[tptacek]

Bill Binney's complaint about the NSA was that they were wasting money on a system that did a poorer job of handling US-centric SIGINT. He was not himself opposed to collecting intelligence on US citizens; his own "ThinThread" system was designed to do exactly that, but with better technical controls over who could view the data.

The problem with the NSA's programs isn't that they lack technical controls; it's that they're allowed to supervise their own collection efforts and build their own controls in the first place.

The notion that Binney is a staunch opponent of PRISM-style surveillance is revisionist.

[krek]

> his own "ThinThread" system was designed to do exactly that, but with better technical controls over who could view the data.

That's plainly false. His system was specifically designed to throw-out private data, that is, never to store it. There is no data to view if it's not stored. See his 29C3 technical talk where he goes over it. [1]

>The notion that Binney is a staunch opponent of PRISM-style surveillance is revisionist.

This ignores nearly everything Binney has actually said when asked about why he came forward to blow the whistle on NSA's spying activities. Also, see above.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDM3MqHln8U

[tptacek]

New Yorker:

Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S. This was a big problem: federal law forbade the monitoring of domestic communications without a court warrant. And a warrant couldn’t be issued without probable cause and a known suspect. In order to comply with the law, Binney installed privacy controls and added an “anonymizing feature,” so that all American communications would be encrypted until a warrant was issued. The system would indicate when a pattern looked suspicious enough to justify a warrant.

But this was before 9/11, and the N.S.A.’s lawyers deemed ThinThread too invasive of Americans’ privacy. In addition, concerns were raised about whether the system would function on a huge scale, although preliminary tests had suggested that it would. In the fall of 2000, [General Michael Hayden, the director of the N.S.A.,] decided not to use ThinThread, largely because of his legal advisers’ concerns… .

I'm sure it discarded some things, but the basic technical control that ThinThread appeared to have that Trailblazer (and PRISM) lacked is cryptographic authorization controls.

[krek]

The New Yorker's Mayer is paraphrasing an anonymous source, which she then counter-points in the very next sentence of the article with a quote from NSA historian Matthew Aid, who says: “The resistance to ThinThread was just standard bureaucratic politics. ThinThread was small, cost-effective, easy to understand, and protected the identity of Americans.” [1]

That's what Binney and Drake have said all along.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

[tptacek]

I think if you read my comments you'll find that I'm not denying that ThinThread had a goal of protecting the identity of Americans. The problem is that the collections programs underpinning PRISM and XKEYSCORE also have that goal. The problem isn't the technology.