DailyCaller | Daily Caller: What system are we talking about?
Binney: It used to be called Stellar Wind and now
it’s called Ragtime. Ragtime P is the domestic stuff. That may be a
reference to the Patriot Act Section 215.
Daily Caller: So what are they doing with all of
this information? If they can’t stop the Boston marathon bombing, what
are they doing with it?
Binney: Well again, they’re putting an extra burden
on all of their analysts. It’s not something that’s going to help them;
it’s something that’s burdensome. There are ways to do the analysis
properly, but they don’t really want the solution because if they got
it, they wouldn’t be able to keep demanding the money to solve it. I
call it their business statement, “Keep the problems going so the money
keeps flowing.” It’s all about contracts and money.
Daily Caller: But isn’t data collection getting
easier and processing speeds getting faster and data collection cheaper?
Isn’t the falling price one of the reasons they can collect data at
this massive level?
Binney: Yes, but that’s not the issue. The issue is,
can you figure out what’s important in it? And figure out the
intentions and capabilities of the people you’re monitoring? And they
are in no way prepared to do that, because that takes analysis. That’s
what the big data initiative
was all about out of the White House last year. It was to try to get
algorithms and figure out what’s important and tell the people what’s
important so that they can find things. The probability of them finding
what’s really there is low.
Daily Caller: Well if that’s where the priorities
are, should we ask if the goal really is to prevent terrorism? Or is it
to know as much as possible about Americans — at an individual level and
a society level?
Binney: That’s my point. When you ask how much
damage these leaks have done to our capability, they’ve actually done
absolutely nothing. The terrorists were monitoring all of this
information anyway, so they had a pretty good idea of what was being
collected. So, who are we keeping this from? It’s not the terrorists. We
are really keeping it from the American public. Because that’s who
they’re collecting data about. And that’s who they’re keeping it secret
from. The terrorists already knew all this stuff.
Daily Caller: How searchable is this material? Let’s say I want to use NSA material against the tea party. Could I do that?
Binney: That would be very simple. You just take the
key point “tea party,” plug it in the graph, and you get everybody.
That smacks of what they’re doing.
I was listening to the testimony of one of the tea party people
to Congress, one of the people being abused by the IRS, and she said
she was asked, “What is my relationship with this person?” And the IRS
agent gave her the name. Well, the question becomes, how did the IRS
know the relationship with that person? And one way they’d know that is
from this program, for sure.
So the question is, is someone in the White House, in the line of
command, using any access to that program to find a tea party initiative
or tea party people trying to get tax exempt status so they can pass
them along for the IRS to target? That’s a question I think the
government needs to answer, and prove that that’s not happening.
But when have they ever told you the truth from 2001 on? They only
tell you the truth when they’ve been caught or exposed. And then, they
only tell you what’s been exposed. They never go any further. Then, they
wait for the next exposure to come out. How can you believe it?
0 comments:
Post a Comment