That was a pretty good interview. I read about Binney before Snowden and I think Snowden knew about him as well. That's why he had to get all that data out otherwise he would not be believed.
I remember Binney sort being painted as a crazy conspiracy lunatic.
It is interesting how he stood up to them but was afraid for his life for a bit there. Wonder if he knew of any cases of people being suicided on US soil by the US govt or just a general precaution. Wonder if anyone from that dept. would leak anything...
I'm really grateful that we have folks like Binney thinking about the bigger picture. It's not as though our government has not made mistakes in the past; during the Korean War for instance, we killed ~20% of the North Korean population [1], largely with napalm. That, in my humble opinion, is an unacceptable civilian casualty ratio. Binney is the kinda guy, were he around back then, who would have spoken up and said "This ain't right."
I've watched Binney speak before and I sense very little personal remorse about his own involvement. Maybe it was just the times I caught his speeches, but he seemed to be a geek who never really stopped to think about what he was doing until it was too late.
He was one of the principal forces behind the "Five Eyes" agreement that "allows" for the end-run around our Constitutional protections, for example.
Still, I find 'purity' useless in the real world and it's important to have folks like Binney speaking out.
The thing is he seemed even more nuts before Snowden. So few people took him seriously. I didn't, I only half believed him. But we found that indeed these programs exist and they do record everything and so on.
But Binney's story and motivations are a big ambiguous as well. He doesn't go into as much detail here but from another interview I read how he basically had his program and his proposal on how to do things, then at some point higher ups decided to go with contractors and use another approach, and also appropriated some of his code and his ideas (but without including him). He mentioned coming to work one morning and seeing a large amount of monitoring equipment (switches, servers?) being delivered but he wasn't told about it beforehand. And then he figured it out. So it is a bit of being back-stabbed at work as part of internal politics and not everything was purely ideological as he might make it seem.
I remember Binney sort being painted as a crazy conspiracy lunatic.
It is interesting how he stood up to them but was afraid for his life for a bit there. Wonder if he knew of any cases of people being suicided on US soil by the US govt or just a general precaution. Wonder if anyone from that dept. would leak anything...