Bulk surveillance data collection makes citizens more vulnerable to terror attacks and costs lives, according to former NSA whistleblower William Binney.
Testifying before the U.K. government’s Joint Select Committee reviewing the controversial draft Investigatory Powers Bill (IP Bill), Binney argued that bulk data collection has already cost lives in the United States, and that it tends to swamp intelligence analysts with too much information rather than allow them to be more selective about what information they gather.
Binney said that if they had been using a more targeted approach to data collection, French intelligence “could have had the opportunity to stop them before the attack” in the November 2015 terror actions in Paris. Binney also said that the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) should not do bulk data collection given that the law to allow it is currently still in draft form.
When the committee asked whether bulk data collection would give the GCHQ another tool “to find needles in haystacks,” Binney answered: “It’s not helpful to make the haystack orders of magnitude bigger, because it creates orders of magnitude more difficulty in finding the needle,” adding that “using a targeted approach would give you the needles and anything closely associated to the needles right from the start.”
Speaking about NSA’s bulk data collection program, Binney said it “has made their analysts fail, and they have failed consistently since 9/11, and even before that.” Binney testified that using a more targeted approach to data collection “will give privacy to everybody in the world.”
Unredacted Snowden disclosure
The NSA targeted “the two leading encryption chips used in Virtual Private Network and Web encryption devices,” reported Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept this week. That information had been redacted in earlier reports from The Intercept about NSA activity revealed in the Snowden leaks in 2013, due to concerns that terrorists might be able to use the information to identify and avoid using encryption products that had been subverted by NSA.
Greenwald revisited the original leaked documents in light of the recent disclosures about backdoors in Juniper Networks firewalls, and decided that it was in the public interest to publish the unredacted sentence.
Speaking to The Intercept, Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which manufacturers the NSA document references. But Green told The Intercept that “the damage has already been done,” and that he believes foreign companies are increasingly concerned about working with encryption technology from U.S. companies.
— source searchsecurity.techtarget.com