" As the technical director of the world geopolitical military analysis stuff, I went to the terrorist shop, and I said, “I want a list of all the sites that produced any information that is helpful to you in analyzing the terrorist target anywhere in the world.” So they came up with a list of 18 sites that do the contributions to them. I said, “OK, these are our targets.” That was pretty simple, you know. “These are the producing assets that we have, so this is where we go first.”
So we proposed to go to those 18 sites for $9.5 million in January 2001. Unfortunately, at the same time, this was when [Michael] Hayden, director at the time, Hayden started his Trailblazer program, and he came down here to Congress and said: “Volume, velocity and variety is a big problem. We can’t handle it. We need lots of money to deal with it. So give me about, what, about $4 billion to manage it.” So that’s what they did. And that put the focus over there. …
You lost out to the director’s program, which was huge. And you guys had a $3 million program.
It cost us about $3.2 million to do it, yeah, from scratch.
… And it was working.
It was working, yeah.
Because tests were done also. And all the tests came with flying colors?
Yes.
So explain that to me.
We had any number of people looking at the program we were running. They, of course, wanted to support all the money programs, so they didn’t want to shine too much light over there, because it would get too much attention at that point, and say, “Gee, you already solved this problem, so what do you need all this money for?” They didn’t want to have that happen, so that was what their fear was. And that motivated them, then, to kill the program. But effectively it was already running and working and inputting data for analysis and we were already using it."
- Well, the only reason I found out about that was because the contractor I had [who] was doing that program for me on foreign intelligence came to me, because he and his folks were the only ones who knew how the code worked, and could set it up and get it running for them. So they had to use them to do that.
So when they did that, he came to me and said: “Well, you know, you know what they’re doing down there is they’re pulling in all domestic data and taking it, by hundreds of millions of records, every day, on U.S. communications with other U.S. people, inside the country. And it’s coming from AT&T.” So that was, AT&T was the first input into that domestic intelligence program, which I later found out was called Stellar Wind. …"
So you’re hearing this stuff. And what are you thinking? Are you guys talking with other people?
Well, at my point, I said: “Well, obviously, this place has gone rogue. It is just now violating everything, every foundational principle of this country, the Constitution fundamentally, and not counting any number of laws.” So I said, “Obviously, there’s nothing that can be done inside this agency.”
After I got out, I went down to the House Intelligence Committee and talked to Diane Roark, who was the staffer there, and told her what the program was and what was going on. Because it was the job of that committee, under the FISA laws, to prevent this kind of espionage against U.S. people.
And you go to her before or after you leave?
Slightly before I left.
All right. Before we get to that point, you’re hearing all this stuff. You’re thinking: “This does not sound kosher.” … What do you learn they do?
Well, what they did was they got rid of the section of the code that encrypted any of the attributes of U.S. citizens. That was the protection section. So what they did was, they either commented it out – what that means is, if you go into the source code and put a “C” at the front of the line of every code, every line of code that does the encryption, that, for the compiler, when it comes through to compile it, it looks at that and says, “That’s a comment,” OK, so it skips over that.
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.
And you suggested that.
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."
William Binney goes to the House, the DoD, the DoJ and none of them defend the Constitution?