NSA Whistleblower Kirk Wiebe Details Gov’t Retaliation After

[Oscar]

WATCH: NSA Whistleblower Kirk Wiebe Details Gov’t Retaliation After Helping Expose "Gross Mismanagement"

[ http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/19/ ... tails_govt ]

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QUOTE: "So every time that you touch an electronic system, there’s droppings left. There’s a record that can be exploited."- Kirk Wiebe, NSA Whistleblower.

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Guests

Kirk Wiebe, retired official from the National Security Agency, where he worked for more than 32 years. He received the NSA’s second-highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award; the director of CIA’s Meritorious Unit Award; and a Letter of Commendation from the secretary of the Air Force, among other awards. He was an NSA whistleblower on matters of privacy involving massive electronic surveillance.

Ben Wizner, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of its Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. The ACLU his also helping to coordinate Edward Snowden’s legal defense.

Links
Learn more about NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe
[ http://www.whistleblower.org/program-ar ... kirk-wiebe ]

See all Democracy Now! interviews with NSA whistleblowers
[ http://www.democracynow.org/topics/nsa ]

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Veteran National Security Agency official Kirk Wiebe helped develop the data processing system ThinThread, which he believed could have potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks. But the NSA sidelined ThinThread instead of the problem-plagued experimental program Trailblazer, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Wiebe was among the NSA officials to face retaliation for blowing the whistle on Trailblazer. During his career, he received honors, including the NSA’s second-highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the director of CIA’s Meritorious Unit Award, and a Letter of Commendation from the secretary of the Air Force. Wiebe joins us to tell his story and to respond to the White House-appointed panel to recommend NSA reforms. We also speak with Ben Wizner, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who is helping to coordinate Edward Snowden’s legal defense.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Kirk Wiebe, if you could talk about that, and also if you would share with us your own story, you yourself subjected—well, your whole family subjected to a daylong armed raid by federal authorities. But respond on that issue of metadata, as a former intelligence—

KIRK WIEBE: Well, yes, Amy, Ben captured it very nicely. It is true that in terms of speed and comprehension, comprehensiveness, if you will, metadata provides an opportunity to assess the activities of a targeted person or entity much more rapidly, and therefore—and because it’s machinable. The world operates on metadata. It is exactly how data is moved. When you dial a phone number—we say dial—when we punch up a phone number, instantly almost, the other end is ringing the person intended to receive the call. This is true of email: In seconds, it arrives at the person’s inbox—when things are working right. So, the speed—the opportunity for speed and comprehension of what a targeted entity is doing is enormous.

And especially if you watch it daily over time, you can actually then begin to paint a picture of a person’s lifestyle, where they are, because it’s not just phone calls. It’s bank deposits. It’s credit card swipes at the gas station, at the flower shop, when a man’s on the way home and buys flowers for his wife. It’s the E-ZPass transponder that measures or knows what ramp you got on a toll road. You amass this data. You have time hacks of every place an individual is when they do those things. So every time that you touch an electronic system, there’s droppings left. There’s a record that can be exploited.

AMY GOODMAN: And your own story, Kirk Wiebe?

KIRK WIEBE: Yes. You know, I have mixed emotions about it, because my job is not to destroy NSA, by any means. I was a member of a proud agency, that’s had some black marks on its path in terms of spying on Americans, but we had been assured that was never going to happen again after the Church Committee. And we had guidelines under USSID-18, which said, "Thou shalt not spy on Americans," except upon probable cause shown to a judge that there’s evidence of wrongdoing, criminality, terrorism or whatever. So, everything seemed to be copacetic, congruent with the Constitution, and it was a fun place to work, on true targets of concern. In the latter part of my career, when I met up with Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, ultimately Tom Drake, and of course Diane Roark from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that had been my experience, one that was very positive. And I was awarded for my work.

But then we began to see the agency’s intent on exploiting the digital age. And the digital age takes various forms. We talk about Facebook. We talk about the Internet, telephone, personal devices of every kind, iPods that can communicate now. So there’s a plethora of means of communication, all important to sort out for national intelligence purposes, but focused on foreign threats—and domestic, if there’s evidence that they exist. And that was the philosophy. That was the approach. And that’s what we built our original prototype system to work against in terms of analyzing big data. There needed to be a way to look into big data quickly for assessment purposes and be able to, as quickly as possible, home in on that fertile territory, that data connected with legitimate terrorist criminality and so forth.

When we found out that the NSA was directing resources against Americans without probable cause, this was late in 2001 just prior to, surrounding the events of 9/11, which happened concurrently as this technology was blooming. Nine-eleven really served as a marker that we had failed as an agency. We had been trying to get the NSA to lean forward, if you will, in its digital seat to get in—to get tools into the fight, with all this digital data, and find terrorism and so forth. And we had an opportunity to put it out there nine months before 9/11. Bad culture inside the building and bad process, that managers are supposed to ensure does not happen, defeated the small successful prototype in approach that embodied the principles of the Fourth Amendment in it. And it was eliminated in favor of Trailblazer.

Well, when 9/11 happened and we failed and the project that we had been developing called ThinThread was not adopted, we felt we had no other things to do at NSA. And since three of us were eligible for retirement, we retired, formed a small company and tried to bring the concepts of ThinThread to other agencies in the government. We succeeded in demonstrating its capabilities in a government contract with Boeing Company in 2004, but a high executive in the agency that that contract serves said, "We have to stop these guys. They’re going to embarrass NSA," because we had found things in a set of data, that two agencies had, that NSA had not, and that was embarrassing. So that contract was stopped.

We then found another contract at Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Patrol. We found some news-breaking data there about an operation involving Iranian businesses importing electronics to support the building of triggering devices for IEDs. And we found that—and this is not classified. This data, this fact, was actually broadcast publicly by the Department of Commerce to U.S. businesses, putting them on alert that certain people, individuals and businesses were trying to import electronics to build triggering devices for IEDs to be used against our troops abroad and coalition forces. We simply, Bill Binney and I, sat down, used Google at home, on our spare time, to formulate a profile of these businesses, where they were, how they were functioning, and it turned out they were all false fronts to cover up the import operation. We put all the—we connected the dots for the government, reported it to Customs and Border Patrol, where we were working. They took the data and briefed it up the line. And within two weeks, we were let go from our contract. I guess we had embarrassed too many people.

Long story short, two years later, seven gentlemen—I shouldn’t call them gentlemen—seven people are arrested in Florida by the FBI associated with this import operation. We were pleased that we could contribute, even if not officially in an official position for the government. But as far as NSA was concerned, we launched an IG complaint in 2002 talking about gross mismanagement and fraud—not so much fraud, but more about gross mismanagement.

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