Every human has ideas and opinions others disagree with. However, as Technical Director and later geopolitical world Technical Director of NSA with over 30 years of SIGINT service, literally no one is in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.

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lern_too_spel 2 days ago | parent [-]

He was a middle manager decades ago. Literally most intelligence people are in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.

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timschmidt a day ago | parent [-]

"Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks."

https://www.wired.com/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/

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lern_too_spel a day ago | parent [-]

That doesn't in any way contradict what I said. Both technology and the law changed significantly since he was a middle manager in the NSA.

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timschmidt a day ago | parent [-]

It is, in fact, a direct contradiction of what you've said. There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed. And a great deal of evidence to the contrary. EFF maintains a lovely list of primary sources: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs#main-content

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lern_too_spel a day ago | parent [-]

> There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed

Mass surveillance outside the U.S. is not illegal. There is no reason for that to have slowed. The documents showed no mass "surveillance" inside the U.S. The only mass collection was phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for surveilling anybody, only to spit out possible associates of specific people under surveillance.

	▲	timschmidt a day ago \| parent [-]
		> The only mass collection was phone metadata collection "email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests"" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:PRISM_Collec... You will claim this program does not target US persons. To which I have already responded in another comment that "They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program." NSA self-reporting of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT incidents seems to indicate that warrant-less surveillance of US persons does, in fact, happen. As does testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks": "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc