Saturday, March 21, 2015

USA - NSA Whistleblower: ‘We’re No Longer a Country with a Government, We’re a Government with a Country’

OFF THE WIRE
by Mikael Thalen

Former high-level intelligence official warns of "totalitarian" slide into a "controlled society"
NSA Whistleblower: 'We're No Longer a Country with a Government, We're a Government with a Country'

Former National Security Agency technical director turned whistleblower William Binney told radio-talk show host Alex Jones Wednesday that the United States no longer represented a country with a constitutional government.

Binney, a 36-year agency veteran who blew the whistle on domestic surveillance in 2001, warned that the United States was sliding dangerously close to “totalitarianism” under the NSA’s plan for a “controlled society.”

“I basically see us moving to a controlled society. A totalitarian state where the government wants to be in charge,” Binney stated. “When Reagan said, ‘We’re a country with a government,’ I think we’re now a government with a country.”

Highlighting the NSA’s continued deception on the scope and scale of domestic and international surveillance programs, Binney pointed to historically dangerous talking points currently used by the agency to keep the American public in the dark.

“If they say, ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide,’ first of all that’s a great quote from Joseph Goebbels, and secondly that’s totally irrelevant… That’s right out of Hitler’s playbook,” he said. “If you’re going to tell a lie, make it a big one and tell it frequently until it’s believed and that’s what’s going on here.”

During his tenure at NSA, Binney witnessed first-hand the oppressive surveillance tactics of groups such as East Germany’s “secret police,” commonly know as the Stasi, giving him a unique historical insight into the dangers of unchecked intelligence powers.

Like many government agencies, Binney argued that the modus operandi of the NSA has become “keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.”

“Their problem is getting the next contract,” he said. “If you solve the problem, you don’t have the problem to get money. That’s their philosophy.”

By weakening global encryption standards under programs such as “Bullrun,” the NSA has also opened the door for other surveillance agencies and rogue hackers to access important data.

“NSA has no monopoly on smart people. People around the world, hackers and people in Russia and China… also have smart people and they can go in and hack into systems and recognize these weaknesses in the firewalls and operating systems and encryption systems so they can penetrate everything too,” Binney said.

“The point is, if you keep those things weak, which is what the operational side of NSA wants to do because then that allows them to see into what your doing, they can penetrate it to get it.”

Internal groups within the NSA even refuse to share vital information with one another in an attempt to keep control of offensive and defensive operational techniques.

Binney also passionately laid out steps the American people could take to reverse the NSA’s growing worldwide control grid during the remainder of his interview.