Barrett Brown vs. the Private Intelligence Business | scary read

[Catherina]

6. The NSA whistleblowers confirmed this too so people can't say it's just 1or 2 journalists

Last edited Tue Jun 25, 2013, 12:16 PM - Edit history (1)

The NSA whistleblowers confirmed this too so it's not just 1-2 journalists misunderstanding things.

When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. ... the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/