The Frontline Interview: William Binney | Hacker News Reader

The Frontline Interview: William Binney

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101 pointsmolecule19 comments

Oh this is a very good interview. I have read and seen others but this is one of the most detailed ones on Binney.

Binney came before Snowden and he raised all these issues and it didn't really sway the public. That was pretty frustrating. He didn't bring a database with him so naturally some assumed he was making stuff up because he was bitter his system was being used and deployed under a different compartment and he was sort of not part of it.

One interesting thing here is that it really undermines the often repeated PR phrase "Oh why didn't Snowden just come to us (higher ups) and tell us. There was no need to go public like that". The implication is "we could have listened and fixed the problem".

Here is Binney years before trying to do that. Yes he didn't go directly to his bosses, I think it was clear they wouldn't have listened. He went to Intelligence Commetee (Congress). Went to DOJ. Nothing happened. Some anemic 90% redacted reports. "Vows to take to be more careful in the future", nonsense like that.

All it ended with was FBI raids and persecution for those involved.

The crucial part comes at the end and that is Snowden studied their case and he made sure to take documents out with him.

The story about Thomas Drake was fascinating and very sad too. He went from being a senior executive at the NSA to being accused of violating the espionage act (all charges which were later dropped) and having his entire life ruined. Spent his life savings fighting the legal battle, his wife left him, and he could only get work at an Apple store.

I didn't realize Snowden had studied what happened to Drake and Bennie et al, and determined that if he took a massive amount of documents it would actually protect him and not just be his word against theirs. And of course, he could have only done that as an admin. That was some pretty impressive high stakes chess there. Wow.

So in effect, they manufactured Snowden by their inability to do anything meaningful with what Binney told them.

That is pretty amazing no one listened all the way up to a Supreme Court Justice.

I'm equally amazed they have not done something with Greenwald and are letting him still go. I'm looking forward to his next story which he said would expose who they are targeting.

I'll watch anything produced by Frontline. Always first class and real news.

The whole Frontline 'United States of Secrets' episode is very good and worth a watch. Part two is this week, I think on Tuesday.

I wasn't as familiar with Diane Roark, also interviewed in that -- she has the ultimate "I told you so" when she uncovered the program herself, and tried to convince congress on the committee her boss was on to discontinue STELLARWIND because 1) this was illegal 2) it would become a huge PR fiasco once it eventually became public.

Knowing the full history of the "program" and everyhing the lead to The Big Leak really puts it in perspective and grounds the entire NSA domestic spying apparatus in reality. At least for me. I'm fairly young and was in school 03 to 07 but I wish I paid more attention back then.

The whole discussion about deleting code vs commenting it out seems to imply that the NSA wasn't using any sort of version control system in 2001. Does anyone else find that odd?

It's just to explain to the layperson how easy it is, on the software side, to intentionally remove the feature he considered necessary for NSA to keep working consistent with the laws and the constitution. It also explains the difference between his approach and the approach the organization took.

It also doesn't mean what you imply. They've certainly used revision control systems at that time and his example doesn't contradict that.

From the interview:

"So either that, or they took that entire block of code and deleted it. So there's one of two ways of getting rid of it. If they commented it out, it would only take a couple minutes to reinstate it. It wouldn't be difficult to do. If they deleted it, they'd have to reconstruct all that code.

I suggested that to Diane Roark. That was the way that they probably did it, and they could reinstate it very simply, if they only commented it out."

If you are using version control, it would only take a couple of minutes even if you had deleted everything. You wouldn't have to rewrite all that stuff, just go back in the history.

I realize that this is off-topic to the main thrust of the discussion, but I found it a curious.

I also use RCS but if I know that I should turn off something possibly only temporarily I won't delete all the code, especially if it is spread over more files. I can't imagine you wouldn't. Even big chunks of code can be turned off by a few carefully chosen "if (0)" or commenting out a few of the calls. So your argument is still invalid.

It seems to me, like the parent said, he's just simplifying a normal process. Sure, if his code was a few lines, and someone deleted a few you could use version control to get them back. On the other hand, if his code was a full fledged program, and the deletions were institutional such that further work was carried on after the deletions making the entire datflow go through different assumptions and processes, it would be significantly more difficult to reinstate. Preserving the dataflow might be done if you're just commenting out a line to test things. But if a whole chunk is straight up deleted, the flow of data will likely shift to be incompatible with the old way of doing things within a couple of revisions of the code such that no version control would help.

Ah yeah thanks for that explanation. It makes sense. I guess I wasn't thinking about the effect of the commented out code on the mind of the programmer trying to make the current version of the code "backward compatible" with the old feature.

William said if one wanted to comment a line of the source code, they'd place a C at the beginning of the line.

Is this a familiar language behavior to anyone, or are they using in-house languages/interpreters. I wouldn't put it past them, but I found that comment interesting and would like to know more if anyone has any data.

It's Fortran. Placing a "C" in the first column means Comment [1][2].

This burned one of my teammates once because he used Emacs to edit a Fortran file and in trying to type C-x C-c he accidentally added a "c" to the front of a line of code. This broke our application in production.

[1] http://www.stanford.edu/class/me200c/tutorial_77/03_basics.h... [2] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/805-4939/z40007332024/in...

Thanks! I've never worked with Fortran.

They really need to update their site for mobile. I couldn't read anything

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