So I guess the lesson is that if you want to have a bigger impact when you blow the whistle, you need hard documentation and evidence. You can't just tell the world there is a bad thing happening. You need to show them the paper that proves it.
Many of you have probably seen this, but I highly recommend the PBS Frontline documentary, <i>United States of Secrets</i>: <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec...</a><p>Binney, along with the other NSA whistleblowers, are interviewed at length for the film.<p>That, and <i>Citizenfour</i> were, for me, the most intriguing documentaries about these issues.
A year before Snowden took off to Hong Kong, William Binney was on a panel at Def Con where NSA surveillance was talked about at length, worth a watch - www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqIz-RNUL1g<p>A lot of the stuff which was later leaked by Snowden is discussed here, nice to see Binney vindicated.<p>Interestingly, the NSA facility in Hawaii where Snowden was working at the time is mentioned by name.<p>I often wonder if this Defcon talk inspired him to do what he did.
Word abut the surveillance programs (dubbed Echelon) was common-sense on #phrack as far as 2002. We have had American and German Intelligence agencies capture traffic at the Slovenian Internet Exchange at least since 2007. When the affair broke out, Germans stated that they will cease cooperation with the Slovenian Intelligence Agency, and the entire thing was swept under the rug.<p>Unfortunately, whistleblowing really takes substantial evidence, and that's what Snowden provided.
"Binney doesn’t see much distinction between the Bush and Obama administrations when it comes to intelligence policy."<p>This has been such a disappointment for me. I had such high hopes for Obama. :(
Yesterday Thomas Drake spoke on this topic: <a href="https://voicerepublic.com/talks/the-digital-surveillance-state" rel="nofollow">https://voicerepublic.com/talks/the-digital-surveillance-sta...</a>
Hell, Drake warned back in 2005, and Congress rushed back into session to make it legal. Drake managed to do it without passing reams of classified data to Wikileaks, too...
So Bill Binney is often described as a legendary mathematician inside the NSA, have anyone ever had a technical discussion with him about things like ECC?
> “I’m out here exposing their underwear,” he said.<p>But with no proof other than his word. It's easy to ignore one disgruntled former employee's lunatic ramblings. Not so easy with actual documents supporting their claims.
Well, if we want to go that route, then one could say Frank Church was aware (and his committee made the results public) some 38 years or so before Snowden.
I lost trust in anything Binney says when I saw that he did an interview with Alex Jones on Infowars. You need to completely separate yourself from that garbage if you want people to take you seriously.
The issue at hand here is how do we prevent terrorist attacks from within our own borders without mass surveillance of the population and without the profiling of certain populations (ie middle easterners, northern africans, etc)??<p>I don't think we need mass surveillance since it creates more useless data and not enough indicators someone is planning something. So where is the line drawn between mass surveillance and no surveillance? How do we keep this country safe, without infringing people's freedom?