Kirk Wiebe talking:
I have mixed emotions about it, because my job is not to destroy NSA, by any means. I was a member of a proud agency, that’s had some black marks on its path in terms of spying on Americans, but we had been assured that was never going to happen again after the Church Committee. And we had guidelines under USSID-18, which said, “Thou shalt not spy on Americans,” except upon probable cause shown to a judge that there’s evidence of wrongdoing, criminality, terrorism or whatever. So, everything seemed to be copacetic, congruent with the Constitution, and it was a fun place to work, on true targets of concern. In the latter part of my career, when I met up with Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, ultimately Tom Drake, and of course Diane Roark from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that had been my experience, one that was very positive. And I was awarded for my work.
But then we began to see the agency’s intent on exploiting the digital age. And the digital age takes various forms. We talk about Facebook. We talk about the Internet, telephone, personal devices of every kind, iPods that can communicate now. So there’s a plethora of means of communication, all important to sort out for national intelligence purposes, but focused on foreign threats—and domestic, if there’s evidence that they exist. And that was the philosophy. That was the approach. And that’s what we built our original prototype system to work against in terms of analyzing big data. There needed to be a way to look into big data quickly for assessment purposes and be able to, as quickly as possible, home in on that fertile territory, that data connected with legitimate terrorist criminality and so forth.
When we found out that the NSA was directing resources against Americans without probable cause, this was late in 2001 just prior to, surrounding the events of 9/11, which happened concurrently as this technology was blooming. Nine-eleven really served as a marker that we had failed as an agency. We had been trying to get the NSA to lean forward, if you will, in its digital seat to get in—to get tools into the fight, with all this digital data, and find terrorism and so forth. And we had an opportunity to put it out there nine months before 9/11. Bad culture inside the building and bad process, that managers are supposed to ensure does not happen, defeated the small successful prototype in approach that embodied the principles of the Fourth Amendment in it. And it was eliminated in favor of Trailblazer.
Well, when 9/11 happened and we failed and the project that we had been developing called ThinThread was not adopted, we felt we had no other things to do at NSA. And since three of us were eligible for retirement, we retired, formed a small company and tried to bring the concepts of ThinThread to other agencies in the government. We succeeded in demonstrating its capabilities in a government contract with Boeing Company in 2004, but a high executive in the agency that that contract serves said, “We have to stop these guys. They’re going to embarrass NSA,” because we had found things in a set of data, that two agencies had, that NSA had not, and that was embarrassing. So that contract was stopped.
We then found another contract at Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Patrol. We found some news-breaking data there about an operation involving Iranian businesses importing electronics to support the building of triggering devices for IEDs. And we found that—and this is not classified. This data, this fact, was actually broadcast publicly by the Department of Commerce to U.S. businesses, putting them on alert that certain people, individuals and businesses were trying to import electronics to build triggering devices for IEDs to be used against our troops abroad and coalition forces. We simply, Bill Binney and I, sat down, used Google at home, on our spare time, to formulate a profile of these businesses, where they were, how they were functioning, and it turned out they were all false fronts to cover up the import operation. We put all the—we connected the dots for the government, reported it to Customs and Border Patrol, where we were working. They took the data and briefed it up the line. And within two weeks, we were let go from our contract. I guess we had embarrassed too many people.
Long story short, two years later, seven gentlemen—I shouldn’t call them gentlemen—seven people are arrested in Florida by the FBI associated with this import operation. We were pleased that we could contribute, even if not officially in an official position for the government. But as far as NSA was concerned, we launched an IG complaint in 2002 talking about gross mismanagement and fraud—not so much fraud, but more about gross mismanagement.
That was an inspector general report.
we were raided in 2007. In fact, it was July 26th at 9:00 a.m., in a coordinated strike against me, Bill Binney, Diane Roark of—the HIPSC staffer, and Ed Loomis.
Bill Binney told that the federal authorities coming in, raiding his home. He’s got a gun up against his head as he’s in the shower. His kid and his wife, they’re all under the gun.
And they came to my home. I was actually sitting at my computer looking out the window, and I noticed about a dozen or so FBI agents coming across my yard in the dark blue uniforms with the gold letters “FBI” on their backs. And immediately, a chill went up my spine. I said, “Uh-oh,” to myself, and I ran to the front door, because I didn’t want them to break in the door—not that they had an intention to, but I didn’t know that at the time.
So I opened the door. The lead agent showed me his badge to identify himself, and a search warrant. They asked me who else was in the house. My mother-in-law was, along with my eldest daughter. They were still up sleeping. And they asked me to get them downstairs and have them sit on the couch in the front room. They asked me if I had any pets. I said, “Yes, I have two dogs.” They asked me to lock those in the bathroom. My youngest daughter and wife had already left the house on an errand and didn’t know any of this was happening at the time.
And they entered, and they asked me—they didn’t ask me. They escorted me to the outside deck—this was July, it wasn’t cold—and babysat me there for the next seven-and-a-half hours while this group of about 12 or so agents went through the house documenting everything they found, rummaging through papers, taking computers, anything with a digital memory, gathering it up, putting it into—they had about five or six vans, unmarked white vans, out in my driveway—piled all that stuff in the vans, took printers, a whole bunch of stuff, and left.
Now, while this was going on, my wife comes home with my youngest daughter. They see all these vans lined up in the driveway. I have a 400-foot driveway because my home is on a flag lot. It actually sits behind other homes that are streetside. So, it’s a long driveway, and that was lined with vehicles, FBI vehicles. They were worried something had happened to me, maybe medical or whatever. The FBI explained what had happened and took them and sat them on the couch, at the same time.
Now, they did not have guns drawn. And people—you know, I’ve thought about why were they drawn when they went to Bill Binney’s house, and the only difference I can think of is the fact that Bill had at one time been a registered owner of firearms. He doesn’t have them anymore, but he was at one point. And probably the FBI does a check on the database to see if the person they’re targeting for a raid has weapons in the house or not—is my guess—and it’s a safety procedure for those teams. But that’s kind of what happened.
I was never charged.
— source democracynow.org
Kirk Wiebe, retired official from the National Security Agency, where he worked for more than 32 years. He received the NSA’s second-highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award; the director of CIA’s Meritorious Unit Award; and a Letter of Commendation from the secretary of the Air Force, among other awards. He was an NSA whistleblower on matters of privacy involving massive electronic surveillance.