William Binney is one of
the highest-level
whistleblowers to ever
emerge from the NSA. He was a
leading code-breaker against
the Soviet Union during the
Cold War but resigned soon
after September 11, disgusted
by Washington’s move towards
mass surveillance.
On 5 July he spoke at a
conference in London
organised by the Centre for
Investigative Journalism and
revealed the extent of the
surveillance programs
unleashed by the Bush and
Obama administrations.
“At least 80% of fibre-optic
cables globally go via the US”,
Binney said. “This is no
accident and allows the US to
view all communication coming
in. At least 80% of all audio
calls, not just metadata, are
recorded and stored in the US.
The NSA lies about what it
stores.”
The NSA will soon be able to
collect 966 exabytes a year, the
total of internet traffic
annually. Former Google head
Eric Schmidt once argued that
the entire amount of knowledge
from the beginning of
humankind until 2003 amount
to only five exabytes.
Binney, who featured in a 2012
short film by Oscar-nominated
US film-maker Laura Poitras,
described a future where
surveillance is ubiquitous and
government intrusion
unlimited.
“The ultimate goal of the NSA
is total population control”,
Binney said, “but I’m a little
optimistic with some recent
Supreme Court decisions, such
as law enforcement mostly now
needing a warrant before
searching a smartphone.”
He praised the revelations and
bravery of former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden
and told me that he had
indirect contact with a number
of other NSA employees who
felt disgusted with the agency’s
work. They’re keen to speak
out but fear retribution and
exile, not unlike Snowden
himself, who is likely to remain
there for some time .
Unlike Snowden, Binney didn’t
take any documents with him
when he left the NSA. He now
says that hard evidence of
illegal spying would have been
invaluable. The latest Snowden
leaks, featured in the
Washington Post, detail private
conversations of average
Americans with no connection
to extremism.
It shows that the NSA is not
just pursuing terrorism, as it
claims, but ordinary citizens
going about their daily
communications. “The NSA is
mass-collecting on everyone”,
Binney said, “and it’s said to
be about terrorism but inside
the US it has stopped zero
attacks.”
The lack of official oversight is
one of Binney’s key concerns,
particularly of the secret
Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (Fisa),
which is held out by NSA
defenders as a sign of the
surveillance scheme's
constitutionality.
“The Fisa court has only the
government’s point of view”,
he argued. “There are no other
views for the judges to
consider. There have been at
least 15-20 trillion
constitutional violations for US
domestic audiences and you
can double that globally.”
A Fisa court in 2010 allowed
the NSA to spy on 193
countries around the world,
plus the World Bank, though
there’s evidence that even the
nations the US isn’t supposed
to monitor – Five Eyes allies
Britain, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand – aren’t immune
from being spied on. It’s why
encryption is today so essential
to transmit information safely.
Binney recently told the
German NSA inquiry committee
that his former employer had a
“totalitarian mentality” that
was the "greatest threat" to US
society since that country’s US
Civil War in the 19th century.
Despite this remarkable power,
Binney still mocked the NSA’s
failures, including missing this
year’s Russian intervention in
Ukraine and the Islamic State’s
take-over of Iraq.
The era of mass surveillance
has gone from the fringes of
public debate to the
mainstream, where it belongs.
The Pew Research Centre
released a report this month,
Digital Life in 2025 , that
predicted worsening state
control and censorship,
reduced public trust, and
increased commercialisation of
every aspect of web culture.
It’s not just internet experts
warning about the internet’s
colonisation by state and
corporate power. One of
Europe’s leading web creators,
Lena Thiele, presented her
stunning series Netwars in
London on the threat of cyber
warfare. She showed how easy
it is for governments and
corporations to capture our
personal information without
us even realising.
Thiele said that the US budget
for cyber security was US$67
billion in 2013 and will double
by 2016. Much of this money is
wasted and doesn't protect
online infrastructure. This fact
doesn’t worry the
multinationals making a killing
from the gross exaggeration of
fear that permeates the public
domain.
Wikileaks understands this
reality better than most.
Founder Julian Assange and
investigative editor Sarah
Harrison both remain in legal
limbo. I spent time with
Assange in his current home at
the Ecuadorian embassy in
London last week, where he
continues to work, release
leaks, and fight various legal
battles. He hopes to resolve his
predicament soon.
At the Centre for Investigative
Journalism conference,
Harrison stressed the
importance of journalists who
work with technologists to best
report the NSA stories. “It’s no
accident”, she said, “that some
of the best stories on the NSA
are in Germany, where there’s
technical assistance from
people like Jacob Appelbaum.”
A core Wikileaks belief, she
stressed, is releasing all
documents in their entirety,
something the group criticised
the news site The Intercept for
not doing on a recent story.
“The full archive should
always be published”, Harrison
said.
With 8m documents on its
website after years of leaking,
the importance of publishing
and maintaining source
documents for the media,
general public and court cases
can’t be under-estimated. “I
see Wikileaks as a library”,
Assange said. “We’re the
librarians who can’t say no.”
With evidence that there could
be a second NSA leaker, the
time for more aggressive
reporting is now. As Binney
said: “I call people who are
covering up NSA crimes
traitors”.

by Anthony Loewenstein

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