could be just... | |
| It's everybody. | |
| The Anaris device simply takes in the entire line, so it takes all the data. | |
| In fact, they advertise. | |
| The way they advertise, they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10 gigabit lines. | |
| That's the nearest, not the STS 6400, but the, I forget the name. | |
| There's another device that they have that does that, but it does it at 10 gigabits. | |
| That's why they're building Bluffdale. | |
| Because they have to have more storage because they can't figure out what's important. | |
| So they're just storing everything there. | |
| So all that email is going to be stored there for the future. | |
| But right now it's stored in different places around the country. | |
| But it is being collected and FBI has access to it. | |
| You mean it's being collected in bulk without even requesting? | |
| Yes. | |
| What about Google releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government's demands for personal data is at an all-time high, and for all of those requests in the U.S., Google says they complied with the government's demands 90% of the time, but they're still saying that They're making the request. | |
| It's not like it's all being funneled into that storage. | |
| What do you say to that? | |
| Well, I would assume that that's just simply another source of the same data they're already collecting. | |
| Mark Klein, in his declarations in the court about the A TNT facility in San Francisco documented the NSA room inside that ACE TNT facility where they had Narist devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. | |
| So that's kind of a powerful device that would collect everything that was being sent. | |
| It could collect on the order of a hundred, over a hundred billion, one thousand character emails a day. | |
| One device. | |
| So that gives you an idea of the magnitude of the kind of collection that's going on. | |
| Well, you're saying they sift through, those are billions of billions of emails. | |
| I wonder, how do they prioritize? | |
| I mean, is it like foreign nationals first? | |
| How do they prioritize? | |
| How do they filter it? | |
| First of all, I don't think there's any filtering. | |
| They're just going to store it all. | |
| So then it's just a matter of selecting it when you want it. | |
| So if they wanted to target you, they would take your attributes and go into that database and pull out all your data. | |
| That's what I was going to ask. | |
| Are they reading my Gmail? | |
| I should say there is no Afghanistan general in my mailbox. | |
| Do you think now that I said that they will stop looking into my mailbox? | |
| I don't think that would make any difference, no. | |
| If they had you on the target list, you're on the list. | |
| Were you on the target list? | |
| I'm sure. | |
| I believe I've been on it for quite a few years, yeah. | |
| So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my email so that when they read it they'll understand what I think of them. | |
| Do you think we should all, like, leave messages for the NSA, you know, a mailbox? | |
| Sure. | |
| Mr. | |
| Binney, you blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was president. | |
| With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency? | |
| In the surveillance program, in what direction is this administration taking the program? | |
| The change is that it's getting worse. | |
| They're doing more. | |
| That's why they, I mean, he is supporting the building of the Buffdale facility, which is over $2 billion they're spending on storage alone of data. | |
| So that means that they're collecting a lot more now and they need more storage for it. | |
| So that facility, by my calculations that I submitted in a sworn affidavit to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation lawsuit against NSA, Would hold on the order of 5,000 exabytes or 5 zettabytes of data. | |
| Just that current storage capacity that's being advertised on the web that you can buy currently. | |
| And that's not talking about what they have in the near future. | |
| Okay, so what are they going to do with all of that? | |
| Okay, they're storing it. | |
| Why should anybody be concerned? | |
| Well, if you ever get on their enemies' list, like Petraeus did, or for whatever reason, then you can be drawn into that surveillance. | |
| Do you think they were? | |
| General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration, or General Allen? | |
| Well, there's certainly some questions that have to be asked, like why were they targeted to begin with? | |
| What law were they breaking, or what probable cause did they have to begin even to survive? | |
| In the case of General Petraeus, one would argue that, okay, there could have been security breaches, something like that. | |
| But with General Allen, I don't quite understand, because what they were looking into were his private emails to this woman. | |
| Well, that's the whole point, yeah. | |
| The whole point is what probable cause from the beginning. | |
| Is it to embarrass him? | |
| And why did they... | |
| I'm not sure what the internal politics is. | |
| Yeah, well, that's part of the problem. | |
| This government doesn't want things in the public. | |
| It's not a government, a transparent government. | |
| So whatever they're doing, whatever reason they had to motive, and whatever the motivation was, I'm not privy to it, so I don't really know, but I certainly think that there was something going on in the background that made them target those fellows. | |
| I mean, otherwise, why would they be doing it? | |
| There is no crime there. | |
| It seems that the public is divided between those who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties and those who say, I have nothing to hide, so why should I care? | |
| What do you say to those who think that shouldn't concern them? | |
| The problem is, if they think they're not doing anything that's wrong, they don't get to define that. | |
| The central government does. | |
| The central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. | |
| So it's not up to the individual. | |
| Even if they think they're doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target. | |
| Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA. Well, the violations of the Constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. | |
| That was the part that I could not be associated with. | |
| That's why I left there. | |
| They were building social networks on who was communicating and with whom inside this country so that your entire social network of everybody, of every U.S. citizen was being compiled over time. | |
| So they're taking, from one company alone, roughly 320 million records a day. | |
| That's how, over time, that's probably accumulated up to close to 20 trillion over the years. | |
| The original program that we put together to handle this, to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were under jeopardy, Would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody's communications except those who were targets. | |
| So that, in essence, you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause. | |
| And once you showed probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. | |
| And we could do that and isolate those people all along. | |
| That wasn't a problem at all. | |
| There was no difficulty in that. | |
| But it sounds very difficult and very complicated. | |
| Easier to take everything in and... | |
| No, it's easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, of the relationships for the world to filter out data so you don't have to handle all that data. | |
| And it doesn't burden you with a lot more information to look at than you really need to solve the problem. | |
| So do you think that the agency doesn't have the filters now? | |
| No. | |
| You have received the Callaway Award for Civic Courage. | |
| I congratulate you for that. | |
| Thank you. | |
| On the website, in the press release, it says it is awarded to those who stand up for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal and professional lives. | |
| Under the code of spy ethics, I don't know if there is such a thing. | |
| I assume, well not. | |
| Your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. | |
| How do you look back at them? | |
| Oh, that's pretty easy. | |
| They're violating the foundation of this entire country, our entire foundation of why this entire government was formed. | |
| It's founded with the Constitution and the rights given to the people in the country under that Constitution. | |
| They're in violation of that. | |
| And under Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7, Governing Classification, you cannot classify information just to cover up a crime, which this is. | |
| And that was signed by President Obama. | |
| Also President Bush signed an earlier executive order, a very similar one. | |
| If any of this comes into the Supreme Court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire House of Cards of the government falls. | |
| What are the chances of that? | |
| What are the odds? | |
| Well, the government's doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court, and of course we're trying to do the best we can to get into court. | |
| So we just thought it deserves a ruling from the Supreme Court, ultimately. | |
| The court is supposed to protect the Constitution. | |
| All these people in government take an oath to defend the Constitution, and they're not living up to their oath of office. | |
| Thank you. |
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