Former Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State”

[OnyxCollie]

104. Before you get all judgmental... (too late)

Inside the NSA’s Domestic Surveillance Apparatus: Whistleblower William Binney Speaks Out
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/6/10/inside_the_nsas_domestic_surveillance_apparatus_whistleblower_william_binney_speaks_out

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it was pretty hard for me to believe that my agency, that I had supported for so many years, and the country, of course, and the laws that we had, including the USSID 18 that has—which was our guiding documentation internally in NSA about not spying on U.S. citizens—when they started doing that after 9/11, it was just hard for me to believe they did it, but it—the evidence—I mean, I had direct evidence that they were doing it, so I just couldn’t—I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t be a party to that. And what I did after that was tried—I went to the intelligence committees first to try to get them alerted to it, so they would try—address it. I mean, their responsibility was to prevent the intelligence community from spying on U.S. citizens, based on the FISA laws. And after that, when that didn’t work, I even tried, with Diane Roark and others, to address this issue to the Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Supreme Court. But we weren’t able to do that. And so, eventually, I tried the—as well as Kirk Wiebe and I, we both tried to get to the Department of Justice inspector general’s office and alert them to this and say there are ways to do it without violating all the U.S. citizens’ privacy. But that wasn’t what the government wanted to do. I mean, when Qwest, the CEO of Qwest, was approached in February of 2001—that was before 9/11—to give over customer data, it was all—it was still targeting domestic spying, and that was call records they were trying to get from that. So, the—

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about that for a moment, Bill, the former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio, the only head of a communications company to—the only head of a company to demand a court order or approval under FISA.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes, and the consequence for him was they targeted him, and now he’s in prison. So, I mean, they succeeded in prosecuting him. But what it told me was that the intent from the beginning was to do domestic spying, accumulating information and knowledge about the U.S.—the entire U.S. population. So I thought of that as a J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids, you know? It wasn’t that he had information and knowledge to leverage just the Congress. You have information and knowledge to leverage everyone, judges included, in the country. So, that’s why I got so concerned. I tried to work internally in the government to get people to do something about it, but that whole process failed. So what it did was it alerted them to what I was doing, and they targeted me with the FBI, and they attempted to falsely prosecute me. Fortunately, I was able to get evidence of malicious prosecution every time, so they finally backed off trying to prosecute me.

AMY GOODMAN: If you would briefly, though I don’t like to have you relive this, tell us what actually happened to you, with the FBI raiding your home.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, they came in, and there were like 12 FBI agents with their guns drawn, and came in. My son opened the door, let them in, and they pushed him out of the way at gunpoint. And they came upstairs to where my wife was getting dressed, and I was in the shower, and they were pointing guns at her, and then they—one of the agents came into the shower and pointed a gun directly at me, at my head, and of course pulled me out of the shower. So I had a towel, at least, to wrap around, but—so that’s what they did.

And then they took me out and interrogated me on the back porch. And when they did that, they tried to get me—they said they wanted me to tell them something that would be—implicate someone in a crime. And I said, well, I didn’t—I thought they were talking about someone other than the President Bush, Dick Cheney and Hayden and Tenet, so I said I didn’t really know about anything. And they said they thought I was lying. Well, at that point, "OK," I said, "I’ll tell you about the crime I know about," and that was that Hayden, Tenet, George Bush, Dick Cheney, they conspired to subvert the Constitution and the constitutional process of checks and balances, and here’s how they did it. And I talked about program Stellar Wind, all the data coming in, about how they managed to graph it and also how they bypassed the courts. They didn’t tell the courts about this program, and they didn’t solicit any approval from the courts. And they also only told four people initially in Congress, that were the—they were the chiefs and deputies of the Intelligence Committee. That was on the House. That was Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi. I don’t remember the Senate side. But when you do that and—I mean, Senator Rockefeller, when he got briefed into those programs in 2003, said he wasn’t capable of understanding any of it, because he wasn’t—he wasn’t a technician, he wasn’t a lawyer, so he couldn’t do anything about it. That was in his handwritten note to Dick Cheney. So, I mean, it was clear they were doing something that was unconstitutional and against any number of laws that existed at the time.