In 2010, Thomas Drake, a former senior employee at the National Security Agency, was charged with espionage for speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun about a bloated, dysfunctional intelligence program he believed would violate Americans’ privacy. The case against him eventually fell apart, and he pled guilty to a single misdemeanor, but his career in the NSA was over.
Though Drake was largely vindicated, the central question he raised about technology and privacy has never been resolved. Almost seven years have passed now, but Pat Eddington, a former CIA analyst, is still trying to prove that Drake was right.
While working for Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., Eddington had the unique opportunity to comb through still-classified documents that outline the history of two competing NSA programs known as ThinThread and Trailblazer. He’s seen an unredacted version of the Pentagon inspector general’s 2004 audit of the NSA’s failures during that time, and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests.
In January, Eddington decided to take those efforts a step further by suing the Department of Defense to obtain the material, he tells The Intercept. “Those documents completely vindicate” those who advocated for ThinThread at personal risk, says Eddington.
The controversy dates back to 1996, when Ed Loomis, then a computer systems designer for the NSA, along with his team worked to move the NSA’s collection capabilities from the analog to the digital world. The shift would allow the NSA to scoop up internet packets, stringing them together into legible communications, and automating a process to instantly decide which communications were most interesting, while masking anything from Americans. The prototype, called GrandMaster, would need to ingest vast amounts of data, but only spit out what was most valuable, deleting or encrypting everything else.
Then in the fall of 2001, four passenger airliners were hijacked by terrorists as part of a suicide plot against Washington, D.C., and New York City. The U.S. intelligence community faced a disturbing wakeup call: its vast collection systems had failed to prevent the attacks.
Yet, in response, the NSA simply started collecting more data.
The NSA sent out a bid to multiple defense contractors, seeking a program that could collect and analyze communications from phones and the internet. Science Applications Internal Corporation, or SAIC, won the contract, known as Trailblazer. Meanwhile, internally, NSA employees were developing a similar, less costly alternative called ThinThread, a follow-on to GrandMaster. ThinThread would collect online communications, sort them, and mask data belonging to Americans.
Those involved in ThinThread argue that their approach was better than a collect-it-all approach taken by NSA.
“Bulk collection kills people,” says Bill Binney, a former NSA analyst, who rose to be a senior technical official with a dream of automating the agency’s espionage. “You collect everything, dump it on the analyst, and they can’t see the threat coming, can’t stop it,” he says.
Binney built a back-end system — a processor that would draw on data collected by ThinThread, analyze it, look at whether or not the traffic was involves American citizens, and pass on what was valuable for foreign intelligence.
“Bulk acquisition doesn’t work,” agrees Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA senior analyst, who was trying to help convince NSA of ThinThread’s value at the time.
The analysts are drowning in data, and Binney and Wiebe believe ThinThread would have solved the problem by helping the NSA sort through the deluge automatically while protecting privacy using encryption.
But Binney and Wiebe say advocates of ThinThread hit every possible bureaucratic roadblock on the way, sitting in dozens of meetings with lawyers and lawmakers. In the meantime, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time, said he decided to fund an outside contract for a larger effort, focused on gathering all communications, not just those over the internet, as ThinThread was designed to do.
Additionally, while ThinThread masked American communications, Hayden’s legal and technical advisors were concerned the collection itself would be a problem. Some of Hayden’s senior officials at the NSA came from SAIC, the company that won contract to design a proof of concept for Trailblazer.
“A tiny group of people at NSA had developed a capability for next to no money at all to give the government an unprecedented level of access to any number of foreign terrorists,” Eddington says. “Instead that system was shut down in favor of an SAIC boondoggle that cost taxpayers, by my last count, close to a billion dollars.”
He argues the contract, and the “incestuous” relationship between the NSA chief and the contractor never received the scrutiny it deserved. “It was clearly an ethical problem,” Loomis said.
Ultimately, however, the NSA went with Trailblazer. Hayden rejected the ThinThread proposal because the intelligence community’s lawyers were concerned it wouldn’t work on a global scale, and that it would vacuum up too much American data. Hayden has continued dismissing concerns years later as the grumblings of disgruntled employees. Hayden told PBS Frontline ThinThread “was not the answer to the problems we were facing, with regard to the volume, variety and velocity of modern communications.”
In 2002, Wiebe, Binney, Loomis, Drake, and Diane Roark, a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee who had been advocating for ThinThread, united to complain to the Defense Department’s inspector general, arguing that ThinThread, while still a prototype, would be the best surveillance system. The oversight body completed its report in 2004, which included major concerns about Trailblazer.
“We talked about going for the nuclear option,” Wiebe said, referring to discussions at the time about contacting the press.
But Drake went it alone, however, never telling his colleagues what he planned to do. Stories about the disagreements started showing up in news headlines based on leaks. The Bush administration in 2007 sent the FBI after the whistleblowers, raiding each of the whistleblowers’ homes who raised complaints to the Pentagon inspector general. Drake faced espionage charges after speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun about the alleged mismanagement and waste in the NSA.
Though Drake wasn’t sent to prison, he lost his career in government, and now works at an Apple store. The question of whether ThinThread would have provided a better capability than Trailblazer was never resolved.
While ThinThread never made it to production, some of the analytic elements, minus the privacy protections, made it into Fort Meade as part of a massive surveillance program now known as Stellar Wind.
But there may be a way to settle the debate. The watchdog agency tasked with oversight of the Department of Defense completed a full investigation into the battle between ThinThread and the Trailblazer. The Pentagon inspector general published a heavily redacted version of that investigation in 2011; that report is now the only public record available, aside from the account of the whistleblowers who exposed it.
Despite everything that’s come out about its surveillance programs, the NSA still won’t release the full ThinThread investigation. “I don’t really know what they’re trying to hide,” said Loomis.
Loomis says he thinks those redactions were more for the sake of Hayden’s reputation than protecting real classified information. He eventually documented the saga in a self-published book called “NSA’s Transformation: An Executive Branch Black Eye.”
Drake told The Intercept in an email that efforts to uncover the Pentagon inspector general’s ThinThread investigation were a large part of his defense. Since then, the Office of Special Counsel concluded last March that the Department of Justice may have destroyed evidence that might have helped exonerate him.
In the meantime, however, hope is fading that the entire story of ThinThread will emerge from behind the government door of secrecy. “We’ve been trying for 15 or 16 years now to bring the U.S. government the technical solution to save lives, but they fight us left and right,” said Wiebe.
Eddington says the ThinThread controversy demonstrates the lack of oversight of the intelligence community. “The mentality that gave us this system is still in place,” he says. “We could see this become de facto permanent,” he said.
“Then in the fall of 2001, four passenger airliners were hijacked by terrorists as part of a suicide plot against Washington, D.C., and New York City. The U.S. intelligence community faced a disturbing wakeup call: its vast collection systems had failed to prevent the attacks.”
The system failed because it did not include communications from the Executive branch; a little snooping would have exposed the traitors at the top.
But, it is so much easier to believe authority figures like Bush, Obama, and now Trump, than question their lies.
Yes Id like far more info on the legalalities of how to obtain withheld documents
I’m not sure what your article’s about. The headline is about a lawsuit, and then it goes into history of a 16 yo NSA program? Why not more information about the lawsuit and what it means to attain?
This story was covered by a documentary film “A Good American” directed and produced by Friedrich Moser. Binney, Drake, Loomis and Roark all make appearances. It came out in 2015. Riveting and scary.
I just kept thinking how ridiculous it is that we spend so much billions and effort to thwart the terrorism threat. Compare deaths:money:surveillance of terrorism and say, drunk driving. Drunk driving causes orders of magnitude more deaths, yet has orders of magnitude less $ and surveillance aimed at nabbing drunk drivers.
Terrorism isn’t a real threat (well, no more dire than drunk driving, or workplace accidents, or cops killing innocent people, etc.) It is though a boon to the surveillance companies, government agencies, and tough-talk politicians. A nice convenient justification to keep the lucre and power going.
[[[ I just kept thinking how ridiculous it is that we spend so much billions and effort to thwart the terrorism threat. ]]]
What’s even worse than that?
How about this: We spent 50 years fighting the Russians in the Cold War… deposed the old hard liner Commies in the 1990s… and then… TODAY, the Democrats riot in the streets demanding that we become Commies… and fight the reborn Russia for another 50 years (or nuke them)
Democrats are nuts. They are worse than a Jim Jones Cult running around the streets burning shit like the Spirit Cooking cult members that they really are.
Don’t drink the koolaid???? Democrats say, “Gimme More Koolaid!”
lol they aren’t “demanding that we become commies”. we didn’t depose shit; you might remember yeltsin did that, or you might not. agree the democrats that want war with russia are batshit crazy.
Don’t be so naive.
The Bankers and Insurance Industry destroyed the USSR with Chernobyl.
You don’t know how Lloyds of London operates.
property is theft, comrade.
Can I have your car?
;)
“Loomis says he thinks those redactions were more for the sake of Hayden’s reputation than protecting real classified information….
Drake told The Intercept in an email that efforts to uncover the Pentagon inspector general’s ThinThread investigation were a large part of his defense. Since then, the Office of Special Counsel concluded last March that the Department of Justice may have destroyed evidence that might have helped exonerate him.”
The War on Terror has always been the war for grabbing more of taxpayers’ money. Hayden is just another treasonous profiteer. Would be nice to make the despicable and thoroughly ugly Hayden to pay Drake for the lost years.
When individual survival is not guaranteed as intended by God, then people tend to form and join groups. This is a common practice for insects like ants and bees. Insect colonies disallow individuals and have no place for them except as food in their jaws. Humans who are unable to thrive as individuals typically join colonies and adopt the colony code. As individualism is crushed, colonies eventually collide with other colonies and wargames are the order of the day. Human evolution will eventually spawn 2 more appendages to the current 4.
A point raised in the Washington v. Trump ruling that may be a preview of TDOJ motions in other national-security cases, such as this one.
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2017/02/09/17-35105.pdf
“Unreviewable” is that Nixonian logic the Executive ring is somehow its own circus: “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”
Every president since Iran-Contra criminal Reagan has had reason to believe they’re above the law.
The 3 judges were making a point. When they dredge up ex parte Milligan and ex parte Quirin they’re serious about judicial review even when mentioning deference. It’s a hint to TDOJ that they seriously went the wrong direction; if they had simply pleaded to the judges’ sense of executive deference it would have been a lot better for Donald’s case.
In other words, the judge said…”Will the governments council please approach the bench.(leans down and whispers..) Now now now, which one of you dumb schmucks wrote this drivel? Your lucky I don’t slap every one of you with sanctions, notwithstanding throwing you in jail for criminal stupidity. Did you really think you could insult this court’s intelligence, and get away with it? I’ve got news for you. The next time you appear before me, you so much as bat an eye of insolence, you’ll wish you had never entered law school… COMPRENDE? Now take that piece shit you wrote and get the fuck out of my court before I make fools of you in front of the entire planet. One more thing…, clean up your stinking slime trail on your way out too. And use your jackets. NOW. “
I was sort of interpreting coram nobis to be implying Executive honey catches more favorable-decision-flies than vinegar, but certainly love the notion some Executive-constraining federal judge swinging the pair you’ve described – actually exists somewhere.
“There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability”
Will you please at least bother to confirm your hyperbolic claims aren’t rubbish before posting them?
“In United States constitutional law, plenary power is a power that has been granted to a body, or person, in absolute terms, with no review of, or limitations upon, the exercise of that power. The assignment of a plenary power to one body divests all other bodies from the right to exercise that power, where not otherwise entitled. Plenary powers are not subject to judicial review in a particular instance or in general.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenary_power
After living in Maryland in a neighborhood where 50+% of the residents work at Ft. Meade I am not surprised by the incestuous corruption without accountability that exists. The thing to remember is these are mostly achievement driven, ex-military people who would pawn their own mothers for a second guaranteed pension, while working in commission based private contractor worlds. They literally think that the information they have about the threats to our country are enough to justify their bats shit crazy programs all the meanwhile demanding smaller government when they express their own political views.
It’s seriously inbred corruption, double dipping, MIC entitlement mentality without any outside review.
Lots of money to be made (looted) as a destroyer of the world.
Mercs… and, batshit crazy professional conspiracy theorists at the CIA and NSA line their budgets with your facebook pics.
Hitler would’ve LOVED facebook. Anne Frank wouldn’t survive 24 hours, today.
Right. No change in behavior from the NSA should convince you they knew and approved.
same thing the clintonites are doing in blaming bernie voters for their defeat, which will inevitably lead to more defeats; face it, it’s just incompetence.
Actually, democrats believe in the Boogieman and Santa Claus.
If memory serves, I seem to remember Binney and Drake saying in an interview, they had seen documents that proved the NSA had data on the whereabouts and phones of the 9/11 terrorists. I personally believe that is why they were persecuted by the Feds. To shut them up.
Secrecy breeds corruption.
And intelligence organizations require secrecy.
This has always been the eternal contradiction of the world of spys.
“Secrecy breeds corruption.”
Indeed, it absolutely assures corruption.
Anything that leads to more openness and less spending is a good thing.
Further evidence of the lies by Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Barack Obama and their many cronies about how Snowden should have worked within the system. Yes, so they could have put him in jail to keep him from revealing the extent to which elected officials, military officials, civil servants and their corporate cronies at the highest levels have conspired to subvert the Constitution.
Look at this: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/09/presidential-executive-order-enforcing-federal-law-respect-transnational – now ALL executive agencies are ordered to share ALL their data, within whatever tenuous limits the law were applied if it were applied. The NSA analysts might not have a use for all that crap, but I’m sure the DEA will.
Great article Jenna, Thanks!
Many folks don’t realize that much of the initial criticism of these mass surveillance programs…
…that remain in place in clear violation of the 4th Amendment no matter what anyone’s lawyerly, made-“legal”-after-the-fact, definition of the word “is” is…
…were based as much on combating financial fraud/improprieties and promoting effective intelligence techniques as they were on the more commonly covered, despicable, and democracy-crushing violations of due process. It’s a big part of the story that rarely gets the emphasis it deserves.
Typo in the article: Science Applications International (vice Internal) Corporation, which has subsequently spun off its software programs as Leidos Corporation.
Wake up, people!
Surveillance and Espionage were always core to the grand design of the internet.
Don’t forget, it was sanctioned by Democrats from 1993-2000. Clinton Admin, itself, prosecuted Phil Zimmerman over PGP (because it thwarted the grand design.)
VP Al Gore invented the Internet; and, his reward — he now sits on the board of KPCB.
You ought to avail yourself to any of the multitude of articles and books written on the origin of the internet, which will perhaps teach you that
a. The internet came into being to help scientific researchers, principally at high energy physics facilities such as SLAC, DESY and CERN share masses of data; and
b. Al Gore did not invent the internet. Seriously, I doubt the guy ever wrote a line of code in his life.
I don’t need to read the books.
I do this for a living. I’ve been in the middle of the computer revolution for over 30 years.
DARPA, TCP/IP, and “the internet” were created in 1962 to create a redundant command and control system for nukes. (Your “reason” is BS.)
Al Gore is a megalomaniac and had the monetary political support of the incubators at KPCB (… you know… the ones who financed Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netscape, Sun, etc.)
As a megalomaniac, Al Gore does think he invented the internet. His reward after his stint on as the VP — He went to work for his backers — KPCB. So did Colin Powell.
Look them up. See for yourself.
Your first line says it all. And your logic is so impeccable: In one post you say that Gore invented the internet then in the second you say he thinks he did. I suppose that puts you in the same category as people like GW Bush who believe that if you believe something strongly enough, it becomes true, or like Trump who believes he can create truth out of thin air.
I would hate to be someone responsible for debugging your code.
the comment about Gore having invented the internets is generally offered ironically or sarcastically. it’s a fairly common dig at Gore.
Yes, sir, Colonel!
Using KPCB money lauched Gore to create the BS global warming stuff so he can tax the world with carbon taxes.
and still wrong, after all these years. also, franco is still dead.
I suggest you reread my post.
I’m very good at writing and reading code, thank you. I’m sure if you saw my some of my millions of lines of virgin code over the years, you’d throw your shit away.
You are, as usual, simply full of shit.
DARPA (originally ARPA) was established in 1958.
The first ARPANET communication (UCLA to Stanford) was in 1969.
The first, experimental TCP efforts were in 1973 and the initial specification was in RFC 675, the following year.
Pay no attention to Truth Seeker’s pronouncements on computing or telecommunications technology, readers. S/he has not the slightest clue, but is always insistently confident.
Read it and weep, … http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/
And,… here’s the creme d la creme
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_darpa.htm
To meet this need, ARPA established the IPTO in 1962 with a mandate to build a survivable computer network to interconnect the DoD’s main computers at the Pentagon, Cheyenne Mountain, and SAC HQ. As described in the following pages, this initiative led to the development of the ARPANET seven years later, and then to the NSFNET and the Internet we know today. ARPA also funded some of the early networking research done by Lawrence Roberts, who later became the ARPANET Program Manager.
I’d provide you with the Federal Register entries if I thought you were worth my time.
gore never said he did.
Not even in the same dimension as reality. The original intent behind the Internet was to design and build a communications network that could survive massive disruption — such as nuclear war. Thus the decentralized packet-switching structure in which any given packet may traverse any available (series of) route(s) between origin and destination.
That’s exactly the opposite of the design one would choose if the purpose were surveillance.
Phil Zimmerman was never prosecuted, merely “investigated.”
[[[ I SAID: Surveillance and Espionage were always core to the grand design of the internet. ]]]
[[ YOU SAID: Not even in the same dimension as reality. The original intent behind the Internet was to design and build a communications network that could survive massive disruption ]]]
First… You contradict yourself even between posts… as I said before, the internet started as a C&C system for nukes. That’s the Congressional Budget Authorization for the thing we know as the internet today.
In the 1990s, the INTERNET BROWSER (HTML crap) (from THE SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER AT THE U OF S. ILLINOIS) spawned a “spy grid” scheme that you call “The Intercept and Ed Snowden” today.
With the advent of cellphones, Bill Joy (former Sun) said, “These change everything,… these know who you are… and where you are.”
Now, use your cellphone and call Al Gore at KPCB… Bill Joy might be sucking his phallus.
All I’ve ever seen you post are polemics that show your hard-on for Democrats, when the Republicans are as bad and in many cases far worse. In the end, both are bought-and-paid for corporate whores with little regard for their mandate from the Constitution.
Maybe instead of being a half witted shill you should start placing the blame where it lies – for both sides.
Maybe with a name like Che, I can find you with a torch during the next riot???
I’ll be watching for you.
Actually, I picked the name as an irony to the person that posts here regularly as ‘Benito Mussolini’.
Now try to stop fellating the right-wing, which by the way includes both major parties, and grow a brain.
Interesting read, Jenna. Your article does a nice job of preserving some more pre-History of The Surveillance Age… So ThinThread never stood a chance, because there was zero Kick-Back Potential.
safety first!