"Former NSA director: Having surveillance tools revealed puts U.S. in greater harm" PBS NewsHour 5/13/2014
Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to a close look at the U.S. government’s surveillance programs.
It’s the subject of tonight’s “Frontline” on PBS, the first of a two-part series titled “The United States of Secrets (includes 2hr video).” Their reporting focuses on inside accounts of the controversial spying operations put in place after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Here, you will see former National Security Agency employees affiliated with a program called ThinThread, a tool which could capture and sort massive amounts of phone and e-mail data, but had an encryption function to protect the privacy of individual Americans. They and others describe the moment they found out that the technology was being used without the privacy protection.
NARRATOR: It didn’t take long for clues to emerge that something much bigger was going on.
WILLIAM BINNEY, Former National Security Agency Technical Director: They started seeing stacks of servers piled in corners and so forth.
So we had to walk way around all this hardware that was piling up out there. And so we knew, you know, something was happening.
JAMES BAMFORD, Author, “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America”: All of a sudden, people who normally would communicate with each other were keeping secret this new operation of some sort.
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