14 DAY TRIAL // William Binney, who was part of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for more than 30 years, has revealed that the organization has a copy of most emails sent by US citizens.
In an interview with Democracy Now, Binney, who served as a World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group director at the NSA before retiring in 2001, has stated that around 20 trillion emails, phone calls and other data have been collected by the agency.
He claimed that after the Patriot Act and the “secret interpretation of Section 215,” were passed, the government gained more power.
“[The law] gives them license to take all the commercially held data about us, which is exceedingly dangerous, because if you take that and put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country,” he explained.
“And having that knowledge then allows them the ability to concoct all kinds of charges, if they want to target you.”
The former NSA director told journalists that the government enhanced surveillance with President Bush, but the Obama administration has increased it even further.
“Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens,” Binney said, referring to the differences between the Obama and Bush administrations.
When asked about Bluffdale, Utah, the place where the NSA is believed to be building the biggest spy center in the US, the expert said that it may be a “very large storage device” which would be utilized for remote interrogation and processing.
The complete video interview, which also features Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher connected to WikiLeaks, and filmmaker Laura Poitras, is available on Democracy Now.