Panopticon of global surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

NSA Whistleblower William Binney Tells All

[While more pro-NSA than Snowden and being asked questions by a right-wing lawyer, but still has interesting things to say....] January 10, 2014




"Where I see it going is toward a totalitarian state,"says WilliamBinney. "You've got the NSA doing all this collecting ofmaterial on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo,the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did."
Binney is talking about the collection of various forms ofpersonal data on American citizens by the National SecurityAgency (NSA), where he worked for 30 years beforequitting in 2001 from his high-placed post as technical leader forintelligence. A registered Republican for most of his life, Binneyvolunteered for military service during the Vietnam War, which ledto his being hired by the NSA in the early '70s.
In 2002 - long before the revelations of Edward Snowdenrocked the world - Binney and several former colleagues went toCongress and the Department of Defense, asking that the NSA beinvestigated. Not only was the super-secretive agency wastingtaxpayer dollars on ineffective programs, they argued, it wasbroadly violating constitutional guarantees to privacy and dueprocess.
The government didn't just turn a blind eye to theagency's activities; it later accused the whistleblowers of leakingstate secrets. A federal investigation of Binney - including an FBIsearch and seizure of his home and office computers that destroyedhis consulting business - exonerated him on all charges.
"We are a clear example that [going through] the properchannels doesn't work," says Binney,