Tuesday we took a quick look at the story of how the NSA's war against patriotic whistleblower Tom Drake persuaded Ed Snowden to move outside the system to expose the criminal activities the government was perpetrating against the American people. In the story we met William Binney. Up top is the short documentary Laura Poitras did for the NY Times about Binney in 2012. It should scare your socks off.
Binney was a top intelligence officer/code breaker with the NSA for over 30 years. Like Drake– and with Drake– he was a by-the-book, patriotic whistelblower when Bush and Cheney decided to shred the Constitution and start illegally surveilling American citizens without warrants. He resigned from the NSA on Halloween, 2001. The infamous FBI raid on his shower took place in 2007.
He continues to claim that virtually every e-mail ever sent by every American citizen has been intercepted by the NSA. He compares them to the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and the SS. This month he and Drake testified at the NSA hearings the German government is holding. It's hard to believe their electrifying testimony in Berlin has been virtually ignored here in the U.S. “The goal is control of the people,” Binney told the Bundestag. “They want to have information about everything; this is really a totalitarian approach.”
“Totalitarian” is not a word to be used lightly in Berlin, and the repeated use of the word by the 70-year-old NSA veteran– an idol of Edward Snowden– electrified the German committee. Asked about co-operation contracts between the NSA and BND, Binney answered the question only after the committee went into closed session.
A second NSA man turned whistleblower, Thomas Drake, told the committee his former employer’s spying was the “ultimate form of control” that was “strangling the world”. Drake dismissed as “beyond any credibility” German intelligence claims that they knew nothing of mass data collection by the NSA on German soil. He even accused Germany of duplicity in its outrage over US mass surveillance, saying the BND operated as an “addendum appendix of the NSA.”
It is these claims of BND co-operation with the NSA that are likely to cause the most friction in the Berlin inquiry. Such alleged co-operation is one suggested reason why the federal government– and government MPs in the inquiry– have been so cool on accepting Edward Snowden’s offer to testify in Berlin. The inquiry members have offered to meet Snowden in Moscow for an informal chat, but the ex-NSA contractor says he is not interested in assisting them unless he is granted asylum to testify in person in Berlin.
Facing into a long, hot summer of hearings, opposition committee members claim the government’s lukewarm approach to Snowden speaks volumes about their true level of concern over NSA surveillance. Things should get interesting when the committee questions the heads of the BND and domestic intelligence about how the NSA managed to spy on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
The key question: did they really know nothing about it until Der Spiegel magazine passed on Snowden information to Merkel’s office? If not, why not?
If need be, the German leader herself may be called to testify alongside German IT student Sebastian Hahn. Like the chancellor’s mobile phone, his computer was identified this week as another target of NSA surveillance via the XKeyscore programme.
Hahn, who operates a server on behalf of the anonymising internet network “Tor,” is now preparing a formal complaint for the German authorities. “It’s a massive invasion of my privacy to have every server connection from my computer in Germany recorded by a foreign intelligence service,” he said.
Yesterday Germany expelled the CIA station chief. Steffen Seibert, a government spokesperson: “The representative of the US intelligence services at the embassy of the United States of America has been told to leave Germany.” The chairman of the Bundestag committee overseeing the German secret service said the action was taken because of American spying on German politicians and its failure to co-operate and provide adequate responses.
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