Former NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney Warns UK Lawmakers Mass Surveillance Will 'Cost Lives In Britain'

from the analysis-paralysis dept

Shortly after the first Snowden documents were leaked, Techdirt wrote about former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney providing some context and history to the newly-revealed information. The central point he made was that trying to collect "haystacks" of data -- mass surveillance -- doesn't work, because intelligence agencies have insufficient resources to search through vast digital stores for the "needles" hidden there. It's a theme Techdirt has returned to a number of times, as has Binney. This week, he was trying to convince a committee of MPs and peers who are scrutinizing the UK's Snooper's Charter Bill that too much data leads to "analysis paralysis," and that targeted surveillance was the way to go. The Guardian reported:

William Binney, a former technical director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), told parliamentarians that the plans for bulk collection of communications data tracking everyone’s internet and phone use are "99% useless" because they would swamp intelligence analysts with too much data.

He said:

This approach costs lives, and has cost lives in Britain because it inundates analysts with too much data. It is 99% useless. Who wants to know everyone who has ever [been] at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts.

He claimed that the attacks carried out on September 11 could have been thwarted if the NSA had adopted the more targeted approach he and his colleagues were advocating:

Sixteen months before the attacks on America, our organisation (Sigint Automation Research Center -- Sarc) was running a new method of finding terrorist networks that worked on focusing on 'smart collection'. Their plan was rejected in favour of a much more expensive plan to collect all communications from everyone.

The US large-scale surveillance plan failed. It had to be abandoned in 2005. Checks afterwards showed that communications from the terrorists had been collected, but not looked at in time.

Binney pointed out that in addition to improving the operational efficiency of intelligence agencies, a targeted approach brought with it other important advantages:

It reduces the privacy burden affecting the large number of innocent and suspicion-free persons whose communications are accessible to our systems.

And as a bonus:

Legally protected groups such as MPs, lawyers and journalists could have their communications screened out and excluded from bulk collection and analysis unless a designated and targeted authorisation is in place.

Alongside the facts about the failure of mass surveillance laid before them by Binney and other expert witnesses giving evidence to the committee, let's hope the MPs and peers also took on board that point about the personal advantages of targeted surveillance for them as a group.

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Filed Under: bill binney, haystacks, investigatory powers bill, ipbill, mass surveillance, needles, surveillance, uk

Money And Power: The Real Reason For The NSA Spying On Everyone

from the money-money-money dept

More than four years ago, we wrote about all the buzz that you were hearing about "cyberwar" was little more than an attempt to drum up FUD to get the government to throw billions of dollars at private contractors. We noted that Booz Allen Hamilton (yes, the last employer of one Ed Snowden) had hired former NSA director and also Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as its Vice Chairman. He was the leading voice out there screaming about the threat of "cyberwar" getting on TV and having lots of opinion pieces in big name publications -- all of which mentioned his former government jobs, but almost none of which mentioned that his current employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, stood to make billions selling "solutions" to the government. And, indeed, Booz Allen has been raking in the cash on "cybersecurity."

This is worth keeping in mind as you read this fascinating interview with NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney, in which he lays this out plain and simple. The real reason for all this NSA surveillance is about money and power. "Stop terrorism" is secondary. After pointing out that all of this data collection has been basically useless in stopping terrorism (as confirmed by multiple independent accounts of the NSA's activities), the interviewer asks Binney why the NSA keeps doing it:

So why do they keep doing it?

Money. It takes a lot of money, you have to build up Bluffdale [the location of the NSA's data storage center, in Utah] to store all the data. If you collect all the data, you've got to store it, you have to hire more people to analyze it, you have to hire more contractors, managers to manage the flow. You have to start a big data initiative. It's an empire. Look at what they've built! Have you ever looked around all the buildings they've built up because of 9/11?

So that's what it's all about, expanding the budget for the intelligence community?

If you have a problem, you need money to solve it. But if you solve that problem, you no longer have the justification to get money. That's the way they view it - keep the problem going, so the money keeps flowing. Once you build up this big empire, you have to sustain it. ... Look at the influence and power the intelligence community has over the government. They [the government] are giving them everything they want, they're trying to cover up all their tracks and their crimes. Look at the influence and power they're gaining.

As Clay Shirky famously noted years ago, "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." That appears to absolutely be the case here. It's why there's so much FUD. The NSA and the rest of the intelligence community has built up the threat to be this huge issue that requires huge dollars as well. And once they have the huge dollars and the giant staff, they have to keep that up. So they have to create a continuing problem for which they are the solution -- and since it's all (mostly) done in secret, you get this nefarious circle (as opposed to virtuous), in which more FUD is spread, more money flows in and everyone has to justify themselves to keep it all going.

Whistleblowers like Binney and Snowden actually disrupt that circle and put a threat to the money flows.

Filed Under: bill binney, contractors, cyberwar, lobbying, nsa, surveillance
Companies: booz allen

Former NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney: The NSA Is Making Itself Dysfunctional With Too Much Data

from the analysis-paralysis dept

Former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney has been making the interview rounds in the wake of the NSA surveillance leaks, adding some useful context and history to some of the allegations. In one interview, with the Daily Caller, almost as an aside, he makes a really good point about how in the desire to collect all these haystacks of information, the NSA is missing out on a lot of needles. There's a discussion of how law enforcement apparently has a recording of a phone call between one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife, but that nothing was done with it. Binney points out that, when you have that much data, important stuff gets lost.

They're making themselves dysfunctional by collecting all of this data. They've got so much collection capability but they can't do everything. They're probably getting something on the order of 80 percent of what goes up on the network. So they're going into the telecoms who have recorded all of the material that has gone across the network. And the telecoms keep a record of it for I think about a year. They're asking the telecoms for all the data so they can fill in the gaps. So between the two sources of what they've collected, they get the whole picture.

They can do textual processing at a rate of about 10 gigabits a second. What that means is about a million and a quarter 1,000-character emails a second. They've got something like 10 to 20 sites for this around the United States. So you can really see why they need to build something like Utah to store all of this stuff. But the basic problem is they can't figure out what they have, so they store it all in the hope that down the road they might figure something out and they can go back and figure out what's happening and what people did. It's retroactive analysis.

Yes, it may be useful in hindsight (not that useful automatically makes it legal), but what would be even more useful is if they stopped focusing so much on collecting data, and went back to doing traditional investigative work that focuses on real targets. Piling on to the haystack doesn't help anyone. It comes from the faulty belief that piling more data on top -- even if it's useless data -- must be a good thing.

Filed Under: bill binney, nsa, nsa surveillance