NSA chief General Keith Alexander, Courtesy
NSA
In a rare break from the NSA’s tradition of listening but not speaking, NSA
chief General Keith Alexander was grilled Tuesday on the topic of eavesdropping
on Americans in front of a House subcommittee.
The questioning from Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) was prompted by
Wired’s
cover story this month on the NSA’s growing reach and capabilities, but
leaves Americans with as many questions about the reach of spy agency’s powers
as they had before Alexander spoke.
Alexander denied, in carefully parsed words, that the NSA has the power to
monitor Americans’ communications without getting a court warrant.
But Alexander’s comments fly in the face of people who actually helped create
the agency’s eavesdropping and data mining infrastructure. Few people know that
system as well as William Binney, who served as the technical director for the
agency’s M Group, which stood for World Geopolitical Military Analysis and
Reporting, the giant 6,000-person organization responsible for eavesdropping on
most of the world.
He was also the founder and co-director of the agency’s Signals Intelligence
Automation Research Center, which helped automate that eavesdropping network.
Binney decided to leave after a long career rather than be involved in the
agency warrantless eavesdropping program, a program he said involves secret
monitoring facilities in ten to twenty large telecom switches around the
country, such as the one discovered in San Francisco’s AT&T installation a
few years ago.
Historically, the NSA’s initial response has always been to either deny or
evade when confronted with issues involving eavesdropping on Americans. For
decades the agency secretly hid from Congress the fact that it was copying,
without a warrant, virtually every telegram traveling through the United States,
a program known as
Project Shamrock.
Then it hid from Congress the fact tha
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