Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for Drake, he was facing federal charges and nobody seemed to notice. 89% of federal cases are plead before trial and of those that go to trial 90%+ are found guilty, that is how much the odds were stacked against him. He got nowhere near the attention that he deserves[1[]

William Binney is an absolute hero. I have absorbed everything this guy has ever said or done[2]. He was not only employed at the NSA, but he was a director who designed the software that is being used right now to dragnet all the communications. It is difficult for anybody - congressman, president, republican voter, etc. - to argue that what the NSA is doing is fine when the guy with all the technical details and design of the program says it isn't. That he is against what is happening is a big deal and needs more attention.

This video is on the front page of USA Today, so these guys and the topic is starting to get the recognition they deserve.

[1] The New Yorker did a great feature on him called 'The Secret Sharer' - good for background http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

[2] Search YouTube for Binney - he was the keynote speaker at the 2600 HOPE conference last year - a presentation that everybody must watch. Apparently Snowden decided to go the route he did after watching Binney in Laura Poitras' "The Program" for the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... Potras is the same person who was the first journalist Snowden contacted.

Binney didn't design the system that's currently being used, and that's his whole point. He designed a cheap way to do what the current program does but that would protect people's privacy (in part by not storing all the data that it filters). His point is that the NSA spent billions on a dragnet system that violates privacy and isn't even able to catch terrorists as well as the privacy-respecting system he designed internally for dirt cheap.

In one of his interviews[1] he mentions that after he left and TrailBlazer was abandoned the NSA took what he built in ThinThread but removed the privacy shields he had in place that would encrypt US communications.

The rest of the platform is ThinThread (which was a lot cheaper than the failed TrailBlazer project).

Also interesting that a lot of the NSA platform is open source. OpenCloud for server management and Hadoop for distributed computing.

[1] I can't recall which one, in his keynote at HOPE he does make another reference to the crypto privacy shield being removed

He mentions that here, I believe: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...

The biggest impact I came away from that 2600 HOPE youtube vid was Binney's superiors told him to halt his Thinthread so they had time to wrap alot more budget around it so their revolving door out into commercial intel may more heavily wet their beaks. Being presumably professional mathematicians who should understand the egregious criminality of stealing public trust and funds, this was most particularly egregious. As all this was, and remains classified so this abuse will continue unchecked and unbounded.

This was a great talk by Binney, Drake and Jesselyn Radack, on whistleblowing and surveillance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDM3MqHln8U

A few seconds where he talks about the metadata: http://youtu.be/XDM3MqHln8U?t=1h18m52s

His talk at HOPE 9 was great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI

I completely agree, especially about Binney. I've been following what the NSA's doing since the Room 641A scandal broke. I recently wrote a paper on the NSA versus privacy, and as usual, what I found during the course of my research pretty much blew my mind. Binney is a hero as much as Snowden is, as are Drake and Weibe. I've used every opportunity to post this short that the NYT did on Binney, and everyone who's interested in this (and especially everyone who's not) should watch it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...

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