William Binney Explains Snowden Docs

Let's say that the EFF wins. Let's say it exceeds its wildest dreams.

How do you know it had any effect?

Until the next Snowden comes along, you don't. And I'm sure there won't be any more Snowdens. The NSA is going to redo its systems so that nobody can get anything out. This isn't a stretch of the imagination. They obviously have plenty of very technically talented people working there, and they'll get much stricter with access controls now.

Democratic processes cannot change a fundamentally undemocratic system. Secret courts, secret laws, secret executive orders, none of it is even a pretense of democracy. And so, nothing the EFF does can save you. Nothing you can do within the political system can save you, because it is a rigged game, or more accurately, an irrelevant game. It does not matter who wins or loses. It is not the game the NSA plays.

=============================================

I'm sure people will ask what my solution is. I wish that I had one, and I hope that you realize the fallacy in insisting that until a more comfortable solution is in front of you, the "solution" you have that will obviously not work should be invested in without any faint expectation of a return.

There is one thing you can do that's simple, though: Don't work for them. Don't work for SAIC. Don't work for Booz Allen. Don't work for the NSA. Without people like us, without engineers, they can't do anything.

And more then that: If you have a friend from undergrad, if you meet someone at a meetup or a hackfest or in a bar that says they work for the NSA, directly or indirectly, treat them like the Statsi agent they are, spit in their face and tell them they're not welcome in your life. Make sure they know that they aren't doing a good thing or the right thing. Make sure they know how utterly, baselessly evil they are.

That's one solution. It's not as blandly palatable as donating to the EFF, but it's one that's less of a waste of your time.

Binney had the guts to step back and speak out. He could've kept playing ball. THINTHREAD or not, his subsequent actions are worth praise. Credit is given where credit is due. Very little else is out there to encourage people in high positions to follow suit. That's true. THINTHREAD's reassurance of privacy is as laughable now as it was then. Marketing to a naive public like that is so annoyingly ironic when the leading threat (time and time again) is the lack of privacy from a surveillance state.

> Maybe the ultimate lesson we learned then and now is how little people care.

People are woefully uninformed on the NSA and surveillance. If you ask a random layperson what Snowden disclosed nine times out of ten you'll get "that phone program thing, right?"

The major media outlets made the issue about PRISM and The Congress ran with that free lunch to pass ineffective measures on part of one program while ignoring the bulk of the revelations.

The Snowden documents passed through America without being digested at all. The media made the story about the Snowden character and political bickering. The Merkle episode was covered like it was a report on bickering children (German chancellor upset at US, Obama to meet with her) rather than piecing together how having that data during the Eurozone crisis likely affected policy decisions.

I'd call this trick a feat if it weren't such a repeat act.

I honestly do believe people care. I just don't think people understand what was disclosed. Even tech-savvy and otherwise well informed friends are surprised when I send or summarize the lesser covered material.

> I remember reading about him and thinking how this is a bit too conspiratorial.

I see this a lot and I honestly wonder. A lot of us knew-without-proof what was going on... suspected strongly may be better wording. We didn't talk about it because either people wouldn't be interested without proof, or we assumed other people knew just as much.

What is it that in fact makes the subject so far-fetched and a topic treated the same way as the "the president is a man-reptile from neptune" kind of conspiracies?

I am really trying to figure out what, in my education (or what little I had of it seeing as I left high school fairly early), caused me to see things in a less "that's crazy talk" way and more as a "it's technically possible and they have endless resources, why wouldn't they do it" subject while other people dismissed it (and some still do).

ACLU is working on it, support them.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/new-documents-sh...