Editor’s note: The following is a lightly-edited transcription of an interview with William Binney, a former employee with the NSA who after over 30 years with the agency quit and became a whistleblower, bringing to light many of their illegal activities and mass surveillance of American citizens.
Libertas Institute: Please describe your work experience with the NSA.
William Binney: For approximately 28 years, I was primarily involved in breaking codes and dealing with ciphers and data systems and solving those, and working with data, trying to do threat assessment with all of that data that we had.
After a while, I became the Technical Director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. What that meant was that I had to expand my thinking around the world, and the major problem was data with the web and everything. That’s when I started designing programs to handle that information and be able to select out what was important and what wasn’t.
Then I started implementing those programs, and NSA took those programs and started to direct in domestic data. When they did that, that’s when I left. I couldn’t be a party to that.
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