William Binney :
certainly 2003 was important because of all of the Narus devices they were putting and other equipment that would allow them to take whatever was on the optical fiber network inside the United States. They deployed those and started collecting all that material, so that becamethat was content coming in. Emails, voice over IP, all of that kind of material was coming in and being stored. And then, before that, starting right after 9/11, they started pulling in all of the call records, which, by the way, some of the numbers everybody is talking about are pretty low. Theyre just too low. The call records that I estimated would have been on the order of three billion a day.
Now, it doesnt mean that theyre transcribing whats being said on the phone calls; theyre just recording the fact that they occurred. Theyre using a target list, Im sure, to target people who arewho they want to record and transcribe. And that list is provided to the switch networks, and whenever the switches detect them, they route those audiosthat audio to recorders, and then it gets recorded, stored and put in a priority list. Then the transcribers go through that and transcribe it.
The point was, the terrorists have already known that weve been doing this for years, so theres no surprise there. Theyre not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that theyrewere notthe government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; its trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States.
Glenn Greenwald:
The idea that there are any terrorists in the world who pose any real threat who arent aware or who werent aware until our articles appeared last week that the United States government tries to monitor their communications and listen in on their telephone calls and read their emails, any terrorist who is unaware of the fact that the U.S. government was doing that is a terrorist who is incapable of even writing their own name, let alone detonating a bomb inside the United States. Exactly as Mr. Binney said, their only concern isthis has nothing to do with terrorism. Theyre not trying to keep any of this from the terrorists; theyre trying to keep it from the American people. And thats the point.
And as far as the documents are concerned, he had access to enormous sums of top-secret documents that would be incredibly harmful. He went through and turned over only a small portion of those documents to us, all of which he read very carefully. And I know that not only because he told me that, but also because the way we got the documents was in extremely detailed folders all divided by content, that you could have only organized them had you carefully read them. And when he gave them to us, he said, “Look, Im not a journalist. Im not a high-level government official. I am not saying that everything I gave you should be published. I dont want it all to be published. I want you, as journalists, to go through it and decide what is in the public interest and what will not cause a lot of harm.” He invitedin fact, urgedus to exercise exactly the kind of journalistic judgment that we have exercised. And so, had it been his intention to harm the United States, he could have just uploaded all these documents to the Internet or found the most damaging ones and caused them to be published. He did the opposite. The NSA and the rest of the country owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all of the work he has done to inform the American public without bringing about any harm to them.
– source democracynow.org