01/13/17 – William Binney on Russian hacking, NSA spying, and counterproductive means of fighting terrorism – The Scott Horton Show

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Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org and, hey, travel to D.C.
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Alright, introducing the famous National Security Agency whistleblower, William Binney.
Let's see, in James Bamford's article for Wired, he writes, Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician, largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network.
Welcome to the show, William.
How are you, sir?
Well, I'm pretty good, and thanks for having me.
Good, I'm happy to hear that, and thank you very much for doing it.
I've been meaning to interview you for actually many years now.
I'm not sure why I never did, but, oh, I know, Sam Husseini dropped your email address right into my lap, so I thought, oh, man, I've got to do this now.
I guess I just didn't know if I knew enough for the best questions to ask you, but now I've got a few.
First of all, you've been writing these essays with the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, and particularly with Ray McGovern, one of which ran in the Boston Globe.
I believe it's the same one I have in front of me from ConsortiumNews.com.
The dubious case on Russian hacking.
Of course, there have been a lot of assertions about Russia breaking into the DNC and to John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager's email account, and leaking these emails to WikiLeaks.
And you've written with Ray McGovern that you're not so convinced, sir.
Is that right?
Yes, sir.
Really, there's two questions here.
One is the hacking.
I mean, hacking doesn't mean they transferred the data to WikiLeaks for publication, which is really the issue.
I think if you're going to accuse them of interfering in our election, then the only way they would be doing it would be to leak the emails to WikiLeaks to get published so that they can be in public view.
I mean, otherwise, everybody hacks everybody.
In fact, we, the United States, do better at hacking everybody on the planet than anybody else in the world.
So, I mean, the Russians aren't doing anywhere near the hacking that we do, but they certainly do hack.
But that's not the issue here.
The issue is if we're going to do...
I mean, the president's already taken action, okay?
So he obviously doesn't seem to be bothered by any of this.
But to me, the issue still is with the intelligence community to prove that actually they did transfer those emails to WikiLeaks.
I have yet to see any proof of that.
All right, now, this is just a side note, but I did get an email from a listener of the show that said basically, dang it, hacking and cracking are different.
Hacking is good and cracking is bad, and that's what we're talking about here is like a breaking and entering here.
It's cracking that's the accusation that they broke in.
I don't know if that really matters to people outside of the computer security industry, but it seemed to matter to him.
But anyway, so you're saying then, well, let's see, when the government asserts, Homeland Security, et cetera, assert that Fancy Bear is apartment 28 and that's the GRU, the Russians, and that they're pretty sure that they did this phishing attack against John Podesta, and that's how they got the emails, and then I guess as you say, it's one to skip a few, they must have given it to WikiLeaks.
But that part aside, did you buy that, the whole Fancy Bear, GRU thingamajig there?
Well, even that I think still is somewhat questionable.
I think they still need to have a trace path of evidence to show that also, and they haven't produced that either.
I mean, the point is, you know, we don't want this to be another WMD or another Tonkin Gulf affair where you can make decisions to go to a cold war, even start a hot war where a lot of people got killed, like in Vietnam where the whole basis for the Tonkin Gulf was a farce, was a fabricated set of evidence just to go to war, and so was the weapons of mass destruction, and people died because of these decisions.
So I mean, the point is, let us have a little professional discipline here and show the evidence and trace it and make sure that what we're saying is right.
So far, they haven't done that.
Well, now, in the way that they make their assertions, does it make you really doubt that they have evidence to back it up the way that they keep saying, well, we assess this and it seems like maybe that, but don't quote us on it and this kind of thing?
Yeah, that's the whole point.
You see, if you have the evidence, you have the evidence.
You don't need to say we have high confidence.
But stating a level of confidence means you don't have the evidence.
And then, so now, if I remember right, this would be going back, I guess, to December, but I believe, or maybe this is in the latest one, too.
I'm sorry to get them mixed up, but I believe that you had written that, listen, if it happened the way that they say it happened, they would be able to prove it, that you can't run around on the world's internet without the NSA following your every step, or at least they can always go back and rewind the tape and see everything everybody did, if that's what they want to do.
Is that right?
That's correct, yeah.
I mean, they have...
Even the Russians, sir?
The Russians?
Meaning, you know, super powerful villains?
Anybody on the planet, they've got tens of thousands of implants and all the switches in the worldwide network.
Anybody that does anything in the world, they've got evidence of it.
All right, and then I think even previously, before that, you had said, and this is an exact quote, so you can clarify all you want here, but I believe you had said, and I think it wasn't all that clear, but it sounded to me like you were implying that you really knew for a fact that whichever batch of these emails, maybe the DNC ones or maybe the Podesta ones, whichever, that you knew that they had been leaked from inside the American intelligence community, as in they were so resentful against Hillary Clinton and her secret-keeping practices that they went ahead and let her have it.
Is that right?
Well, I didn't know for a fact, but I had a strong indication because they had some motives to ensure that she didn't get into office.
I mean, for example, NSA by itself had a motive because she had compromised on her website or server evidence of Gamma material out of NSA.
That's the most sensitive material at NSA, and it's basically the last time Gamma was compromised was in 1971 by Jack Anderson in the Washington Post.
He compromised Gamma Guppy.
You can Google this.
Your listeners can Google this on the web and read about it, but it was, in fact, the point that he compromised that we were reading the encrypted telephones in the limousines of the Soviet leadership in Moscow so that we had an insight into the Soviet leadership and what they were saying to one another.
And, of course, when that was exposed, of course, it went away as a source.
And this is a similar kind of thing.
It's like exposing the Enigma, the fact that we were reading Enigma during World War II, except we're not at war.
So, you know, that's the point.
It's a very serious thing.
It gets to imply that this is the system we're reading, and it also implies when you look at it hard, it says here's how, or at least the level of ability to solve encryption programs that we've got, at least at this level, you know.
So it gives them some idea of our technical capability and, in fact, in reality, our practical capability.
So that's a very serious thing.
And now the other part of that, though, is, and I'm not one to usually take Hillary Clinton's side too much, but do you really think that NSA would do that, that higher-level people or just some disgruntled guy would be so vengeful that they would leak on a major party candidate for the presidency of the United States as revenge for being that sloppy with their secrets?
Well, you know, I look at it this way.
These people have done some very serious things, including fabricating evidence against people in courts of law.
I mean, this is crazy.
They'll do, I mean, I don't put anything beyond them.
This is the intelligence community trying to ensure that they have some reasonable control of our government.
I mean, that's what intelligence agencies are all about.
And it's a very dangerous thing.
All right, now, so let me ask you this.
Out of all the Snowden leaks, and there are a lot, and I admit I have not been able to go through all the articles.
They have them cataloged over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation page.
But, you know, and I think there's been allusions to this, but I don't think I've ever read or seen a real straight answer or kind of final definite answer to the question of, does the NSA save the audio of our phone calls?
Because after all, they're just little MP3 files, or I'm sure they can zip them up a lot tighter than that even.
And sometimes it seems like they indicate that, yes, they actually can go back and listen to the archives of all of our phone calls, not just see the records of who called who.
Yes, I think there is some kind of, I mean, Tim Clemente, the FBI, ex-FBI agent, hinted at that after the Boston Marathon bombing.
When he referred to the FBI and the intelligence community having the ability to go back and listen to the phone call conversation between one of the Tsarnaev brothers and his wife, he said that publicly on CNN.
So that was just one indication of it.
But the other point is to go look at the, if you have your listeners, Google NSA Space Fairview.
That's the main program for a collection of data inside the United States, and you'll see all the tap points that they have, about 100 tap points inside the United States distributed with the population.
And that slide, though, is dated in 2004.
So that was the level of the intrusion domestically in 2004, and it's gotten much worse since then.
But it gives you the direct idea that they're collecting voiceover IP and all kinds of communications of U.S. citizens, not just emails, but also phone calls.
And also you can listen to the testimony of Adrian Kinney and David Murphy Falk, who were transcribers at Fort Gordon, Georgia, who would do the transcriptions of the phone call recordings.
And they talked about doing it, transcribing phone calls between U.S. citizens with no warrants.
And this was starting in 2002, I believe it was, with Adrian Kinney, and then David Murphy Falk took that through 2007, and basically the Fairview program is the generating principle for that.
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All right, and now I could have mentioned in your introduction there, I was just reminded, looking at my notes here, that I saw Oliver Stone recently say that the Nicolas Cage character in his movie Snowden was based on you, and there's an allusion in there.
I believe they have a part of the dialogue where he talks about thin thread and stellar wind, and this was your project, thin thread.
Is that right?
Yes, yeah.
And can you describe that for us, exactly how that was supposed to work?
Well, yeah, it was actually a functioning program at three different sites 24 hours a day.
It wasn't planning.
It was actually executing.
And it was a targeted-based program that looked at the entire flow of data across fiber lines and said, here's what's important data out of that.
And it used the metadata to actually extract information that was relevant based on, you know, basically three logical approaches, a deductive, inductive, and abductive approach.
Deductive means where you put together the social networks and you are in the social network of a known bad guy, why your data would be pulled.
Or if you were in a zone of suspicion around it that is in close proximity to that social network so that there was likelihood that you were involved or could be, that meant that we had probable cause to look at you, and so therefore we would look at you that way.
And then the other one was inductive so that if you were looking at websites that would be like pedophilia websites with pedophilia material on it or websites that were advocating jihad or things of that nature, or if you were using a satellite phone that geopositioned in the mountains of Afghanistan or in the jungles of Peru, you know, you might be in drugs there or you might be a terrorist.
So we had probable cause to look at you, and then that would be the criteria that they would use to select the information out of that flow across the fiber lines.
And the abductive one was a little more abstract, but it had basically looking at distribution, world distribution, and saying things like, if your social network is distributed primarily across the terrorist-associated countries, then we should look at your network to make sure that you're not involved in terrorism, that's all.
And those kinds of things would have gotten every terrorist since 9-11 and everyone before it.
That's the whole point.
That was the targeted approach we used.
I mean, after all, just look at what's happened.
If you look at what they've been doing...
Well, when did they cancel it?
Just before 9-11.
But the whole point is that since 9-11, all these attacks, when they find out who it is, they say, oh, yeah, we knew who they were.
They were bad guys, they were associated with these terrorist groups or they were doing something like that.
But in some way they were connected and known, but not followed sufficiently to be able to stop or see the threat coming or stop it before people got killed.
And so that was the outcome of that whole procedure.
Bulk acquisition just dumps too much data on people and they can't see the threats coming.
So that means that people die first and then you go in and use all the data you have on somebody.
And isn't it nice that you have data on everybody in the planet and you can follow and trace them, but that's after the fact.
So my point is that bulk collection by the U.S. and everybody else and the Five Eyes and everybody simply means that people die first and then you clean up the mess afterward.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, just in parentheses here, if it is the NSA putting interference on the line, guys, please be polite and knock it off.
Just ask them if you can hear me now.
I'm pretty sure they can hear us both.
All right.
Now, so you know what?
Let me ask you about the wars.
And I know that you quit in 2001, I guess, over this.
You can talk about that if you want.
But next I would ask you about just your opinion, such as it is from the outside of what you think of the reporting about how we wage these drone wars and special forces wars in places like Afghanistan, where it basically all comes down to NSA cell phone data.
And you put that in the hands of somebody like Mike Flynn and he starts killing people.
And I just wonder what you think of that sort of way of going about tracking down enemies and how effective or efficient that might be.
Well, first of all, I call it random slaughter, simply because they don't verify the target before they shoot.
And then they have what's called a double-tap procedure, meaning that once they shoot the target, they wait for other people to come in and try to assist them in some way or the other, and then they shoot them too.
You could see that as an example in the gunship murders in Baghdad, a collateral murder movie that was released by Chelsea Manning, where the gunship shot people, two reporters and about eight other people, I think, and then waited for others to come in and then shot them too.
That's that double-tap principle.
And that's just random slaughter.
First of all, they didn't verify that it really was a target, and they don't do that anyway.
They just do it based on the telephone and GPS of it.
So that means that they don't verify who's on the phone at the time that they shoot.
And that's a big mistake because you end up killing people like in wedding parties and things like that.
The whole idea is—I mean, that was the first rule of hunting when I was a kid.
The first rule of hunting was you make sure of your target before you shoot, and they don't seem to be doing that.
And it's just—so that's why I basically call it all random slaughter.
Well, you know, what's interesting about it, though, is it's all so very high-tech, and you could probably imagine the ABC primetime TV show about it and how sophisticated all the lights on the board look and this kind of thing.
So it makes it seem smart.
It makes it seem scientific and mathematical and provable.
But really all it is is a bunch of really sloppy guessing and even outsourcing the guessing to a computer that doesn't really know anything at all.
All it knows is this phone at some point had some contact with that phone, which is not even information.
That's just data.
That doesn't even necessarily mean anything.
And it doesn't mean that whoever was on the phone to begin with is still there.
That's the point.
And that's why they're not verifying the targets.
And that's really the big problem that they have.
And also the double tap is a problem.
After all, if you were driving down like the one fellow in Baghdad was with his two kids in the back driving down the road and saw somebody laying on the sidewalk bleeding, wouldn't you stop to maybe help?
Pick them up and take them into your car and take them to the hospital?
Wouldn't you do that?
And then because of that, you get killed.
I mean, that's insane.
Well, in fact, the double tap is actually, according to the U.S., correctly, according to the U.S. government, that's the hallmark of Al Qaeda terrorists and other people like that.
In fact, even Eric Rudolph, the Olympic bomber of 1996 and the abortion clinic bomber, that was his tactic, the double tap, where you go ahead and get the ambulance driver and the firefighter who come to try to save the day and maim them, too.
And that's American policy.
I'm not sure who's mimicking who there.
Well, I guess we learn from our enemies, right?
Now we adopt their procedures.
All right, now, so there were a couple of developments after the Snowden revelations.
The court ruled that some of this was unconstitutional.
The Congress, I guess, changed the law somewhat.
They forced a sunset.
Rand Paul actually forced a sunset on part of the Patriot Act.
But then they passed a new thing.
And I wonder, is that all just window dressing?
Has there been any qualitative rollback of NSA surveillance of American citizens since the Snowden revelations?
As near as I can tell, no, there hasn't been any.
And it's all being done under Executive Order 12333, Section 23C.
That's the justification they're using to do all the collection of U.S. citizens.
It basically says, if you're collecting a 64-fiber line, like a 10-gigabit line, and you're going into that line to find it, your intention is to find a dope dealer or some terrorist.
Then you have to collect the whole line.
You're allowed to store it and keep it and just then search it to find that terrorist or whatever.
But in the meantime, that means that all the data on U.S. citizens, everything they've done is stored there.
And every program search that NSA runs or the FBI, which has direct access to that data, by the way, with no attempted oversight, nobody's talking about that.
Also, the Drug Enforcement Administration has that, too.
But the point is, every program that anybody runs against that data goes against everybody's information every time they run that search program.
You know what?
I hate to say this, but I could just hear average people saying, this is crazy.
This guy, whoever he is, is paranoid, and it couldn't possibly be that bad because or else I might have to do something about it or something.
This just couldn't be true.
How could they even have the space on the disks to save all of this information on all 300 million of us and for the rest of the world, too?
Well, that's why they built the big facility, 1 million-square-foot storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah.
And now that's going to be full here in a few years, so they're building a new one over here on Fort Meade that's 2.8 million square feet.
So you see, the point is, if you're collecting everything, it's an ever-increasing amount year after year, so you have to keep building bigger and bigger storage facilities.
And one of the ways they can do things is pack things down but also do transcriptions of things using machine, like Dragon-type software they can use against phone calls, with the understanding that there's probably going to be an 80% correct translation and you'll have a lot of errors in there, but if you then search that with software looking for certain phrases or words and you find a certain level of them, that raises the threshold to the point where you want to have some person transcribe the whole call.
And so that once they do that, they can reinstall the digital and really get packed down.
And it gets down to text then.
I'm sorry, William, the interference on the line is getting so bad right now.
Any idea what it might be?
I mean, it really does sound like it's local to your telephone, to be honest.
Does it?
Well, it might be my computer.
I mean, no, I'm hacked.
Is that helping at all?
Yeah, no, no, it's really bad.
It's getting worse now.
All right, well, you know what?
I think we better go ahead and call it quits here, but hopefully we can make different arrangements and do another interview sometime soon.
Okay, sure.
All right, well, thank you very much.
It's been really great and I really appreciate you.
You're welcome.
Take care.
You too.
All right, y'all, that is William Binney.
He was at the NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the Technical Director of World Military and Geopolitical Analysis and Reporting.
He created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.
That's according to his bio here at ConsortiumNews.com.
The dubious case on Russian hacking.
The dubious case on Russian hacking.
And then, by the way, check out these old articles by James Bamford that talk about William Binney as well.
One of them is at WIRED called The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center.
Watch what you say.
And this one is at the New York Review of Books.
They know much more than you think.
And, yeah, thanks again.
ScottHorton.org, LibertarianInstitute.org, slash Scott Horton Show, Center for the RSS Feed and all that.
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Thanks, you guys.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
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Hey, Al, check it out.
Me, Sheldon Richman, and Jarrah LaBelle, three-fourths of the Libertarian Institute, we're all going to the Students for Liberty thing in Washington, D.C., February the 17th through 19th.
So I guess that's Friday through Sunday there.
And it's a whole big thing.
I gave a talk there about three years ago, I guess, at the Future Freedom Foundation thing.
We may or may not have our own kind of breakout session to give talks and all that, but we're definitely going to have a table and we're definitely going to be around.
So if you guys are going to be anywhere near D.C., then me and the boys from the Libertarian Institute would love to meet you.
So come on out.
And, by the way, if you'd like to help support this expensive effort to get the three of us to Washington, D.C., in order to make this appearance at this conference, well, then, you know, your help is always welcome at libertarianinstitute.org.
Thanks very much.