William Binney

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Binney (2013)

William Binney ( William Edward "Bill" Binney; born September 1, 1943 in Pennsylvania , USA ) is a former US intelligence employee and technical director of the National Security Agency (NSA). Since January 2015 he has received an award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence .

On October 31, 2001, after 37 years of work for the NSA, he resigned from the service in protest at the data collection practice and became a whistleblower . Because of the NSA's turn to the principle of mass surveillance in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he resigned from the NSA because he did not want to take responsibility for this development. Most recently, as technical director, he was responsible for the systems for collecting data and filtering relevant information. He was outraged by the illegal use of NSA data within the US judicial authorities and other institutions that undermined the rule of law and democracy. Just a few days after the attacks, a corresponding proposal by then NSA chief Michael Hayden was accepted by US President George W. Bush and his vice -president Richard Cheney . In Binney's view, this means that all locks for storage and total surveillance have been opened. In this way, by autumn 2001 at the latest, what Binney believed the founding fathers of the USA wanted to prevent exactly: the creation of a state that collects all information about all its citizens and, if in doubt, uses it against them.

In 2007, a group of armed FBI agents stormed his home, Binney reported that "the NSA and the FBI then fabricated charges against my colleagues and me so that they received an arrest warrant." Since May 2011, Binney has been drawing attention to the NSA's mania for data collection .

In December 2012, together with Thomas Drake, he gave a lecture at the 29th Chaos Communication Congress of the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, where he explained, among other things, that the US telecommunications giant AT&T alone supplies the NSA with several hundred million user tracks every day.

Together with J. Kirk Wiebe and Thomas Drake, who are former NSA employees who have been critical of the NSA's surveillance programs for years, he confirmed the extensive surveillance practices of the NSA in surveillance and surveillance that were made public in June 2013 by the whistleblower Edward Snowden Espionage affair 2013 . After being suspected of being criminals and losing their careers and reputations , they find themselves vindicated by the documents leaked by Snowden.

On July 3, 2014, Binney was the first witness to testify before the NSA investigative committee . Binney had previously confirmed on ARD what the NSA has always denied: Not only are general connection data spied out, but also specific content of phone calls and emails: “It's about content. If you invest ten billion dollars in an intelligence agency, that's enough money to build a whole data-gathering empire. That's exactly what happened. ”He used his five-hour questioning before the committee to settle the accounts with the methods of the NSA, which he described as an authority that has lost all measure in collecting data and massively violates the civil liberties.

What the NSA is doing, "is contrary to our constitution," said Binney. In essence, the secret service wants to "know everything about everyone", it is about collecting data about everyone: "We have moved away from collecting this data to collecting data from the seven billion people on our planet." USA and in a global context are targeted by the NSA, although there is a "right to privacy". He spoke of an "attack on individuals". Shortly before Binney's questioning, it became known that the NSA was specifically spying on people who deal with encryption and anonymization on the Internet. As reported by NDR and WDR, the Erlangen student Sebastian Hahn was targeted by the NSA because he operates a server for Tor , a network for anonymizing connection data on the Internet. Binney called the report plausible at his hearing.

Binney explained that virtually all data that traverses Germany would also be picked up by the NSA and the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) - or by the NSA alone. Binney also reported an intensive collaboration with the BND, which had partially had access to spying techniques of the NSA.

His massive criticism went so far that he accused the NSA of a “ totalitarian approach” aimed at “controlling the entire population”: “This is otherwise only known from dictatorships .” The NSA used the attacks as a justification to to start a gigantic mass surveillance. This approach is also directed against its own population and represents the "greatest threat to democracy since the American Civil War ", but it also endangers democracies worldwide.

He worked as an interview partner in SWR2 's radio feature, Spying Friends - Germany and the American secret service NSA, which was produced by Edward Snowden after the disclosure of the NSA program PRISM by Edward Snowden and the public criticism of the NSA's behavior .

In August 2014, Binney was one of the signatories of an open letter to Angela Merkel of the group of former US intelligence professionals " Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity " (VIPS), in which they warned against rash US intelligence photos of an invasion of eastern Ukraine by the close russian military .

Awards

Web links

Commons : William Binney  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Howard Berkes: Amid Data Controversy, NSA Builds Its Biggest Data Farm. In: National Public Radio . June 10, 2013, accessed July 21, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Binney: NSA practice is totalitarian , bundestag.de, accessed July 4, 2014.
  3. ^ Profiles: William Binney. In: History Commons. Retrieved July 21, 2013 .
  4. ↑ We took the wrong path , SZ of July 3, 2014
  5. ↑ Jörg Thoma: The NSA wants all the data from everyone - NSA whistleblower: "They are building a totalitarian state". In: Golem.de . June 28, 2013. Retrieved July 21, 2013 .
  6. ^ Stefan Krempl & Andreas Wilkens: 29C3: Summit of NSA whistleblowers and "enemies of the state". In: heise online . December 28, 2012, accessed July 21, 2013 .
  7. ↑ Peter Eisler & Susan Page: 3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so. In: USA Today . June 16, 2013, accessed July 21, 2013 .
  8. ↑ As the NSA Committee amazed itself ( Memento of 4 July 2014 Internet Archive ), July 3, 2014.
  9. ↑ Binney: NSA practice is totalitarian , bundestag.de, accessed July 4, 2014
  10. ↑ US informant compares NSA with a dictatorship
  11. ↑ William Binney in an interview on the SWR2 feature Spy Friends from November 19, 2014
  12. ↑ US secret service retirees warn Merkel of misinformation. In: Der Tagesspiegel. September 4, 2014, accessed October 6, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Binney, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Binney, William Edward (full name); Binney, Bill (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American whistleblower
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Pennsylvania , USA