Universal surveillance in the United States

NSA Whistleblower Says The Feds Are Gathering Data On Nearly Every US Citizen

The U.S. government has been collecting data on nearly every U.S. citizen and assembling webs of their relationships, National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney told the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference last week.

Michael Kelley

Business Insider,

17 July, 2012

Binney worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution," according to a statement he made in court records.

On April 20 he gave his first interview after resigning to Democracy Now!, asserting that the FBI raided his home after he blew the whistle on the NSA's extensive spying on Americans.

On July 2 Binney, along with two other former NSA employees, agreed to provide evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit that alleges the U.S. government operates an illegal mass surveillance program (i.e. Jewel vs. NSA).

His sworn declaration of facts that he's willing to testify to are both telling and scary:

• In the '90s Binney supervised the development of a NSA program called "Thin Thread" that was designed to identify international networks of connections between people from their internet communications. Since one side of the communications was domestic, the program encrypted the data so as to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens until a warrant could be obtained.

• After 9/11 all safeguards went out the window as "the individual liberties preserved in the U.S. Constitution were no longer a consideration." Members of his Thin Thread team began implementing a program called the President's Surveillance Program (PSP), which collected domestic electronic communications traffic without any privacy protections.

• The NSA began seizing and storing most electronic communications passing through 10 to 20 wiretapping rooms in key telecommunication points throughout the country where all data must pass in order to move from one party’s network to another’s, allowing the government to identify and analyze any individual or group through a searchable database.

• Binney cites the $1.2 billion Utah data center currently being built and the new supercomputing center at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, pointing out that the immense size and computing power of these facilities far exceeds the capacity necessary for storing targeted communications but is "consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications." 

In a nutshell Binney states – with considerable authority – that the NSA has been conducting comprehensive surveillance on U.S. citizens for more than a decade.

NSA Whistleblower Speaks

Live: "The Government Is

Lying to You"

From Democracy Now

In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA's massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower. Binney was a key source for investigative journalist James Bamford's recent exposé in Wired Magazine about how the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency, including private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches and other personal data.

Binney served in the NSA for over 30 years, including a time as technical director of the NSA's World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, he has warned that the NSA's data-mining program has become so vast that it could "create an Orwellian state." Today marks the first time Binney has spoken on national television about NSA surveillance