jackovesk
17th September 2012, 22:32
The 'Program'
Interviewing William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency, is Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has been nominated for an Academy Award and whose work was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America. This Op-Doc is adapted from a work in progress to be released in 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r9-3K3rkPRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r9-3K3rkPRE
The Program: The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
By LAURA POITRAS
Published: August 22, 2012
It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”
Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.
“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.
The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=0
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR7m2_XlFy8yNB3UAn8QleMqx691A5v4 Fb7T57wRd3Q26xxNQue
NSA Whistleblower
Date: 09-16-12
Host: George Knapp
Guests: Thomas Drake
George Knapp was joined by former senior executive of the NSA, Thomas Drake (related article), who discussed his decision to blow the whistle on the agency's Trailblazer Project and illegal spying operations, which led to his being charged under the Espionage Act. He explained that the Trailblazer Project was designed by the NSA to respond to the massive amount of new data being generated by the advent of the digital age. According to Drake, Trailblazer was launched in the Spring of 2000 and, following 9/11, generated billions of dollars for NSA contractors because it was seen as the "flagship program" for harnessing intelligence information, despite having numerous faults. Chillingly, he observed that corporate interests, which worked with the NSA, viewed 9/11 as a "gift," since they could reap massive profits from the War on Terror.
Drake revealed that his concerns with the NSA's conduct began when the agency rejected his proposal for an alternative spying program, known as "ThinThread," which was designed to safeguard the privacy of US citizens. Following that, his colleagues began to question why they were being tasked with spying on Americans using a "super top secret" program called "Stellar Wind." Drake's attempts to determine the legality of the program were thwarted by the NSA and he was subsequently told that the spying had been approved "by the White House" and to stop asking questions about it. In light of these unconstitutional actions, Drake served as a witness to Congressional and DoD investigations into NSA malfeasance, which led to his responsibilities with the agency being dramatically curtailed.
Following a revelatory New York Times article on NSA spying, the agency launched a massive investigation into finding the sources behind the story. Since Drake was privy to the secrets revealed in the article, he became a suspect and the target of intense surveillance "on a scale that I would never want any American to experience." Faced with no other outlet to hold the government accountable, Drake decided to contact the media with his story. This decision resulted in the government indicting him for ten crimes, including the felonious mishandling of classified documents. "I had become an enemy of the state," he declared, noting that the government planned to make an example of him to stop future whistleblowers. Ultimately, the case against Drake "collapsed under the weight of truth," when the government dropped all 10 counts and he accepted a plea deal for a "very minor misdemeanor."
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/09/16
Coast To Coast AM - NSA Whistleblower - 09-16-2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWV1DYS-Fxc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWV1DYS-Fxc
http://www.allsaintscosmedical.com.au/images/media/60_mins.jpg
U.S. v. Whistleblower Tom Drake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0hO5fTGwPY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0hO5fTGwPY
Interview w/ Thomas Drake, after US v Pfc. Manning July 19, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkOOVEGz50w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkOOVEGz50w
http://www.ninaburleigh.com/maglogos/newykrlogo.gif
The Secret Sharer
Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
May 23, 2011
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/cimages/var/ezwebin_site/storage/images/coast-to-coast/repository/carousel/feature_h/546594-654-eng-US/Feature_H.jpg
Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.
On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.
The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose classified information just because you want to.” He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.
Read 'Entire' Article here...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
:tea:
Interviewing William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency, is Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has been nominated for an Academy Award and whose work was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America. This Op-Doc is adapted from a work in progress to be released in 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r9-3K3rkPRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r9-3K3rkPRE
The Program: The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
By LAURA POITRAS
Published: August 22, 2012
It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”
Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.
“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.
The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=0
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR7m2_XlFy8yNB3UAn8QleMqx691A5v4 Fb7T57wRd3Q26xxNQue
NSA Whistleblower
Date: 09-16-12
Host: George Knapp
Guests: Thomas Drake
George Knapp was joined by former senior executive of the NSA, Thomas Drake (related article), who discussed his decision to blow the whistle on the agency's Trailblazer Project and illegal spying operations, which led to his being charged under the Espionage Act. He explained that the Trailblazer Project was designed by the NSA to respond to the massive amount of new data being generated by the advent of the digital age. According to Drake, Trailblazer was launched in the Spring of 2000 and, following 9/11, generated billions of dollars for NSA contractors because it was seen as the "flagship program" for harnessing intelligence information, despite having numerous faults. Chillingly, he observed that corporate interests, which worked with the NSA, viewed 9/11 as a "gift," since they could reap massive profits from the War on Terror.
Drake revealed that his concerns with the NSA's conduct began when the agency rejected his proposal for an alternative spying program, known as "ThinThread," which was designed to safeguard the privacy of US citizens. Following that, his colleagues began to question why they were being tasked with spying on Americans using a "super top secret" program called "Stellar Wind." Drake's attempts to determine the legality of the program were thwarted by the NSA and he was subsequently told that the spying had been approved "by the White House" and to stop asking questions about it. In light of these unconstitutional actions, Drake served as a witness to Congressional and DoD investigations into NSA malfeasance, which led to his responsibilities with the agency being dramatically curtailed.
Following a revelatory New York Times article on NSA spying, the agency launched a massive investigation into finding the sources behind the story. Since Drake was privy to the secrets revealed in the article, he became a suspect and the target of intense surveillance "on a scale that I would never want any American to experience." Faced with no other outlet to hold the government accountable, Drake decided to contact the media with his story. This decision resulted in the government indicting him for ten crimes, including the felonious mishandling of classified documents. "I had become an enemy of the state," he declared, noting that the government planned to make an example of him to stop future whistleblowers. Ultimately, the case against Drake "collapsed under the weight of truth," when the government dropped all 10 counts and he accepted a plea deal for a "very minor misdemeanor."
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/09/16
Coast To Coast AM - NSA Whistleblower - 09-16-2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWV1DYS-Fxc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWV1DYS-Fxc
http://www.allsaintscosmedical.com.au/images/media/60_mins.jpg
U.S. v. Whistleblower Tom Drake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0hO5fTGwPY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0hO5fTGwPY
Interview w/ Thomas Drake, after US v Pfc. Manning July 19, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkOOVEGz50w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkOOVEGz50w
http://www.ninaburleigh.com/maglogos/newykrlogo.gif
The Secret Sharer
Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?
May 23, 2011
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/cimages/var/ezwebin_site/storage/images/coast-to-coast/repository/carousel/feature_h/546594-654-eng-US/Feature_H.jpg
Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.
On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.
The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose classified information just because you want to.” He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.
Read 'Entire' Article here...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
:tea: