

The Frontline Interview: William Binney - molecule
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-william-binney/

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rdtsc
Oh this is a very good interview. I have read and seen others but this is one
of the most detailed ones on Binney.

Binney came before Snowden and he raised all these issues and it didn't really
sway the public. That was pretty frustrating. He didn't bring a database with
him so naturally some assumed he was making stuff up because he was bitter his
system was being used and deployed under a different compartment and he was
sort of not part of it.

One interesting thing here is that it really undermines the often repeated PR
phrase "Oh why didn't Snowden just come to us (higher ups) and tell us. There
was no need to go public like that". The implication is "we could have
listened and fixed the problem".

Here is Binney years before trying to do that. Yes he didn't go directly to
his bosses, I think it was clear they wouldn't have listened. He went to
Intelligence Commetee (Congress). Went to DOJ. Nothing happened. Some anemic
90% redacted reports. "Vows to take to be more careful in the future",
nonsense like that.

All it ended with was FBI raids and persecution for those involved.

The crucial part comes at the end and that is Snowden studied their case and
he made sure to take documents out with him.

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tdicola
The story about Thomas Drake was fascinating and very sad too. He went from
being a senior executive at the NSA to being accused of violating the
espionage act (all charges which were later dropped) and having his entire
life ruined. Spent his life savings fighting the legal battle, his wife left
him, and he could only get work at an Apple store.

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doxcf434
I didn't realize Snowden had studied what happened to Drake and Bennie et al,
and determined that if he took a massive amount of documents it would actually
protect him and not just be his word against theirs. And of course, he could
have only done that as an admin. That was some pretty impressive high stakes
chess there. Wow.

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tdicola
The whole Frontline 'United States of Secrets' episode is very good and worth
a watch. Part two is this week, I think on Tuesday.

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daigoba66
Knowing the full history of the "program" and everyhing the lead to The Big
Leak really puts it in perspective and grounds the entire NSA domestic spying
apparatus in reality. At least for me. I'm fairly young and was in school 03
to 07 but I wish I paid more attention back then.

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santoriv
The whole discussion about deleting code vs commenting it out seems to imply
that the NSA wasn't using any sort of version control system in 2001. Does
anyone else find that odd?

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acqq
It's just to explain to the layperson how easy it is, on the software side, to
intentionally remove the feature he considered necessary for NSA to keep
working consistent with the laws and the constitution. It also explains the
difference between his approach and the approach the organization took.

It also doesn't mean what you imply. They've certainly used revision control
systems at that time and his example doesn't contradict that.

~~~
santoriv
From the interview:

"So either that, or they took that entire block of code and deleted it. So
there's one of two ways of getting rid of it. If they commented it out, it
would only take a couple minutes to reinstate it. It wouldn't be difficult to
do. If they deleted it, they'd have to reconstruct all that code.

I suggested that to Diane Roark. That was the way that they probably did it,
and they could reinstate it very simply, if they only commented it out."

If you are using version control, it would only take a couple of minutes even
if you had deleted everything. You wouldn't have to rewrite all that stuff,
just go back in the history.

I realize that this is off-topic to the main thrust of the discussion, but I
found it a curious.

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toufka
It seems to me, like the parent said, he's just simplifying a normal process.
Sure, if his code was a few lines, and someone deleted a few you could use
version control to get them back. On the other hand, if his code was a full
fledged program, and the deletions were institutional such that further work
was carried on after the deletions making the entire datflow go through
different assumptions and processes, it would be significantly more difficult
to reinstate. Preserving the dataflow might be done if you're just commenting
out a line to test things. But if a whole chunk is straight up deleted, the
flow of data will likely shift to be incompatible with the old way of doing
things within a couple of revisions of the code such that no version control
would help.

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santoriv
Ah yeah thanks for that explanation. It makes sense. I guess I wasn't thinking
about the effect of the commented out code on the mind of the programmer
trying to make the current version of the code "backward compatible" with the
old feature.

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serf
William said if one wanted to comment a line of the source code, they'd place
a C at the beginning of the line.

Is this a familiar language behavior to anyone, or are they using in-house
languages/interpreters. I wouldn't put it past them, but I found that comment
interesting and would like to know more if anyone has any data.

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jzwinck
It's Fortran. Placing a "C" in the first column means Comment [1][2].

This burned one of my teammates once because he used Emacs to edit a Fortran
file and in trying to type C-x C-c he accidentally added a "c" to the front of
a line of code. This broke our application in production.

[1]
[http://www.stanford.edu/class/me200c/tutorial_77/03_basics.h...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/me200c/tutorial_77/03_basics.html)
[2]
[http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/805-4939/z40007332024/in...](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/805-4939/z40007332024/index.html)

~~~
serf
Thanks! I've never worked with Fortran.

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ASneakyFox
They really need to update their site for mobile. I couldn't read anything

