William Binney



William Edward Binney (born September 1 1943) is a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) turned whistleblower who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency.

Quotes

 * In the early summer, the Russians started to train or exercise along the border with Czechoslovakia. I started looking at the communications they were using to move around and that's when I started to pick up some very small number of unique things that was different from a normal training programme. So I started to capture that, and I said: it's obvious that they're going to invade. It was only two days later that they actually invaded
 * A Good American, 2015 documentary


 * 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,
 * Snooper's charter' will cost British lives, MPs are warned ', published by The Guardian'' on 6th January 2016.


 * Sixteen months before the attacks on America, our organisation [Signit 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.
 * Snooper's charter' will cost British lives, MPs are warned ', published by The Guardian'' on 6th January 2016.


 * "I found out later that, NSA had approached the telecommunications companies in February of 2001, this is 8 months before 9/11 asking for all the customer data, that is the billing data on phone calls made from US citizens to other US citizens. In fact, the entire customer set. So, and that's fundamentally what they did after 9/11, here they were asking 8 months before. And what that meant to me was that this was the design from the beginning that management had made the plans to spy on the United States and people in the United States even before 9/11. Ok, then, when 9/11 occurred, that was the pure excuse for them to go in and say, 'now, telecoms, we really need the data now, to be able to do this to be, to protect the United States from terrorism.' and that was simply false to begin with. We had no problem at all identifying these people from the beginning."
 * source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT


 * This is the research we did online for the 9/11 attacks ... we gave this briefing internally at the CIA, they said, 'how'd you know all this stuff?' because at the same time one of the emails had the date ... 9/11 as the attack date that was given
 * source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT


 * (referring to phone numbers stored in a database of phone and email records) Since '1' identifies anyone in the regional zone 1 of the world, that's the US, Canada and some of the islands - it's right there in the front of your white pages book ... all they have to do is use that as a base of knowledge to go in to their entire database and count all of the phone numbers there that had a one in them, right-and then the ones are in the United States and then they'd have a count of how many Americans are in the database and how often each one's there. And yet they claim they can't do that, which is false. You can do the same thing with email, with service providers, IPs and things like that.
 * source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT


 * Incompetence at this scale, when they're doing things at this scale, is really dangerous, you could end up on a kill list without knowing what the criteria is to get on there or what the criteria is to get off.
 * source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT


 * No online cipher is safe, simply because if they don't have the key they'll come across and get it from you. Assuming they didn't already implant it in the system
 * source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT

Quotes about

 * In our Memorandum to you of July 24, 2017 entitled “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?,” we suggested: “You may wish to ask CIA Director Mike Pompeo what he knows about this..." Three months later, Director Pompeo invited William Binney, one of VIPS’ two former NSA technical directors...to CIA headquarters to discuss our findings. Pompeo began an hour-long meeting with Binney on October 24, 2017 by explaining the genesis of the unusual invitation: “You are here because the President told me that if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk to you.” But Did Pompeo ‘Really Want to Know’? Apparently not. Binney, a widely respected, plain-spoken scientist with more than three decades of experience at NSA, began by telling Pompeo that his (CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove it. As we explained in our most recent Memorandum to you, Pompeo reacted with disbelief and — now get this — tried to put the burden on Binney to pursue the matter with the FBI and NSA. As for Pompeo himself, there is no sign he followed up by pursuing Binney’s stark observation with anyone...
 * Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in VIPS Memo to the President: Is Pompeo’s Iran Agenda the Same As Yours? (21 June 2019)


 * If Pompeo failed to report back to you on the conversation you instructed him to have with Binney, you might ask him about it now (even though the flimsy evidence of Russia hacking the DNC has now evaporated, with Binney vindicated). There were two note-takers present at the October 24, 2017 meeting at CIA headquarters. There is also a good chance the session was also recorded. You might ask Pompeo about that... Binney had the impression Pompeo was simply going through the motions — and disingenuously, at that. If he “really wanted to know about Russian hacking,” he would have acquainted himself with the conclusions that VIPS, with Binney in the lead, had reached in mid-2017, and which apparently caught your eye.... Had he pursued the matter seriously with Binney, we might not have had to wait until the Justice Department itself put nails in the coffin of Russiagate, CrowdStrike, and Comey. In sum, Pompeo could have prevented two additional years of “everyone knows that the Russians hacked into the DNC.” Why did he not?... Binney describes himself as a “country boy” from western Pennsylvania. He studied at Penn State and became a world renowned mathematician/cryptologist as well as a technical director at NSA. Binney’s accomplishments are featured in a documentary on YouTube, “A Good American.” You may wish to talk to him person-to-person... We are at your disposal, should you wish to discuss any of this with us.
 * Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in VIPS Memo to the President: Is Pompeo’s Iran Agenda the Same As Yours? (21 June 2019)