http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304202204579252022823658850
LAUSANNE, Switzerland— William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, delivered an unusual message here in September to an audience worried that the spy agency knows too much.
It knows so much, he said, that it can't understand what it has.
"What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data," Mr. Binney said at a privacy conference here.
The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct legitimate surveillance, claims Mr. Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a general during more than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse.
Mr. Binney's warning has gotten far less attention than legal questions raised by leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency's mass collection of information around the world. Those revelations unleashed a re-examination of the spy agency's aggressive tactics.
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But the NSA needs more room to store all the data it collects—and new phone records, data on money transfers and other information keep pouring in. A new storage center being built in Utah will eventually be able to hold more than 100,000 times as much as the contents of printed materials in the Library of Congress, according to outside experts.
Some of the documents released by Mr. Snowden detail concerns inside the NSA about drowning in information. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign cellphone-location tracking by the agency said the efforts were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" data.
In March 2013, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the "relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection," another document shows.
In response to questions about Mr. Binney's claims, an NSA spokeswoman says the agency is "not collecting everything, but we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."
Existing surveillance programs were approved by "all three branches of government," and each branch "has a role in oversight," she adds.
In a statement through his lawyer, Mr. Snowden says: "When your working process every morning starts with poking around a haystack of seven billion innocent lives, you're going to miss things." He adds: "We're blinding people with data we don't need."
A presidential panel recommended earlier this month that the agency shut down its bulk collection of telephone-call records of all Americans. The federal government could accomplish the same goal by querying phone companies, the panel concluded.
The panel also recommended the creation of "smart software" that could sort data as the information is collected, rather than the current system where "vast amounts of data are swept up and the sorting is done after it has been copied" on to data-storage systems. Administration officials are reviewing the report.
A separate task force is expected to issue its own findings next year, and lawmakers have proposed several bills that would change how the NSA collects and uses data.
The 70-year-old Mr. Binney says he is generally underwhelmed by the panel's "bureaucratic" report, though "it would be something meaningful" if the controversy leads to adoption of the "smart software" strategy and creation of a technology oversight group with full access to "be in the knickers of the NSA" and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Mr. Binney lives off his government pension and makes occasional appearances to talk about his work at the NSA.
The spy agency has defended its sweeping surveillance programs as essential in the fight against terrorism. But having too much data can hurt those efforts, according to Mr. Binney and a handful of colleagues who have raised concerns since losing an internal battle to build privacy-protecting Internet surveillance tools in the late 1990s.
At the time, the agency was struggling to transform itself from a monitor of mostly analog signals, such as radio and satellite transmissions, to an effective sleuth in the emerging digital world.
Diane Roark, a House Intelligence Committee staff member assigned to oversee the NSA, says she was "very disturbed" to learn in meetings at the agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., in 1997 "what bad shape they were in."
She saw a glimmer of hope in a corner of the NSA called the Sigint Automation Research Center. Mr. Binney, who joined the agency in 1965 with a cadre of young mathematicians hired to tackle the increasingly mathematical world of ciphers and codes, was working with the research center's chief to create an innovative approach to monitoring Internet traffic.
"Our approach was to focus on the known terrorist community, which predominately existed overseas," recalls Ed Loomis, who ran the research center. "However, we were also interested in any communications they had with anyone in America."
The push was legally tricky. Only the FBI is allowed to collect such information within the U.S.—and usually must prove to a judge that there is a good reason to launch surveillance.
Mr. Loomis worried that the rules were too restrictive and could hinder the NSA's terrorist-catching abilities. So Messrs. Binney and Loomis built a system to scrape data from the Internet, throw away the content about U.S. citizens and zoom in on the leftover metadata—or the "to" and "from" information in Internet traffic. They called it ThinThread.
To keep the data-gathering effort manageable, the two men designed ThinThread to collect data within "two hops" of a suspected bad guy. That meant the system would be built to automatically flag people who communicated with "dirty numbers" or possible terrorists—and records of people who contacted them.
Messrs. Binney and Loomis also believed that ThinThread's powers should be constrained to protect the privacy of Americans. Mr. Binney designed a way to encrypt all the U.S. metadata, and their plans allowed the spy agency's analysts to unscramble the information only with permission from a warrant approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court oversees NSA activities that affect U.S. residents.
ThinThread was never deployed. Agency lawyers refused to relax a ban on recording any U.S. communications. Dickie George, a senior NSA official who retired in 2011, says the consensus was that Mr. Binney's "heart was in the right place," but the technology wasn't ready.
Messrs. Binney and Loomis say ThinThread could have done the job for which it was built. But Mr. Loomis was told to shut down the project. Instead, he was told, the NSA would fund a surveillance program called Trailblazer, built by outside contractors.
Distraught about the decision, Messrs. Binney and Loomis and another NSA employee, Kirk Wiebe, announced plans to retire on Oct. 31, 2001.
Mr. Binney reconsidered after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but left as intended after hearing about new plans to use his metadata-analysis technology to hunt for terrorists. There was one big difference. The privacy protections designed to shield Americans from illegal intrusions weren't on the drawing board anymore, he says.
In 2002, the three retired NSA employees and Ms. Roark asked the Defense Department's inspector general to investigate whether the decision to halt ThinThread and fund Trailblazer was made appropriately.
Trailblazer's data-filtering system was never built, either. Instead, NSA officials secretly sought and won support for an array of programs to conduct warrantless wiretapping of phone and Internet content. They got similar approval to collect and analyze metadata from nearly every U.S. phone call and vast swaths of Internet traffic.
Mr. Binney settled into retirement. But the spy agency's surveillance efforts began to draw more attention.
In 2006, AT&T Inc. technician Mark Klein leaked documents showing that the company was working with the NSA to scour the Internet with technology that was similar to the system built by Messrs. Binney and Loomis. Outside criticism of the agency grew after articles in the New York Times and Baltimore Sun about the agency's surveillance efforts, including ThinThread.
President George W. Bush briefly shut down the warrantless wiretapping program, but then parts of it were legalized by a new law passed in Congress. Meanwhile, the metadata analysis program continued in secret.
Federal officials suspected the three retired NSA employees and Ms. Roark, the former House staff member, of involvement in the leaks, according to government documents. FBI agents swooped in on all four, and Mr. Binney says agents drew their guns on him while he was in the shower. A Justice Department official couldn't be reached for comment on the case.
Messrs. Binney, Loomis and Wiebe and Ms. Roark weren't charged with wrongdoing, but the FBI soon pursued NSA official Thomas Drake, a ThinThread supporter. In 2010, prosecutors charged him with violating the Espionage Act, citing "willful retention" of classified documents. Mr. Drake pleaded guilty to one count of exceeding authorized use of a government computer. Mr. Drake says government officials "wanted to make an object lesson of me, drive the stake of national security right through me, and then prop me out on the public commons as punishment for holding up the mirror of their own malfeasance and usurpations of power."
The raids and prosecution of Mr. Drake angered Mr. Binney. He decided to go public with his concerns. In April 2012, he spoke at an event called a "Surveillance Teach-in" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Wearing a short-sleeve, collared shirt and jeans, Mr. Binney looked like a grandfatherly professor amid the crowd of activists, some wearing Anonymous masks. "I was focused on foreign threats," he said. "Unfortunately, after 9/11, they took my solutions and directed them at this country and everybody in it."
Mr. Binney's claims were hard to prove. Even Mr. Loomis, the co-creator of ThinThread, didn't think it was possible that the same NSA lawyers who refused to budge on the ban against recording any U.S. communications had approved more invasive surveillance procedures after he left the agency.
"After all my struggles with those folks, I just couldn't believe that they went 180 degrees against the law," he said.
In August 2012, filmmaker Laura Poitras released an eight-minute, online documentary about Mr. Binney. She called him a whistleblower. Mr. Snowden saw the video and reached out to Ms. Poitras with an avalanche of undisclosed documents, she says.
Some of the documents leaked by the NSA contractor back up Mr. Binney. For example, documents detailed the agency's two clandestine metadata-surveillance programs: the bulk collection of phone-calling records and Internet traffic-analysis program. The NSA hasn't disputed the documents.
The Obama administration says the Internet program was shut down in 2011, while the bulk collection of phone records still is going on.
John C. Inglis, the NSA's deputy director, told lawmakers in July that the agency had court approval to do warrantless "third-hop" queries of bulk telephone records. A "third-hop" analysis of one suspected terrorist could allow the NSA to sift through the records of at least a million people.
Mr. Binney says he advised NSA officials to "never go beyond two hops." He has urged lawmakers and an oversight board to limit data collection to "two hops" and establish a technical auditing team to verify the spy agency's claims about its data collection and usage.
The presidential panel suggested ending the bulk collection of phone metadata entirely. Instead, phone companies should store the records and turn them over only with a court order, the panel added.
President Barack Obama will decide in coming weeks which of the panel's recommendations he will implement. The recommendations aren't binding.
In recent months, the retired computer-code creator has been greeted like a hero almost everywhere he goes. Mr. Snowden, living in Russia under temporary asylum, says through his lawyer that he has "tremendous respect" for Mr. Binney, "who did everything he could according to the rules."
In Switzerland, at the privacy conference, Mr. Binney spoke from a wheelchair. His right foot was amputated in February because of an infection that spread to his bones and was hard to fight because he suffers from diabetes. The infection returned in August, forcing doctors to amputate his right leg below the knee. In 2010, his left leg was amputated below the knee for similar reasons.
"I'm getting too old for this stuff," he says. "I'm going to do as much as I can."
