bill binney was a high ranking nsa cryptanalyst and engineer for decades who designed a program for collating data across networks. thinthread was designed spec

bill binney was a high ranking nsa cryptanalyst and engineer for decades who designed a program for collating data across networks. thinthread was designed specifically to protect the records of individual american citizens from being accessed without a warrant, ensured by encryption. after 9/11, his program (thinthread) was scrapped in favor of another, trailblazer, which explicitly did not have any of the built-in safeguards against a 'turnkey totalitarian state' as mr binney put it. to sidestep legal restrictions requiring intercepted comms to have at least one party outside the the US, nsa developed tools (evilolive) to bounce traffic to a hop outside of the US and back through a tapped sea cable. there's also parallel construction, the dea's term for constructing a legitimate-looking trail of investigation retroactively to 'launder' evidence intercepted by sigint programs. i could go on, we have are dozens of fragments of evidence that point to mass surveillance, dressed up with nominal but unauditable claims of the protections of rights overseen by a court so secret that the names of its judges aren't public. what standard of evidence besides nsa admitting as much would you accept? > This despite that they know that the device in that room is a filtering device and that Snowden's documents specifically show that the NSA filters the traffic for targets' communications. it's a cable splitter that feeds metadata into their bulk collection database, which is then queried with selectors (keywords). thanks to creative legal interpretations of ussid 18, it doesn't count as wiretapping an individual to record all of their internet activity in a database, only to look at that database. and you'd have to have a lot more trust in a totally unaccountable spy agency than me to think they play it by the book 100% of the time.