I have had a chance to listen to some of the recent House Intelligence Committee hearing, and I find Gen. Alexander's testimony to be reassuring (much more so than recent testimony by FBI Director Mueller or DNI Clapper).  I still think that the collation of all phone metadata into one database is objectionable, and not something that should be done without knowledge of the American people, but I no longer believe that location data is being stored in that database, which is what I most strongly objected to.  Regarding Snowden, I think the ball is back in his and his backers' court, as it is my impression that they have intimated that they have more bombshells to drop.  I am not inclined to give people like Glenn Greenwald the benefit of the doubt, so we will see.  We will certainly never see from him or his ilk any message like "government program run amok due to cronyism and sclerotic bureaucratization" when they can run with "Bush intentionally murders hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and Cheney spies on you because he hates the Constitution and loves torture".

Discussions like this are why I love Ricochet.

Or it may be that the top of the NSA is corrupted by what sounds like what is commonly referred to these days as "crony capitalism", if Binney's account from the hacker conference is accurate.

I am not as familiar with Drake, aside from the USA Today interview, and an editorial I read recently from the Guardian which seemed entirely too hysterical to take seriously.  Binney reminds me of some of my college professors (I have a computer engineering degree) - very eccentric, prone to belief in certain outlandish ideas, but very good at what he does (or did).  This is just an impression based on listening to him talk, of course.  He certainly doesn't seem like a bureaucrat, or someone who has simmered in the anti-American fever swamps that Snowden seems to have at least partially percolated in (Cheney as war criminal, etcetera).

, which (according to his account), was a total failure.   His account is somewhat backed up by things like this:

A second initiative, Trailblazer, is geared toward modernizing NSA's eavesdropping methods, so they can better track newer communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail.

However, at a Senate hearing in April, Gen. Hayden acknowledged that his cherished Trailblazer program was years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. "I would say that we underestimated the costs by, I would say, a couple to several hundred million," he told the committee, adding that the delays were even "more dramatic" than the cost overruns.

"When we actually encountered doing this, it was just far more difficult than anyone anticipated," Hayden said. On top of the other challenges facing him, Alexander will now have to rescue Trailblazer.

but I ultimately don't have enough information to conclude if

1.) The framework of ThinThread is now being used for the data analysis, but with the privacy restrictions Binney discusses removed

or

2.) Trailblazer was very expensive, but added key functionality that was missing from ThinThread

It may be a matter of what you describe above; simple sour grapes.

Dr Steve -

I agree with what you are saying regarding Binney's comments on torturing etc. - I have watched several interviews with him, and he goes off the rails at times into crazyland - e.g., he will invoke the Stasi, the Gestapo, and the KGB, saying that they would have "loved" whatever the system is that the NSA has in place.  While the system may be a very powerful tool for spying on the US populace, as has been noted, there is little evidence that this power has been widely abused.  That said, about 80% of what Binney says seems credible to me (I think this is the best example, if you want to invest the time, it's from some kind of left-wing hacker conference, but it's mostly him talking until the loonies start asking questions at the end).  His discussion of the bureaucratic problems he ran into at the NSA rings true to me (minutes 10-25 or so are where he discusses this), although his language is perhaps a little over-the-top.  He basically argues that his project (ThinThread) was much better and cheaper, but was set aside for the much more expensive Trailblazer...

I'm not really worried.  Probably just the NSA making sure Attkisson's not a terrorist.

$1.08 for a single egg.

God bless America.

Anyway, I'd love if people (especially Dr Steve) would listen to the linked discussion, and respond.

Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.

So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor.

Now contrast that with one of Snowden's recent comments in an online chat with the Guardian:

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond?

Snowden: US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive (sic) that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. 

Here is a link to a new USA Today piece featuring Binney, and two other former NSA employees (Thomas Drake and J Kirk Wiebe), and their lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, a former DOJ attorney.  I find Binney to be a much more attractive character than Edward Snowden, e.g., consider the following:

Q: There's a question being debated whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor.

Binney: Certainly he performed a really great public service to begin with by exposing these programs and making the government in a sense publicly accountable for what they're doing. At least now they are going to have some kind of open discussion like that.

But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries.

Your perspective is greatly appreciated.

I am curious if you are at all familiar with the claims of William Binney, specifically, that a great change occurred at NSA following 9/11.  I have watched several interviews with him, and he comes across as eccentric, but not necessarily a crackpot (he will deny the more extreme suggestions of his interlocutors, for example).  His story comes at least in part as a tale of bureaucratic grasping for additional funds, which I have no trouble believing.  The claims of deliberate subversion of the Constitution are a little harder to believe.

I definitely recommend skipping the Q&A at the end of the HOPE talk - crazy gets laid on thick.

Y'all will probably want to read this Washington Post article.

I also recommend checking  out these interviews with Bill Binney, if you have the time:

Democracy Now!

Daily Caller

Hacker Conference

If you think Binney's credible, then the last link is the most informative.

I was assuming that Greenwald would have been provided some proof of this by Snowden if it is true, and will publish after official denials.  If the Guardian is silent after official denials, then it's probably false.  I would hope this would come up during the Sunday shows, but I guess there's a possibility that it won't.

I'm guessing we'll find out if this is true or not within the next 24 hours.  Stay tuned, folks.

A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA "may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States." A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically -- on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to "target" a specific American citizen.

Sounds about right.