Obama's New FBI Chief Approved Bush's NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Scheme

[leveymg]

4. "The Program" Comey, Goldsmith objected to is the NSA "Thin Thread" program

I think "The Program" that Comey and Goldsmith objected to, and talked Ashcroft into modifying, was the NSA "Thin Thread" program described by Jane Mayer in her 2011 New Yorker profile of NSA Whistleblower, Bill Binney.

Going backwards, related programs included Trailblazer, an NSA program that focused on interception and analysis of data carried on web communications networks, cell phones, VOIP, and e-mail. After receiving widely-reported adverse publicity Trailblazer was shutdown but reportedly morphed into the NSA Turbulance Program. Thin Thread was a rival, and until more recently still secret, NSA program that went operational, resulting in massive domestic surveillance. This is described by Jane Mayer in a 2011 New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

"Code-named ThinThread, it had been developed by
technological wizards in a kind of Skunk Works on the N.S.A. campus. Formally, the project was supervised by the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, or SARC.

While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.”

Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had
pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed.

Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet,
tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering
gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case. When we met, at a restaurant near N.S.A. headquarters, he leaned crutches against an extra chair. “This is too serious not to talk about,” he said.

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his
algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” According to Binney, Drake took his side against the N.S.A.’s management and, as a result, became a political target within the agency.

Binney described Thin Thread to Mayer, who describes The Program this way:

ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the
bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says,
“The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep
expanding.”

Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S.

< . . .>

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of
all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to
retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built
enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.” [end excerpt]

The thing that's different about the The Program as it was modified by Comey, Goldsmith, Ashcroft is a feature retrieved from Binney's original Thin Thread design that employs algorithms to determine that due cause exists to obtain a FISA warrant before US Person identities are revealed to the analyst. That may be a small difference, but it is a difference.