The interview he's talking about [1] was posted here [2] and it really is extraordinary. I highly recommend watching all the videos—unfortunately, they carved it into pieces and you have to scroll down the page to get at them. But it's worth it. The transcript doesn't convey how dramatic the discussion was, or capture William Binney's muttered asides ("including content! including content!") or show the meaningful expressions on their faces, or how the others react as each one is talking. I found the whole thing riveting and I'm still surprised that USA Today put it together. Having all four of them around a table created something entirely more compelling than one-on-one interviews.<p>Edit: also, the transcript is incomplete and leaves out some of the best parts, such as Binney's story of how he called "Tom" (i.e. Drake, whose phone he knew was being tapped) to let the government know that he had evidence of malicious prosecution. Plus the endearing smile on his face as he points out that his prosecution was dropped after that.<p>USA Today should put up the whole unbroken discussion. Apart from the obviously important content and the obvious authoritativeness of the speakers, it's just a great piece of television—and it's not even television. It puts actual news TV to shame.<p>1. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/" rel="nofollow">http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...</a><p>2. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891101" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891101</a>
Interesting that no one seems to be talking about what a treasure-trove such a storage system would be for organized crime and foreign intelligence services (such as China). Imagine if someone could compromise it and get to the same data. Doesn't seem all that far-fetched.
"The idea that we have robust checks and balances is a myth."<p>Albeit to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I was supposing: you cannot have such a huge organization working "properly" on a day-to-day threat-response basis without some "elastic" access control. Even less if you are a contractor like B-A-H.<p>This, in a private entity, is less dangerous. You can have a lot of sysadmins with some access to Google's data because the data is properly partitioned and especially because there are no "targets". When each individual is a target, it is too hard to get proper partitioning.<p>Also, Google's employees have little to no incentives to make those data "public." And I guess direct access to the real emails is pretty hard: Google's money is not there but in the analytics. So internal anonymization may be not only performed but even easy to do. And this is good for Google & its clients.
Interesting video with Binney who says they would've stopped every terrorist attack, including 9/11 had they used a simple technique him and his team outlined which he referred to as a "two degree principle".<p>He said its a myth they need all the data to make the connections in order to catch terrorists.<p><a href="http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2475191994001/former-nsa-employee-on-dangerous-information/" rel="nofollow">http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2475191994001/former-nsa-empl...</a><p>He starts talking about at the 2:57 mark.
It's been purported here that the media is coloring its reporting to paint Snowden in a bad light. But when the bias favors Snowden, everyone looks the other way. For instance, they conveniently left out any mention of this quote by Binney:<p>"But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.<p>"So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor."
Odd they referred to these other whistleblowers as "Former NSA Employees" in the headline. It seems disingenuous to leave that out of the headline, but then I suppose "Fellow NSA Whistleblowers Praise Newest Whistleblower..." probably doesn't sound as interesting.
I would find it really interesting if some employees at companies like Google, Microsoft, etc would come forward and corroborate Snowden's claims as well. At some point, SOME engineering work was involved on their side to make it happen, and there is likely documentation. I would love to see design documentation on how the collection systems work so we can confirm exactly the government has automated access to.