Top NSA Mathematician: ‘I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights.’

If you’re a telecommunications firm that helped the National Security Agency illegally spy on your customers without a court order, Sen. Barack Obama will happily vote for legislation he once promised to filibuster in order to secure retroactive immunity. If you’re implicated in the use of torture as an interrogation tactic, you can breathe easy knowing President Barack Obama thinks it’s in the country’s best interests to “look forward, not back.” But if you were a government official spurred by conscience to blow the whistle on government malfeasance or ineptitude in the war on terror? As Jane Mayer details in a must‐​read New Yorker article, you’d better watch out! This administration is shattering records for highly selective prosecutions under the espionage act—and the primary criteria seems to be, not whether national security was harmed in any discernible way by your disclosures, but by the degree of embarrassment they caused the government.


The whole thing is fascinating, but I’m especially interested in the discussion of how electronic surveillance tools that came with built‐​in privacy controls were tossed in favor of more indiscriminate programs that, by the way, didn’t work and generated huge cost overruns. The most striking quotations come from disillusioned Republican intelligence officials. Here’s Bill Binney, a top NSA mathematician and analyst, on the uses to which his work was put:

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

One GOP staffer on the House Intelligence Committee recounted an exchange with then‐​NSA head Michael Hayden:

[Diane] Roark, who had substantial influence over N.S.A. budget appropriations, was an early champion of Binney’s ThinThread project. She was dismayed, she says, to hear that it had evolved into a means of domestic surveillance, and felt personally responsible. Her oversight committee had been created after Watergate specifically to curb such abuses. “It was my duty to oppose it,” she told me. “That is why oversight existed, so that these things didn’t happen again. I’m not an attorney, but I thought that there was no way it was constitutional.” [.…] She asked Hayden why the N.S.A. had chosen not to include privacy protections for Americans. She says that he “kept not answering. Finally, he mumbled, and looked down, and said, ‘We didn’t need them. We had the power.’ He didn’t even look me in the eye. I was flabbergasted.”

Remember, these aren’t hippies from The Nation, or ACLU attorneys, or even (ahem) wild‐​eyed Cato libertarians. They’re registered Republicans appalled by the corruption of the intelligence mission to which they’d devoted their professional lives.