Skip to main content

Curated research library of TV news clips regarding the NSA, its oversight and privacy issues, 2009-2014

Click "More / Share / Borrow" for each clip's source context and citation link. HTML5 compatible browser required

Primary curation & research: Robin Chin, Internet Archive TV News Researcher; using Internet Archive TV News service.

Speakers

William Binney
NSA whistleblower, NSA Technical Director, 1965-2001
CURRENT 05/07/2012
Binney: To start with I developed the program in NSA to mine massive amounts of data from around the world to detect foreign threats. Then after 9/11 they decided to turn that process that capability against every in the country here, everyone in the united states. And they started by taking commercial data and billing data from AT&T on everyone approximately 320 million calls a day were recorded by this device. That was just the initial participation
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
William Binney
NSA whistleblower, NSA Technical Director, 1965-2001
CURRENT 05/07/2012
Spitzer: What happened? You raised these claims at a certain point? Binney: I went directly to the intelligence committee, the HPSCI, the House intelligence committee and I even tried to see Chief Justice Rehnquist. Eventually, Kirk and I went to see the DOJ IG’s office. Spitzer: Which parenthetically is what you're supposed to do, when you have concerns of this sort, what you're trained to do. and what happened? Binney: Absolutely nothing. They all rejected it. In fact he only thing that came out was their joint DOJ IG report in 2009 where they
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
William Binney
NSA whistleblower, NSA Technical Director, 1965-2001
CURRENT 05/07/2012
Binney continued: said you need to have better and more active monitoring of these surveillance programs. So that, but that did absolutely nothing. Spitzer: there was no question in your mind, these were intercepts this was data collection. Violating of the statue, Violating of what the NSA guidelines were. Binney: Absolutely, direct violation of the Constitution, pen register laws whole series of laws Spitzer: Pen Register being the device that permits you to track, what who is calling whom Binney: right. Spitzer: quickly tell me, fast forward, what happened, the FBI came to visit you one day?. Binney: in July of 2007 they came and raided us, yes. Spitzer: when you say raided you what happened? Binney: Well they busted
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
William Binney
NSA whistleblower, NSA Technical Director, 1965-2001
CURRENT 05/07/2012
Spitzer: The FBI came to visit you one day?. Binney: in July of 2007 they came and raided us, yes. Spitzer: when you say raided you what happened? Binney: They busted in. 10 or 12 of them busted in with guns drawn at my house. Pushed my son. Spitzer: you don't seem to be a terribly dangerous type of person. Binney: In fact, I had been cooperating with the FBI for months because they had been asking me questions about ah . Spitzer: So your complaints triggered them to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Binney: yes, that plus the inspector general DOJ, inspector general’s complaint that we filed.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
William Binney
NSA whistleblower, NSA Technical Director, 1965-2001
CURRENT 05/07/2012
Spitzer: Stellarwind. What was it all about? Binney: it was pulling together all the e-mails and all the phone calls and probably other records like banking and so on so you build relationships that would show communities that you worked with, and who you were involved with what whatever you were doing in your daily life. Spitzer: not just phone calls on my blackberry. Kirk, If I go to an ATM machine they know where I’m taking money out, what my credit card is being used for? Kirk Wiebe: absolutely. Any electronic transaction.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Rachel Maddow
Host of The Rachel Maddow Show
MSNBCW 08/19/2013
Maddow: Miss Poitras is still working on the third installment in that trilogy which is about U.S. surveillance of phone calls and e-mails and so on since 9/11. She posted a bit of that one last year on "The New York Times" website. Binney: You build social networks for everybody. That turns into the graph then you index all that data to that graph which means you can pull out a community, that that gives you an 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 can 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. Maddow: Working with top-level sources like that former NSA employee, uncovering government secrets
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
William Binney
NSA whistleblower, NSA Technical Director, 1965-2001
MSNBCW 03/10/2014
Farrow: question to you Mr. Binney. What would you most like to see change for the next whistleblower who goes through a process like this? Binney: I’d like to see a real program run by the administration that would actually do something about what whistleblowers are talking about. After all, whistleblowers are trying to address problems that exist inside the government, either corruption, fraud, waste, abuse or illegality. Now If the government doesn’t address those, and face them and say yes, we’re doing this and start correcting them, then there’s no real protection there whatsoever for any of us. I mean after all, the FISA court oversight of NSA is a joke as is the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. It’s a joke. Those people have no way of verifying what NSA is telling them. Farrow: There certainly has been some real questions raised about the transparency of those courts and we'll be watching closely.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Jane Mayer
Staff Writer for The New Yorker
KQED 05/13/2014
Narrator: But according to the rules Drake thought he had to follow, whatever he found had to safeguard Americans' privacy. He started by digging around inside the deepest reaches of the NSA's secret R&D programs. Mayer: And he stumbles into sort of a skunkworks, and he discovers that there was actually a program before 9/11 that could have, as they said, eavesdropped on the entire world. It's called ThinThread. Narrator: ThinThread, a program that could capture and sort massive amounts of phone and email data, was the brainchild of veteran crypto-mathematician Bill Binney. Binney: The whole idea was to build networks around the world of everybody and who they communicate with. Then you could isolate all the groups of terrorists. Once you could do that, you could use that metadata to select the information from all those tens of terabytes going by.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Showing 1 through 8 of 8
Page 1