[beeps] [voicemail] Tuesday, 9:47 a.m.
[female] Hi, baby. I'm... baby, you have to listen - to me carefully.
- I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. - I'm on the plane.
I'm calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you.
Please tell my children that I love them very much.
And I'm so sorry, babe.
I don't know what to say. There's three guys.
They've hijacked the plane. I'm trying to be calm.
- We're turned around, and I've heard that. - There's planes
That have been flown into the world trade center.
I hope to be able to see your face again, baby.
I love you. Good-bye.
Voicemail: End of message.
Well, the images I saw, the ones that, of course, uh,
affected me the most were the people diving off the building
when it was burning.
You know, to be put in such a desperate state, you know,
that shows you the human...
Human reaction to those kinds of conditions.
It just, uh, it was just revolting.
And disgusting that we allowed it, basically, to happen.
ThinThread was a program
that absolutely would have prevented 9/11.
So it all went back to that program.
[Radack] The first time
I met Bill Binney,
the first thing he said to me was,
"I need you to know that I would never deliberately
commit suicide."
I thought he was being a little overdramatic,
but then when I started to hear what he had to say
about what our country was doing,
I worried about his safety, too.
[Binney] I wanted to make one thing
very certain up front,
that she could be assured that I would not commit suicide.
And I said that because I knew that some of the people involved - in this activity,
And it was a pretty serious thing
because people at the highest levels
of the US government were involved
in all departments.
So I wanted to make sure that she understood
that if something happened to me, it was not suicide
because I was going to be in this with her
and everybody else to the end.
I grew up in central western Pennsylvania.
It was basically the wilderness of Pennsylvania.
It was out in the hills, in the Appalachia hills
just before the mountains.
This is my father's grave.
At one time, I asked him, I said, uh,
"in your service in war time, how many men did you kill?"
And he said, "maybe one."
So, but that's all he said.
He didn't really talk about it.
I think that was pretty typical of World War II veterans.
They did what they had to do and they didn't really
think that that was anything different than anyone else did - in World War II.
Nobody thought they were heroes. They just thought they did - their duty.
One of the worst things about war is those who start it
force others to be as vicious as they are to stop it.
That's what I'm sure he was feeling.
He just didn't want to talk about having to do
what he had to do when in the war.
One of the main reasons we get into war is by mistakes - by leadership
Because they're informed incorrectly
or they're uniformed about events, you know, totally.
So the principle I thought that I was working under
was to make sure that the information
that I could arrive at through the work I did
was informative to leadership so they didn't make mistakes.
[woman] Watch out, watch out.
Recapping now for you once again if you've just joined us,
an explosion underground in the garage section
of the World Trade Center in New York City
has killed now three people according to the New York - Port Authority
And has injured at least 150 people.
Hundreds of people as we speak are still being evacuated
from the twin story towers of the structure
at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
There was no hope whatsoever.
Trapped on 94 floors all the way up.
The walls just blew in and everything went blank - after that.
Walls collapsed, furniture's down.
It's a mess downstairs.
[Binney] The first attack
on the Trade Centers in '93,
that was the first thing that woke everybody up
in terms of the threat of terrorism.
They took truck bombs into the basement
and tried to place the bombs next to the supports
for the building
and set them off to try to shake the building
or break the supports so the building would fall.
Technically, that didn't function that way,
but it killed a lot of people,
and CIA really did start pounding the drums
across the entire intelligence community
to go after the terrorism,
and that's what we did at NSA.
We were looking also at the same time
with the explosion in the digital age,
ballooning of communications in the internet and the phones,
and the terrorists were burying themselves inside
that ballooning communications network worldwide.
So we had to face that as a new technical problem
that we had to solve to figure out
who was communicating with whom and who were the terrorists
and try to extract that information out of that flow
of information.
When I first took on the duty of technical director
of the world geopolitical and military analysis - and reporting shop,
I pulled together analysts from all over the agency
around the world...
- And I said, "okay, we're going to start." - This little project here,
And here's what we're gonna do.
We're going to graph relationships
of everybody in the phone network in the world.
All we have to do is map all the relationships
"between two and a half billion phones."
And somebody in the back says, "you can't do that."
And I said, "why not?"
And they said, "because all the combinations are infinite."
So I said, "okay, think of it this way."
At any instantaneous point in time
the numbers of atoms in the universe are finite.
The relationship to 2.5 billion phones
is simply a smaller subset of that.
That's nothing.
Now you can get your mind around it.
That was the whole idea of the ThinThread program.
[Wiebe] Of all the analysts I ever knew
in my entire career, spanning from US air force
through my career at NSA,
Bill was by far the most astute,
the most capable,
accurate.
He used all the tools necessary,
not only to find the story,
but to complete it.
Where we weren't able to actually read messages,
they were encrypted,
Bill found ways to leverage indicators
that I'd never seen anyone else do.
Bill was Mr. Externals at the NSA.
He was the person in the agency
who knew the most about what we now call
in the digital age, metadata.
If something was encrypted and you couldn't decrypt it,
you could still get information out of the external signals,
and that was Bill's forte.
Bill would find ways around the encryption
to see things that people didn't even look for...
Able to work almost any problem,
almost any challenge,
and draw upon mathematics
and other inherent analytical skills
and the willingness to be open-minded,
not close-minded.
He had a good B.S. detector
and he could tell when somebody was blowing smoke.
And he was the agency's
best traffic analyst, bar none.
- [Binney] In '65, I was coming out. - Of school
And the Vietnam war was cranking up.
That was when we still had the draft,
and so people were getting drafted out of my community.
And since in the country,
you're usually pretty good with a rifle,
and if you go into the army, you end up in the front lines
doing sweeps through the jungles in Vietnam
and shooting people...
I simply did not want to participate in any of that
at all.
I even stopped hunting because I didn't like to kill animals.
So why would I want to get involved with Vietnam?
I had the option to volunteer for the army to go to Europe.
They gave me a whole battery of tests,
and they said, "gee, you have a fairly high aptitude - for analysis."
So they said, "hey, you're a prime candidate"
for the army's security agency,"
and they sent me to Turkey.
We had just come through the Cuban Missile Crisis
in 1962,
which was probably the closest time
we ever came to nuclear war,
and that kind of sensitized everybody to the real threat.
- Turkey was looking at the southern part. - Of the Soviet Union.
They had a lot of areas where they developed
military technology.
I was working a rather large military data system,
a Soviet data system, that had not been solved
at that point.
So they would look at things like manual Morse
or speech broadcasts or satellite communication.
Those kinds of things produced information
which they called traffic.
Some of it you would record, some of it you would either - get directly translated
Or converted into character streams.
Some of it would be continuously encrypted data,
which you wouldn't be able to read,
but you could look at durations and things like that.
It was probably a 20th of the Russian military,
so I was looking at a small segment of it
trying to develop the techniques that were necessary
to see into what they were doing.
It was me sitting at the desk, looking at this abstract data,
struggling to understand what it really meant.
As I was going through there, it became clear to me
that there were mathematical patterns involved.
I started to see systems and relationships,
so I started building things.
It was allowing me then to begin to understand and interpret
the things that we were getting in terms of communications...
And relating that then to real world events
and what was really happening in the field.
When I got to that point, the whole thing started - to fall in place
And so then you can reconstruct the entire system,
their entire system of command and control
and everything they were doing.
Everything is human behavior.
Human behavior is extremely patterned.
How do people operate? How do they interact?
And how does that manifest or appear
in this abstract set of communications
you're looking at?
It's a matter of getting to a point where you can - understand the patterns
And interpret them properly.
When you sit there and look at a problem like that
and you see... you can see the pattern and the break,
that's exhilarating when you do.
It really is.
Which is basically what we call metadata analysis now.
Nobody seemed to be doing that.
So that ended up NSA requesting me to be reassigned
to NSA headquarter.
I got a letter from what we termed "God"
in February of '67.
[Loomis] Metadata is actually just data
about the data.
And as a traffic analyst,
you don't care about what's in the conversation.
You care about who's talking to whom,
how often are they talking, when are they talking,
what's their pattern of talking,
who are they talking down to,
who are they talking up to,
what's the subordination,
the command and control structure of the organization?
[Binney] In May of '68,
I got transferred
into the current reporting shop.
In the early summer, the Russians started to train
or having exercise along the border of Czechoslovakia.
I started looking at the communications
they were using to move around.
And that's where I started to pick out
some very small number of unique things
that was different from a normal training program.
So I started to capture that.
And I said, "it's obvious that they're going to invade."
It was only two days later that they actually invaded.
That was the first occurrence that I had
direct personal experience with a real world activity
that let me see what was different between that
and the training.
That gave me the idea of what were the real warning indicators
of impending action.
The real warning indicators, there were only five.
Five, that's all. Just five warning indicators.
I mean, they had maybe a hundred warning indicators - on the list,
But none of them meant anything.
The five that were real weren't even on the list.
Okay, so I had my five
and the rest of them were meaningless to me.
So I simply watched for those five.
And it was just case after case over time, over decades,
you could see every time they were going to do something.
One of these or more of these,
one or two of these would show up at least.
When the Yom Kippur War came along in '73,
again, those warning indicators started showing up.
And then again in '79 with Afghanistan.
That was about a week before the invasion.
It was very close to the Christmas holiday.
So at that time, I said, "well, they're gonna go in at close - to midnight on Christmas Eve"
Because that's when everybody's gonna be asleep
"in the free world."
And that's exactly what they did.
I was off by an hour.
I couldn't understand why a lot of people couldn't see - what I could see.
I didn't look at that understanding
as anything more than just a greater understanding
of people and how they operate.
[Drake] I sat on the terrorism desk
in the Pentagon in 1993.
I was on that desk when they attempted to drop
the World Trade Center towers the first time with truck bombs.
That's when I first learned about Osama bin Laden.
I distinctly remember issuing reports
in which we said this is a serious matter.
This is not a one-time event.
There is a larger movement here,
and they're planning on doing more.
Al-Qaeda, the base,
and Osama bin Laden as their leader
weren't just issuing pronouncements,
they were actually calling for action.
The senior military officer, the J2,
reports to the joint chiefs of staff,
comes down to our alert center
in the National Military Joint Intelligence Center,
and he says, "yeah, I'm reading your reports."
Who cares about some raghead spouting off fatwas
in the desert underneath a fig tree?
Who cares?
"Not a threat."
[Roark] The National Security Agency
traditionally has been
one of the most productive of US intelligence agencies.
We relied very heavily on it ever since World War II
at least.
When I got the National Security Agency account,
I had heard that they were in pretty good shape.
I went for intensive rounds of briefings,
and after about three months,
I was shocked at the poor condition of the agency.
We were very ill-prepared for the digital age.
But National Security Agency management continued to think
that they were the best in the world
and had the best technology
because this had always been their reputation
and they were convinced
that there were no fundamental problems.
I was convinced that there were fundamental problems,
both technical and especially cultural,
and I became very worried very quickly.
[Loomis] See, they were drowning
in garbage.
The processes that were in place before ThinThread came along
were wild carded garbage collectors,
and they were dumping all the stuff
into a huge storage system
and the analysts were floundering trying to find out,
well, you know, "what's important to me?"
[Binney] ThinThread was our way of trying
to address the digital age.
It was a question of being able to manage the volume of data.
The terrorists are using all the cell phones,
all the land line phones, all of the internet connections - to communicate.
So the new Cold War, if you will,
was the worldwide explosion of the digital age.
The NSA took the different perspective that says,
"let's just collect everything
and then we'll have our analysts figure it out later."
The problem is, once they collected everything,
your analysts couldn't figure it out.
There was too much. They couldn't get through it - every day.
They'd make their database pulls and they've got hundreds - of thousands of returns.
Well, you could not get through it.
You're burying your analysts with meaningless data.
That's when I started looking at what we had to do
to solve the problem of the volume of data
and how could we isolate things that were important
for our analysts to look at.
And the key was metadata.
Just using the metadata in terms of relationships
across the network.
So you don't have to look internally at the content.
You look more at the relationships
of the people communicating
or organizations communicating in the world.
So that's a way you can see into large amounts of data - fairly quickly,
Effectively, and pull out data
that's relevant
to targets you want to analyze.
My biggest fear throughout all of my work at NSA
was the fear of human inaccuracy and human failure
in terms of interpreting things properly
or in terms of recognizing things.
I felt that that process needed to be fully automated
as much as possible so that the information coming in
was untouched by human hands.
Oops.
Many people called me things like "the great Satan,"
or, you know, "the evil one," I think,
and many other names, you know.
So I had whole groups of people that didn't want to talk to me
or be involved with me
because they felt if they did, they would lose their jobs.
I was sitting at my desk with pencil and paper
trying to build a structure of the Soviet military
command and control system, of all the forces.
In order to do it, I needed a little help
from the cryptologists.
So I went to them to get the bits that they had
in possession.
And they came back with a miniscule answer,
and I said, "if you don't want to work this problem",
just give me the bits and I'll do it."
I couldn't wait for them.
For a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile to be fired,
it takes it no more than 30 minutes
to go from one continent to the other.
That means whether or not you wish to fire back
before the weapons start landing,
you have 30 minutes to make that decision.
It was at a point in time where the civilization
could wipe themselves out in an hour
by nuclear exchange. For the longest time
in my career there at NSA,
I was trying to work... this is probably on
the order of 13 years,
I was trying to work with the computer people
because I wanted them to do certain programs
that would assist me in what I was attempting to do.
Every time I would ask them to do something for me,
they would say, "okay, please send us a memo"
saying you had this requirement request."
So I'd send them memo after memo.
That gave them a requirement.
That requirement gave them the justification
to go to congress or others internally in NSA
and ask for money.
So that helped them build their empire, you know?
But in the meantime, they would never solve my problem.
They would just take the money and keep asking me for
another requirement.
At one time in 1983,
miraculously this PC came up on my desk.
I had a friend who was probably
the best C language programmer at NSA.
His name was Bill, too, and I said, "Bill",
what do you think we could do with this PC?
If I could get an algorithm together,
do you think you could program that into this
two disk drive, 64k ram pc?
He says, "yeah, I think I could do that."
I said, "great."
So we would type in the query from unresolved issues
out of the database...
And up would pop the answer.
Where the mainframe's eight acres of computers
could not figure out what this data was,
I would take it and put it in my little two disk drive pc
and get the answer right away.
So I had to tell the computer people,
and I said, "you know, I have this little program - down here."
"You might want to see this."
And I had this printout from the database,
- and I was going through, "see, it didn't resolve this here. - Watch this here."
And I'd type it in to my little PC,
and up would come the answer.
There's another one, and I'd type it in there, - and up would pop the answer.
They started sweating, I could see.
And I said, "don't you think that's neat?"
He said, "yeah, don't you think that should - be in the mainframe?"
- I said, "sure. I think it should be." - In the mainframe.
"Why don't you send me a memo and I'll give it to you?"
I thought that was great.
In this process, of course, I learned, very simply put,
if you want something done, you have to just go do it.
You never ask for permission, only ask for forgiveness,
if you have to.
In the end, sometimes you don't have to.
Once you solve the problem, it's no longer a problem.
My philosophy was very simple.
If somebody says something is impossible,
that's something you have to do.
It's like open-ended thinking. You don't bound your thinking.
You let it float anywhere it wants to go.
So that gives you the idea of how you can be creative
in any environment.
And so that's what I was after,
being creative anywhere I went.
And that's what the SARC, the Sigint Automation - Research Center,
Was all about.
[Drake] The SARC was this.
Skunkworks organization,
about a dozen people.
Bill Binney was of the co-founders of that.
Ed Loomis was the integrator.
Kirk Weibe at that time was like a business manager
and analyst.
And they had other support people as well.
And they had a few contractors.
The SARC prided themselves on having a very small team
that was very creative and flexible.
They didn't want a lot of bureaucracy.
They had so low a profile that when I asked for - a briefing from them,
The management didn't even know about them.
They had to scramble to find out who they were.
They were kind of hiding until they had their system perfected.
[Drake] It was an extraordinary
organization.
And Bill, he was the algorithm brain.
He was the crypto-mathematician behind the algorithms
of what became known as ThinThread.
People are telling me, "you gotta fear Bill."
And the reason you have to fear Bill
is he's like this super crypto-mathematician.
And if there's anything wrong, he'll shred you.
So I end up calling him up, we made arrangements to meet,
and I end up showing up in his office one morning.
- I spent a couple of hours with him, - and it was immediately clear
Within the first 15 minutes that we were going to hit it off - really, really well.
Because the entire first part of our conversation
was all mathematically based.
The thing that Bill loves most is math.
As soon as anybody raises anything mathematical,
his eyes literally light up and he perks up
and he'll start talking about it, you know?
He just loves math.
And it's wonderful that he found his profession,
you know, the thing that he was really meant to do.
[Binney] The beauty of math
is that it's an attempt
to structure common sense
and consistencies in the universe.
That's all it is.
There is no chaos.
There is nothing that's infinite.
Everything is structured.
And it's just a matter of finding that structure.
I basically envisioned the graph
as a very large globe of the earth, see?
With a total of about 7 billion nodes in it, or dots.
Each representing an individual.
And having all the connections of all those individuals
with all the other connections they have anywhere in the world.
Think of yourselves as drifting into the globe.
So you're going inside the globe
and you can go to any point in the globe
and look at any given point to see the relationships
they have with all the other dots in the globe.
When you go into the globe, you pick out a dot,
and you can pull it out of that relationship graph,
and with it will come all of the nodes
that it has a relationship with.
When you pull that node out and its community, if you will,
the social network it had,
you pulled all of the backup data
that created those relationships to begin with
so that you can now timeline those relationships
and see the interactions over a period of time
whatever you wanted to find.
So that's how I envisioned the graph.
[Loomis] My interest was
in making Bill Binney happy.
Bill Binney is a traffic analyst.
So my focus was really on creating the metadata for him
that he could do his traffic analytic thing.
You can extract an awful lot about a person's life
just by looking at metadata.
And today, when you take all the metadata
that's being popped around the world
by GPS, by your cell phones,
by your transponders
for your E-Zpass on the highways,
by your credit card when you insert it into an ATM machine
or when you insert it into a cash register,
a check-out line,
all that data gets all brought together
and it all traces back to you, the individual.
Doesn't matter what you said in an e-mail
or what website you went to or what you downloaded.
What matters is what pattern your digital behavior is taking
and what fingerprints does that leave
of what you've been up to.
I first started to build on my portion of what I considered - the ThinThread program,
Which was the backend for analysis of the data
once it was acquired.
Ed was doing the front end, doing the sessionizer
getting the data together
and assembling it for me to look at.
Ed's sessionizer was our starting point
to access and scan the internet for important information.
I was convinced that the internet was the new way
of communications
for terrorists and criminals.
And we knew at that point that some of them
had been moving that way.
[Drake] The internet exploded.
The NSA was actually playing catch-up.
They were so way behind the time.
NSA management seriously considered, no kidding,
as to whether or not they would actually give people
e-mail technology.
And the reason is that we don't know what they're going - to send to each other.
And there were no secrets worth knowing on the internet.
It's all open. It's not secret.
There's no effort. We want real secrets.
We don't... internet?
You can't have a secret internet.
In about 1996, I believe it was,
we discovered Osama bin Laden's Inmarsat phone number,
and so we used that to follow his movements
and his intentions from '96 to '98.
Until someone compromised the fact
- that we had his specific phone number, - and he gave the number.
And so after that, we lost that as a source
of intelligence.
[Koppel] More than 80 dead,
more than 1,700 injured
in two bomb blasts today, which exploded just minutes
and 450 miles apart.
Those explosions set to go off at the US embassies
in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya,
were clearly a part of someone's war
against the United States, although it is still unclear
at this hour who our enemy is.
[man] There was smoke
and debris everywhere.
We immediately left the office because we didn't know - what had happened.
And there were people laying about,
and everybody that we came to was just covered in blood.
- [newscaster] We're joined now. - From the White House
By US national security advisor Sandy Burger.
Was this a failure of US intelligence?
- [Burger] Well, the investigation. - Is going on.
I don't believe that's the case, and I think it would be
inappropriate for me to comment on
what we know, what we don't know.
[Binney] In August of 1998,
we successfully got our sessionizer running
at the fiber-optic rates.
Ed gave a copy of that sessionizer
to our friends out at Bad Aibling,
one of our echelon sites for collecting data
in southern Germany.
We just wanted to say, "here, why don't you try this"
and see what you think and give us some feedback."
And he said, "gee, this sessionizer looks really"
great and works really great."
He says, you know, "I think I'll put it on the whole site."
They put it on their system Friday night.
And when they did that,
it started producing so much information
and feeding it back to NSA
that by Saturday morning it was about to crash
the entire storage system inside NSA.
It was too much data coming in. They couldn't handle it.
[Loomis] We were told it was bringing
the storage system to its knees.
And we were to turn it off.
So one of the programmers had to come in over the weekend
and turn off the sessionizer.
[Binney] This particular test
clearly showed
that there was so much more data there
that was much more valuable as a source of information
than anybody realized at NSA.
This was kind of a wake-up call
that I thought made it clear to them
that they needed to open up their thinking
to a much larger scale than they were thinking at.
[beeping]
[Wiebe] I had heard about Bill Binney,
but hadn't actually met him.
I called him up. I said, "Bill",
can I come down and see you
"and what your organization are doing?"
He said, "sure. Come on down."
So I go down, I join Bill Binney
in the Sigint Automation Research Center.
And I look around, and as I meet these guys
and talk to them
and interview them, find out who's doing what,
and begin to see the results of their efforts,
I become literally excited.
In terms of facing the challenges of big data,
digital communications, and the internet,
I saw the answer right before me.
This little research organization
had the keys to NSA's future.
My concern immediately was
does anybody else know that?
Do they even recognize...
Does anybody in any position of influence or power
even recognize what they have?
[Roark] I was aware of the technology
that went into ThinThread from 1997.
I got a formal briefing from Bill and Ed and their team,
and I thought it was pretty impressive
compared to what else I had heard at NSA.
I thought it looked very promising.
I started giving them money.
And I would get Congress to agree
to make sure that they were funded to develop
their systems...
Because the agency was admitting they had to update
to the digital age from the analog age.
They had not started it yet.
And even under the analog systems,
there is this deluge of data coming in.
And once you get the digital data,
you get these high capacity pipelines,
it was going to be far worse.
So it was going to be essential that there was some way
to pick out the targets out of this.
Some way far better than the keyword system
that NSA was using at that point.
[Binney] Shortly after
the Bad Aibling test,
we had the whole system running,
and then from there on, we just took in more and more data
of large numbers of phones and large numbers of computers.
We started consolidating that into my big graph,
which we called the big ass graph.
We started pulling in such a massive amount of data
and the system was working so well,
we could see no limit to it...
Building relationships between billions of people.
I mean, we're talking trillions of transactions.
It was pretty clear that we were building
the most powerful analysis tool that had been developed
in history
to monitor, basically, the entire world
in near real time.
This is monitoring every member of the population automatically.
You invade everybody's privacy.
That's not compatible with a democracy.
That simply is not compatible.
That's like the stasi on super steroids
or the KGB on super steroids, you know?
This is things that they couldn't even dream of.
That's where I, in particular, said we have to do something
to protect the individuals here,
especially those who are innocent
of any wrong-doing whatsoever.
There's no reason to even have this data about them.
[Roark] General Hayden came on
as a new director of NSA.
By that time, the congressional intelligence staff
had become very disillusioned
with the NSA's ability to manage modernization.
He was somewhat forthcoming in a sense
that he was willing to make changes,
although not necessarily in the areas
that congress was focused on,
and he was a very fast talker.
When he would brief the members, he would talk very rapidly.
He would use all kinds of similes and analogies
and everything that left you scratching your head - while he plowed ahead,
And he would get by with a lot that way.
I think the members,
this being a difficult enough topic to understand - to begin with,
He left the members in the dust.
[Binney] When Michael Hayden came in
as director of NSA,
one of the first things he said was
the NSA was going deaf and blind.
So he created the NSA transformation office, the NTO.
A friend of mine became the chief of the NTO,
and he realized what we were doing with ThinThread,
and he thought that was great.
So he sent his deputy down, and he said,
"what can you guys do with $1.2 billion?"
Well, to be offered all of a sudden 1.2 billion
was flabbergasting, you know?
It was kind of hard to deal with.
We had been operating with just a couple million dollars.
So we asked them to give us a little bit of time
to try to figure out what we might be able
to do with that.
So when he came back in,
we said we could upgrade the entire world...
Everything we have in the world,
and everything back here in the United States,
but in the process, we could only spend
maybe a little over $300 million to do it.
So he said, "that's really great."
A few days later, he comes back down.
He says, "you guys did such a great job"
with 1.2 billion offer.
"Now what can you do with 1.4 billion?"
It was very shortly after that that my friend in the NTO
was replaced.
He was basically fired.
And Hayden proposed a program called Trailblazer.
And that was a multi-billion dollar program
that was going to be basically outsourced
and run by contractors and developed by contractors.
[Roark] When the NSA started on.
Trailblazer,
I asked them if they would send down the design paper
and let me read it.
After I read it, I called NSA
and I asked if I could speak to the Trailblazer management.
And I said, "I want to make sure I understand this paper."
I said, "from what I understand",
to modernize digitally, what you want to do
is start with your analog system
and evolve that into a digital system
by putting out one part at time
"and upgrading and adding more parts."
And they said, "yes, that's it exactly."
And I said, "it will never work."
It's a non-starter. It will never work."
Why would we start from outmoded analog technology
and try to evolve that into digital technology?
It just... it made no sense.
You had to go with the new modern digital technology
from the outset.
One of the reasons that I supported ThinThread
was that I thought it was far more innovative
and much more simple and elegant in design
than what they were considering,
therefore probably posing fewer problems.
[Binney] From our tests
with our big ass graph,
it was pretty clear to us that we had to protect
the privacy rights of individuals.
So we devised a way to build in protections
and make it possible to encrypt all their attributes
so you couldn't tell who they were
and you couldn't analyze what they were doing
because you couldn't identify them.
And in cases where they weren't even in zones of suspicion,
which we would define within the graph,
their data wouldn't even be taken in,
so that no one would have an opportunity to abuse
their privacy.
This is also metadata coming in.
The FISA filtering tool that we had
filtered out any American citizen
or party that was in America
unless it was a specific target.
But even then, you would have to get a warrant
to reveal the identity.
[Binney] By 2000, we had it all connected
and everything together and running from one end
to the other
in 24 hours a day
in three different sites focused on Asia.
The only sites that agreed
to cooperate with us
were those sites that were known as research sites.
You know, I never called it a test site, but...
I mean, they were existing sites, I mean.
And they were producing intelligence from that
for a long period of time.
[Roark] We went to NSA
and asked for a briefing.
The SARC team came in and to my great surprise,
the entire Trailblazer team came to the briefing uninvited.
Bill and Ed started the briefing,
and what was astounding was that it went all the way
from the point of collection all the way through reporting,
and including automated reporting.
So I turned to the Trailblazer people,
"are you going to incorporate this into Trailblazer?
Wouldn't this help you?"
And they were pretty much noncommittal and stony-faced.
And it turns out that SARC got in a lot of trouble
for this
after I and other congressional staff left.
General Hayden called in the entire SARC team,
lined them up in his office, dressed them down,
berated them without letting them have a chance to speak.
And then issued a dir-gram
telling the entire NSA
that once a corporate decision had been made,
that they were not to undermine it with Congress.
In other words, they were to cover up
any adverse information.
It was, to me, an absolute clarion call
to keep Congress in the dark.
I thought it was very brazen.
[Binney] General Hayden basically said.
ThinThread was no contribution to the Trailblazer program.
Trailblazer is the program, and we're not gonna have
any other program.
ThinThread, in my view, once we had it all together,
solved all the problems of volume, velocity, and variety.
We had solved all those problems
that they were claiming were problems.
But they rejected it as even a risk mitigation process.
I mean, that's the kind of experience I had
with generals back in 1968 when just prior
to the Tet Offensive we were predicting
that offensive two months in advance.
Some people came to me and showed me some reports
on activity in Vietnam,
and they said that they were preparing a major offensive
that would go from the delta all the way up north Vietnam.
It was all reported to all the major commanders in the field
as well as the pentagon and everybody,
but nobody in a position of authority paid attention to it.
General Westmoreland was again saying to the people - in the United States
That we were winning.
We're watching the situation carefully.
And I'm confident that any further initiatives
can be blunted.
[Binney] I basically looked at that as
a philosophy of the arrogance of power.
They felt they had so much power that they were invincible.
I had friends who were stationed in Vietnam.
One colonel that I knew had a battalion
stationed on the road from Saigon to Cambodia,
which was a major point of attack.
He, of course, had the reporting, too.
So he had 50% of his men in the trenches all the time,
24 hours a day...
Until the attack.
He was ready, and he lost one man
on the first day,
and he stopped them cold.
The problem was that all the forces on either side of him
had fallen back because they couldn't hold
their position on the line
because they weren't ready.
They didn't listen to the intelligence.
So he had to eventually withdraw.
The point was if they were ready,
that offensive would have gotten absolutely nowhere,
but they didn't pay attention.
This was a deceitful
and treacherous act by the enemy.
[Binney] We thought they were all idiots.
I thought every general in the country should be fired
after that offensive.
All of them.
They should have been drummed out of the service.
I mean, we got rid of generals and all that during World War II
for very similar kinds of negligence,
so I don't understand why we didn't get rid of them then.
And in terms of Americans, I think there were a little - over 2,000 lives lost
In that offensive.
That doesn't count how many were wounded.
That's why I looked at it as they were treating us
as simply meat on the line.
You know, throw more meat on the line.
We begin our special coverage tonight
with the latest on the terror attack
against the US guided-missile destroyer Cole.
The navy says it has recovered the bodies of seven sailors
and is searching the mangled interior
of the ship for ten more.
About 35 other sailors were injured.
- [newscaster] In dreary weather. - Fitting the occasion,
The first bodies of sailors killed aboard the Cole
arrived in Germany this afternoon.
The blast which took their lives
is estimated to have been caused
by several hundred pounds of explosives
in a new and deadly terrorist tactic.
[newscaster] Immediately after the attack
there was nothing left of the small local harbor craft
which the navy says had carried the explosives.
Despite instability in the immediate region,
the strategic port of Aden has been used as a refueling stop - for two years
And the Cole was on a heightened state of alert.
But there was no defense it seems
against suicide bombers in a small boat.
[Binney] We decided to continue
developing ThinThread
to try to insure that we had something that would - functionally work
By the end of 2000
- so that we could address the terrorism problem. - In the real world, not in the wish world
Of Trailblazer, for example.
That's when I went to our terrorism analysis center
and said, "okay, what sites do you have that will... "
That produce any meaningful information for you
"to analyze the terrorism targets around the world?"
And so they gave me a list of 18 sites,
and so I took that as the target set to go against terrorism.
And then I came in November of 2000
and made a proposal that we do a deployment of ThinThread
to those 18 sites starting in January of 2001.
But it came back rejected.
So I don't know exactly who rejected it.
I assumed it was the chief of SID, Maureen Baginski.
She was the third person in rank in the agency.
There was the director, the deputy director, then her.
[Loomis] General Hayden
hired Bill Black
to come in and take over the deputy directorship.
Once Bill Black was brought in from SAIC,
where he had been the vice president,
the following spring, he brought in
another senior vice president from SAIC,
and that person was Sam Visner.
And who gets the contract to develop Trailblazer?
SAIC.
What's wrong with this picture?
[Binney] SAIC was a private company.
It is made up basically of retired NSA individuals.
People from NSA retire and they'll go into a company - like SAIC,
And then they'll use their contacts back at NSA
to get contracts back to SAIC.
So when Sam Visner came in to take over
the NSA transformation office,
the first thing he did was to call me to his office.
So I went up to his office to talk to him,
and when I went in there, the senior developer
for the Trailblazer program was there.
And the first thing Sam told me,
he said, "I do not want you briefing ThinThread"
to anybody again."
And the reason he said that, of course,
was because we had already set up an appointment
to brief Charlie Allen.
He was the senior collection officer
for the intelligence community,
so he had a lot of influence.
So I asked him if he wanted me to cancel that appointment,
and he said, "no, no, don't do that."
You go ahead and finish that briefing."
I said, "okay, I'll do that."
When Charlie Allen got in there,
the first thing he sat down and said to us,
even before we started to show him anything about ThinThread,
he said, "I hear you have a cheap Trailblazer here",
and I'm here to see it."
Well, I mean, I had been invited.
Maureen Baginski had come up
'cause Maureen knew Charlie Allen.
They were friends for a long...
They had known each other for a number of years, I think.
And she was there, and she said...
At that point, she said, "yes, Charlie",
but we still need the money."
That was the end of our briefing on ThinThread.
[Loomis] On August 20th of 2001,
Maureen baginski called me and asked to speak with me
and Bill Binney
at 4:30 in the afternoon that day.
And she said to meet her in her office,
so Bill and I went down to her office.
And it was in this meeting with her that she advised us
that she was terminating ThinThread.
And she said that her decision was made because
she had to decide whether or not
she wanted to make six people unhappy
or almost 500 unhappy.
So she chose to make the six people unhappy.
So her decision was what I basically call
happiness management.
- [newscaster] They are letting us stay up. - I'm not sure why.
Newark is allowing us to stay up.
We're... only the news helicopters are allowed up
of the entire country.
We're, like, five people in the air, that's it.
Oh, my god, what's going on?
It's like the side of the building just blew out, Chad, - on the other side.
The side we can't see.
Look at it.
Oh, my God!
The whole tower collapsed.
The whole building is gone. The whole building.
Oh!
Daniela, did you hear me? The entire building collapsed.
It is gone.
The second tower is gone.
Oh, those poor people. Oh, God.
On 9/11, I had taken my father-in-law
to the eye doctor for an examination,
so I was sitting in the waiting room
watching television
while he was getting examined.
And that's when I saw the first plane
hit the tower in New York.
And immediately that said to me
that we as an agency had failed to give warning
of this terrorist attack.
When my father-in-law was done with his examination,
I took him home and then tried to get back into NSA
to see what I could do
to maybe help in getting information
about who did this and all.
And they wouldn't let me back in simply because
director Hayden had sent everybody home
that wasn't necessary for the job,
and so the guards were keeping everybody out,
so we couldn't get back in that day.
So the day after 9/11,
I came in dressed like I was going to sweep the floor,
so the guards let me in.
Otherwise they would have kept me out then, too,
because that day,
- General Hayden had ordered everybody out. - Of the building, too.
So when I got in there, I went up to the SARC.
And while in there trying to look at the material
on my computer,
my contracting...
President of the contracting group
that I had working on ThinThread
came over to me and said that he'd just been
in a contractor meeting with Sam Visner.
And in that meeting, Sam Visner had told him that...
He said to him, "do not embarrass large companies."
You do your part, you'll get your share.
"There's plenty for everybody."
And he also said that Sam had said that,
"we could milk this cow for 15 years."
We began to go out to the workforce
and I would accompany Maureen Baginski.
The workforce took this extraordinarily hard.
People would ask her, "what are you gonna do?"
I still remember her saying,
"9/11 is a gift to NSA.
We're gonna get all the money we need and then some."
Direct quote.
"9/11 was a gift to NSA."
All she saw was dollars coming from congress,
and we would get to spend freely.
[Binney] It was not what
we were supposed to be about.
It wasn't about making money,
it was about protecting the country
and the free world. It wasn't... you know,
wasn't how big of an empire we could build
or how much money we could make, you know?
It was just sickening.
In late September or early October,
we in the SARC were watching as all this
equipment started coming in
and piling up in the hallways and outside the SARC
and inside the SARC in the walkways
between the partitions for the desks.
We knew something was going on because of all this equipment - coming in.
And then later on in early October,
it started to disappear.
That meant they were assembling the hardware
somewhere down the corridor
a little bit down from where we were.
And then by mid-October, the second week in October,
some of the people who used to do the...
Who I had under contract to do the software for us in SARC,
came to me and said that,
"you know what they're doing down there?
They're taking in data on every US citizen in the country."
To do the spying on US citizens,
they had to use the only software that managed
large-scale operations,
which was the software that I put together,
which was the backend of ThinThread,
that part that does the graphing
and the management of information
indexing to the graph.
And one of the first things they did
to make that process work efficiently, of course, - according to them,
Was to remove of all the encryption algorithms
we put into it...
To protect the privacy rights and the identity
of US citizens or any other citizens
in that database.
Well, I mean, after I was told
that they were pulling in all this data on US citizens
and basically graphing the relationships
of every US citizen that uses a telephone
or anything electronic,
well I... it was clear to me that I had to leave the agency.
I couldn't stay there, so I had to get out - as fast as I could.
Bill, Ed, and kirk became so disgusted
with all the resistance they were getting,
and with some of the personal attacks on them,
I think also,
that they decided to take an offer to retire
at the end of October,
and they told me that they planned to do that.
Our last breath at NSA was October 31st, 2001.
Halloween day. Kind of fitting.
[Binney] After 9/11,
and after we left,
Tom took over running ThinThread.
And he said, "well, let's take the software"
in ThinThread
and run it against the database
that we've accumulated inside NSA
to find out if there's any information on the 9/11 attack
that we should have known about, but didn't.
[Drake] We let it run... it was somewhere
around 24 to 36 hours.
I remember my program manager coming back
with the initial results
and they were just devastating.
We discovered critical intelligence,
Al-Qaeda and associate movement intelligence
that had never been discovered by NSA.
They didn't even know they had it in their databases.
But also the specific details
of numbers and movement
and times and locations...
Travel.
And you're seeing the dispersal patterns
that occurred after it happened.
You're also seeing that there was parts of the plot
in which they weren't successful.
There was multiple planes that had been targeted.
And for a number of reasons,
those particular planes were not actually hijacked.
You can imagine the horror of realizing
what had not been discovered
and the confirmation of what was known
sitting in these databases.
What if this was discovered prior to 9/11?
We had the information in the databases.
NSA's response?
Completely shut the program down.
[Roark] 9/11 would have been avoided.
We would have caught the people
who were communicating from San Diego
with people abroad, with known terrorists abroad.
There was no way we wouldn't have caught that.
[Binney] After Ed and kirk
and I left NSA,
we formed a little company, a consulting company
we called Entity Mapping, LLC.
We decide to try to bring the concepts of ThinThread
to other agencies and government
and bring it to the US government
through another door.
[Binney] We were requested by
the Senate Intelligence Committee staffer
to go to the National Reconnaissance Office.
They manage all the satellites and reconnaissance
kinds of missions.
We were working there on a program,
but NSA found out about it.
They got the whole program terminated.
Then we went to customs and border protection.
They got us fired from that one.
Bill and Kirk were just infuriated by every time
we went to get a contract with a promising customer,
at the last minute, it would be shut off.
Happened with INSCOM, it happened with the pentagon,
it happened with NRO, it happened with CIA.
We are stopped at each one of those,
even though were are successful.
- Okay, I think we got it. - Yeah.
[Wiebe] Including one
where we were given a set of data
and asked to analyze it
even though NSA had already analyzed it.
We found extremely valuable material in that data
where NSA had not.
We wrote up a report, sent it up the chain.
A senior executive in that agency said,
"my god, these guys are going to embarrass Michael Hayden"
and the people at the fort.
"We have to stop this program."
And it stopped immediately. We were told to stop work.
Don't do anything else.
And they proceeded to dismantle the computers
that we were working with
and the data that we had discovered
and all of the intelligence
was wiped off the disks.
[Binney] NSA attempted to keep
the principles of ThinThread
being applied anywhere in the US government
so that no other agency in the US government
could take advantage of it either.
So in essence, they wanted to keep the US population
and the free world's population vulnerable,
which is what they did.
And that's why we filed the DoD IG complaint
in September of 2002 against NSA
for corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse.
[Loomis] Kirk drafted up
a very strong fraud complaint
and we said, "let's go with it."
And Diane was also a party to this as well.
She agreed to go along.
So there was Kirk, Bill, Diane, and myself,
and then Kirk was actually floating this by Tom Drake.
I was not aware that he was,
but he was sharing it with Tom Drake.
And Tom, since he was still working at NSA,
said that he would support us from the inside.
[Drake] I had access
to critical information
that clearly NSA was hiding.
- Because of all these investigations. - That were ongoing,
NSA said, "let's find where the skeletons are",
capture it all, and then bury the report
"as deep as possible."
This was actually something that Bill Black,
the deputy director, was doing.
And the order went out,
"no one will ever see that report."
We can't show anybody
what ThinThread discovered that we hadn't discovered.
We can't show ThinThread had confirmed
"what was clearly a failure."
So I was contacted officially
and arrangements were made for me to meet
with the investigators.
And so the DoD IG's office took that investigation on
with about 12 investigators,
and took them about two and half years to do it.
They finally published their report
in, I think it was, January of 2005.
And at the time, about 98% of it was redacted
because it was so damning to NSA.
- [Loomis] Many of the redactions. - Are on paragraphs
That are marked unclassified.
So it was clear to me
that the dirty laundry was blackwashed.
[Binney] This was our justice department
covering up for those crimes.
[Wiebe] In 2005,
Trailblazer was declared an abject failure,
having wasted billions of dollars.
A lot of millionaires were made during that time,
but not much intelligence got done.
It was the largest failure in NSA history.
People don't realize that.
And yet, general Hayden,
who presided over the largest failure in NSA history,
was promoted to a higher position of authority,
made deputy director of National Intelligence,
and then promoted again
and made director of Central Intelligence.
It is odd when mankind promotes failure.
Something is wrong.
On the 26th of July of 2007,
the FBI decided to raid four people.
That was Kirk Weibe, Ed Loomis,
Diane Roark, and myself.
So they fabricated evidence
to get a warrant signed by a judge
to go in and raid our houses and take our material.
Specifically, they were after all the material
that was related to ThinThread.
My son answered the door and let them in,
and they came in with their guns drawn
and pushed him out of the way at gunpoint,
and came into the bedroom where my wife was getting dressed
and pointed guns at her, and then came into the bathroom
where I was taking a shower and pointed a gun at me.
I didn't hear them at first, apparently.
By the time I heard them,
it sounded like they were going to break down the door.
They were rattling it madly and banging it back and forth.
When the raid occurred here,
it was such a shock to my inner core.
I couldn't believe it was happening.
[Roark] I went to call
my attorney first.
She told me to ask for the affidavit
that justified the raid.
- I asked them, they said it was classified. - And I couldn't see it.
As soon as I got off the phone, I realized they had gone - to the office
And picked up all the most relevant information,
all of the stuff about NSA that was on the shelves,
which was, I think, a first indication
that they had entered the home previously.
When all that equipment was taken from my house,
my computers, my data, my newspapers,
my memorandums that I had shared with friends of mine,
I just could not believe
that I was perceived as an enemy
by my own country.
I think... I keep thinking if this happened to us,
and we were educated people,
sophisticated in government ways,
who could get some help,
what happens to the man on the street?
What happens to the 18-year-old kid?
[Binney] When I found out that all
the things that we were doing
as a result of that 9/11,
and I heard vice president Cheney's statement about,
"we have to go to the dark side,"
I've looked at it as a total destruction
of our society,
and we lost all moral standing in the world
as a result of going to the dark side.
It was just sad.