Former NSA officer accuses the agency of inability to cope with a huge amount of data from mass surveillance

William Binnie

William Binnie , a former US intelligence officer and exposer of their working methods, at a conference organized by Contrast Security , once again criticized mass surveillance programs . He stated that all these programs were and remain ineffective because they are buried under piles of data and cannot cope with the processing of such volumes of information.

Regarding mass surveillance, ex-US intelligence officer Edward Snowden recently stated that the United States used terrorism as an excuse to spy on lawyers, journalists, the UN children's fund, etc. Snowden also clarified that the US sleet program did not prevent a single terrorist attack and did not even help in their investigation.
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He wrote: “These programs were not related to terrorism. That was an excuse. It was a diplomatic manipulation, economic espionage and social control. It was a force, and there is no doubt that mass surveillance strengthens state power. ”

At the same time, William Binnie, much earlier than Snowden, began to criticize the actions of the US special services (Snowden would later call Binnie one of the instigators of his act). He left his place of work, where he served 30 years, in 2001. At work, he was described as one of the best analysts, a talented mathematician and a specialist in cracking codes. In particular, he specialized in Russia.

After leaving the service, he founded his own private intelligence company, Entity Mapping, LLC. And next year he, together with his colleagues in the company, demanded that the US Department of Defense conduct a comprehensive investigation into the actions of the NSA. In connection with the mass surveillance, he accused the agency of a direct violation of the country's constitution.

Back in 2002, he drew attention to the fact that the NSA spends many millions of dollars on the Trailblazer mass surveillance program, whose effectiveness is close to zero. Binnie himself, as an NSA employee, proposed another project to the competition, ThinThread, which was preferred by Trailblazer.

Based on the information from Binnie, which he shared at the conference, it follows that mass surveillance programs were ineffective in the fight against terrorism because they couldn’t get any benefit from collecting huge amounts of data.

Binnie explains that a fairly simple query to the databases of the NSA from an analyst working there today will return a huge amount of data to him, since the data is collected for about 4 billion people around the world. Binnie even has the courage to argue that all the necessary data that could help to stop the recent terrorist attacks in Boston or in Paris was contained in the databases of the NSA - but could not benefit from them.

According to him, this problem is not only in the NSA, but also in the FBI, the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency, since they all have access to the bases of the NSA.

And if earlier, says Binnie, the NSA collected data on calls — who was calling whom and how long it was communicating — now the agencies are already interested in the contents of these calls. And the constantly repeated mantra “collect all the data” leads only to a constant increase in the budget of these programs.