Related: NSA Whistleblower Details How The NSA Has Spied On US Citizens Since 9/11

After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the back-end part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. So that was a program they created called “Stellar Wind.” – William Binney, 32-years-NSA Whistle-blower

The 8-minute video, adapted from an ongoing project by Poitras that is to be released in 2013, has footage of the construction of the NSA’s $2 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, which Binney says “has the capacity to store 100 years worth of the world’s electronic communications.”

– –

Transcript excerpts:

[Narrator] Following 9/11, the National Security Agency began a top-secret surveillance program to spy on U.S. citizens without warrants. Code-named Stellar Wind, or “The Program” to insiders, the full scope of the surveillance has not been made public. …

Binney worked at the NSA for 32 years. He is regarded as one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the NSA’s history.

[William Binney, NSA Whistle-blower] After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the back-end part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. So that was a program they created called “Stellar Wind.” …

Here’s the real grand design. Every domain, think of a domain as an activity, a specific type of activity: phone calls; or banking is another domain. So, if you think of graphing each domain, and then each graph, then turning it into a third dimension, the trick now is to map through all the domains in that third dimension, pulling together all the attributes that any individual has in every domain. So that now I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out, and show your entire life over time. …

The purpose is to be able to monitor what people are doing. You build social networks for everybody. That then turns into the graph, and then you index all that data to that graph, which means you can pull out a community. That gives you the outline of the life of everybody in the community, and if you carry it over time from 2001 up, you have that ten years worth of their life that you could lay it out in a timeline that involves anybody in the country. Even Senators, and House of Representatives, all of them. The dangers here are that we fall into something like a totalitarian state like East Germany.

• • •

NY Times:

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.

NSA Whistle-Blower Tells All – Op-Docs: The Program

          Published on Aug 29, 2012 by

Entire Article