[Kzyxtalk] Bill Binney ans Kirk Wiebe on KMEC, your community radio -- Monday, February 23, at 1 PM

[sako4 at comcast.net]

*** NSA WHISTLEBLOWERS BILL BINNEY AND KIRK WIEBE ON KMEC RADIO, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, AT 1 PM, PACIFIC TIME *** 




NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and Kirk Weibe join hosts John Sakowicz and Sid Cooperrider on your community radio station, KMEC, on Monday. We'll talk about a breaking story -- how the NSA is spying on our cell phones. 




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BACKGROUND 


NSA Whistleblowers on Breaking Story: Spying on Billions of Cell Phones 


The Intercept is reporting: “American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. 


“The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. 


“The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania. 


“In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is ‘Security to be Free.’ 


“With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. 


“As part of the covert operations against Gemalto, spies from GCHQ — with support from the NSA — mined the private communications of unwitting engineers and other company employees in multiple countries. ... 

“Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment.” 


WILLIAM BINNEY 


Binney is a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement after 30 years, blew the whistle on NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007. Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules.” 


J. KIRK WIEBE 


Wiebe is a retired National Security Agency whistleblower who worked at the agency for 36 years. Wiebe’s colleague William Binney developed the ThinThread information processing system that, arguably, could have detected and prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks. NSA officials, though, ignored the program in favor of Trailblazer, a program that ended in total failure with costs of billions of dollars. Wiebe and Binney blew the whistle internally on Trailblazer, but to no avail. 


BINNEY AND WEIBE TOGETHER AT THE NSA 


William (Bill) Binney is a former NSA crypto-mathematician, and J. Kirk Wiebe is a former NSA senior analyst who was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, NSA’s second highest distinction. They both worked in the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), and served in the NSA for decades. As Technical Director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney mentored some 6000 technical analysts that eavesdropped on foreign nations, collecting private phone calls and emails for NSA databases. However, with the expansion of the Internet during the 1990s and the explosion of communications that went with it, it quickly became clear that NSA could not keep up with, and effectively analyze, all the new data available. Working in the SARC, Binney and Wiebe both realized this was a dangerous vulnerability for NSA and the country. 


In response, Binney and his team (of which Wiebe was a member), created a program – ThinThread – that could effectively isolate and streamline data in the new Information Age. More importantly, it could filter out all types of irrelevant data, thus eliminating the need to forward and store large amounts of information for subsequent analysis. To ensure the privacy rights of American citizens were adequately protected, Binney and his team installed an “anonymizing” feature to ensure Fourth Amendment protections for the communications of U.S. citizens. 

- See more at: http://www.whistleblower.org/bio-william-binney-and-j-kirk-wiebe#sthash.QocOZfyo.dpuf 


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