I just finished watching this documentary called “A Good American”, a film by Friedrich Moser. The story is about Bill Binney who once worked as an analyst for the NSA. Oliver Stone is the Executive Producer. What it offers in pretty clear language and evidence is how badly misappropriation of public monies, corrupt Washington insider activity, political appointments, and gross incompetence lead up to the losses of 9/11 and subsequent years.
Bill and others employed at the NSA developed a program called thinthread which, when placed in the communications streams being monitored by the NSA, traced communications packets from source to destination and saved the data about the data (called metadata) into a large database. Then, using techniques Bill developed in previous decades, reports could be made showing the interconnections between hundreds of millions of telephone and internet users worlwide.
It was so successful that it could find threats developing well before anything would happen and allow for a substantial advanced warning on threats about to happen. Bill’s earliest use of the analytical techniques told of the impending Tet Offensive in Hue in Vietnam. He perfected the automation of the techniques with the introduction of the personal computer.
At the NSA he was given charge of a small team of individuals to automate analysis of the data being collected. The team quietly did that and demonstrated it’s efficacy at several “research” operations the NSA ran around the world. It was discovering things that no other individuals or systems were able to discover.
As the world threat levels loomed and Osama Bin Laden began financing the terrorism, Bill’s thinthread was detecting those activities in advance. The problem was that the appointed head of the agency, the director in charge of analysis automation, the assistant director in charge of analysis automation, and the newly hired systems vendor had a vested interest in making sure Bill’s thinthread did not get to play throughout the agency. They made millions burying it and touting their nonworking, expensive, protected system offered by the vendor SAIC.
As a good American Bill then pursued notifying the Defense Department of the missteps by the bosses. What he did not anticipate was the fallout. The NSA had pulled the plug on thinthread and buried all information about it at the direction of the bosses who were enriching themselves pushing the nonworking system SAIC had produced. They even went after him, his team members, his Congressional liason, et al as enemies of the state. Later the FBI’s case was dismissed due to falsified charges.
There was another feature Bill and team worked into the code that prevented anyone in the United States from being spied upon without the proper court authority. Those same bosses stripped it off. The NSA is not to spy on U.S. citizens by law. The bosses were also law breakers.
In subsequent years Bill and team tried selling this technology to other government agencies and were stymied by the NSA at every turn. Well into the post 9/11 era the NSA still did not have or use the thinthread or any equivalent of it but instead continued to push the SAIC vendor solution.
Bill and the team members are retired now. They had to “retire”. Our country is at greater risk without them. Our government agencies are accelling at their incompetency and trouncing our civil rights to privacy all at the same time.