Unbeknown to those governments the cia had access to the encryption tools and could therefore read high level internal government correspondence from countries including france egypt and as well and many others what this means is that at the highest levels of the Us Government including the white house every assassination every act of ethnic cleansing every disappearance of a dissident every terrorist attack every order to carry out torture whether that took place in guatemala or saudi arabia was known by the United States joining me in the washington studio to discuss these revelations is William Binney a leading intelligence expert who worked at the National Security agency for 30 over 30 years so bill it is a great fascinating story yeah were you aware of it when you know i wasnt actually go but but i mean it makes sense i mean the standard procedure. For intelligence agencies to try to get other of course countries to buy into their system well they did an amazing job in the other 123. Countries. And they may even made money on it millions of dollars selling which went right back into the absolutely venture but were talking about some very dirty regimes the shah in iran and military dictatorships and hunters in latin america India Pakistan even the vatican. Thats how they manage to get manuel noriega. And there is this of course. This is what Intelligence Services do and why they were created what they were meant to do but it does make them morally complicit because they know things they know about impending actions that will take a life or lives i was talking to before the show i covered the war in bosnia to what extent i dont know about you know what extent potentially did they know about the massacres and trevor needs a 1000 people killed. Talk a little bit about that kind of moral quandary that it that it that it puts not just the Intelligence Agency itself but by the u. S. Government into well i think its also if you reflect back on world war 2 i think the british did some similar kinds of things when they didnt want to compromise the fact that they were reading the enigma encryption from the from the nazis so so they let things happen that they could about a lot of old british ship i mean they sacrifice to ships thats right and so so they i guess that the idea is to make a value decision is what theyre doing but certainly something of this nature i would think that they could have covered up with all kinds of other kinds of inputs and not really compromised fact that they in fact were reading all these encrypted messages so although reagan apparently blew the expose the libyan well yes he did that when he thats when he did yes thats true i was a bombing at the mainland discotheque and then he got up in public and said well we read the correspondent thats right from the embassy in berlin and we know gadhafi was lying thats another point if you notice that the countries that didnt buy into this encrypted system that was trying to run the people who do better right right right but the problem is you see they were also to an extent compromised by the communications from other embassies from right countries out to their home country right so thats. They make that point that in fact you may not know what the chinese are saying through their encrypted devices but you know what the iranians are saying to the chinese and what the chinese also say to them they didnt report back so that gives them it gives it some insight into what the chinese are think you are planning so theres also that i mean one of the things is this kind of appalled the german intelligence according to this article is that in the United States there really are no friends in the Intelligence Community and. Everyone so for instance during the falklands war i was in buenos aires covering for National Public radio. They could read the argent time device and which was argentina was not a hostile country to the United States especially under the military junta even though they had disappeared 30000. 00 of your own citizens which they must have known about. And you know but they fed so they could read the argentine devices and were feeding it to the brits who were sailing towards south georgia and the Falkland Islands to retake them yet. I want to talk a little bit about the. Reach and duration of this global surveillance because it was outside of china and russia it was almost everyone. Yeah it started in 1070 i think is the start date for that was from the 1970 s. Theyre really recent times so its quite a quite a bit of coverage so how would you compare it to the revelations of snowden did we have greater access at least according to those revelations than we did then i think doubt we do yes because of the internet the because the internet and the reach of the internet and the people who are communicating on the internet yeah we have great much greater reach in terms of people access to countries and so on because theyve implanted you know device hardware and software in switches and servers and and that works and computers around the world i mean at one point snowden some of the stowed material said they had over 50000 implants in the World Wide Network so so you think that from at least one node released the reach is actually greater yes i do. To what extent do you coming out of the Intelligence Community do you feel there is i mean lets talk about argentina so during the dirty war dissidents trade Union Leaders student activists communists mountain arrows they were all swept up and killed by the in order to try and hunt the by the military dictatorship. And yet we stood by and did nothing. As they. Carried out one of the most egregious human and later of course or earlier we had seen pinochet in 73. 00 which again they mustve known completely about to what extent do you feel theres a responsibility to step in moments like that or is is essentially these people were talking about probably tens of thousands of people are these people just going to be sacrificed for our national selfinterest well i always maintain that intelligence has to at least stand up for human human really human rights worldwide and. They can do that in ways that will not compromise this sources and methods that theyre using that theyre not theyre not actually trying to do that thats thats the real problem that they have the capacity to do it they have the capability to do it without compromising what their sources are so why arent they doing it i just dont understand that i mean theres a theres an awful duplicity so i mean i covered the wars in Central America whatever the murderous rampages were and el salvador they were dwarfed by real smart of what im all and so on the one hand you have through. Intelligence gathering very hard evidence 3 of. Egregious you know Rights Violations and yet this intelligence is sitting on your desk in the oval office or anywhere else u. S. Policy seeks to mask that evidence that it has i mean often frankly denies it in order to support regimes i mean really would be a good one the shah would be another yes yeah i guess. We have sold out human rights and around the world not just for you know for regimes that will support us worldwide but also for other regimes that perhaps we we think need to be changed just for the for the see if they can get Something Better they have an opportunity to. Maybe institute another change for example ukraine is a good one ukraine it we tried to get that regime change too to be a positive one for us and yachts was our guy i think was the key statement at that point so its the same thing we attempted coup there just like there was a coup attempt here right here trying to get so you see intelligence agencies doing it in both cases one of the things that came up in the series that was kind of interesting is that they would say and a lot of the workers was based in switzerland they didnt know and the workers who figured it out were gotten rid of pretty quick right there was a woman they talk about kind of figured all those things. But they would send them into these countries to repair these machines to centrally c. I. A. Machine that was a case of somebody one of these poor. Technicians who arrived in iran and the iranians had figured it out yeah well i mean thats their whole point they dont they dont consider the implications of it or the. Necessarily the threats that might come to employees that they employ unwittingly who have no idea what what is really the background of the company theyre working for or what their motives are what theyre really doing i mean its just like its just like the congress here doesnt really know what the intelligence agencies are doing even in our country right so you know its no different in this is a problem with intelligence agencies and we need somehow to fix that we had proposed to fix you know to president obama in 2014 but he didnt take it up i mean it was to have. A Technical Group to be able to go around any agency look at any database of any system they had to be able to verify what theyre really doing because right now they cant do that even today lets talk because you Design Systems yes. One of the things i talk about in the in the article is this the evolution of from literally cranks my father is you know in. So there was a cryptographer in world war 2 and they would carry the use kind of very devices strapped to their legs. Which could be the germans could break down the american but it took them a few hours right and this was true in the kind of a tactical thing right sort of was by the time they broke it down it was useless because they already moved but there is this evolution within the system. And by the end in a way technology. Outpaces always you know you know the ability of even this great. Enterprise that theyve set up itself talk about that evolution well its a part even to say they face that problem in the late eightys early ninetys when the digital explosion was starting they they were behind the let me just interrupt because they talk about you know the sixtys even earlier electronic circuits sure going from vacuum tubes the circuits so there were any technology is advanced but you know allowed greater capabilities and greater greater challenges really to the Intelligence Community so they had to try to keep up with it it was really the digital explosion was really the biggest one that i experience when i was going to come back to that ok when we come back well continue our conversation about the cias Encryption Services with William Binney. Seemed wrong. Just. To see. Just. Answer. And in. The trail. Find themselves well its a part. Of the common ground. Has changed american lives but pharmaceutical companies have a miraculous solution. Based drugs to people who are chronic pain and believe that their opioid prescription is working for them in the remedy be certain to. Price at the. Close of dependency in the addiction to opiates the long term use that really isnt scientifically justified and ill study actually suggest that. The long term effects might not just be absence of benefit but actually that very night because we want to. Stop a man who has it in plan a change on the last turn to continue a little spike thats simply a in association with management on that end desire to know. How much older than herself a vocal just do not go near them she still. Feels to me up on the show was still a lot. Looser more pushing and huge for. You but its not just on thoughts almost unusable not on one level so theres 2 more stuff and it takes 2 to 3 shit when i see you over. And her. Welcome back to on contact we continue our conversation about the cias Encryption Services with bill bennett so before the break we talked about that shift to electronic circuits and then take us from there well from there basically went from the analog no. Major shifts from analog to digital in my experience thats what thats what i was in and i say at the time but you know its the same thing it really was you were looking at the networks back in the dog days and it was simply they shifted to digital so you could really use the same techniques and approaches to solve problems in the Digital World that you did in the analytic or in the analog world but many people thought oh its totally different you know and you have to have new people and young people and they lost that skill to be able to make that transition. With the underlying principles of analysis of data period i did what one of the things that interests me is that that shift. From in the mid sixtys. With electronics actually made it easier. Because and actually if you think about it as the the internet makes it a lot easier now too because once you solve the system you solve that for the world because its a standard you know once you get through the standard you you have you have the entire world that your feet you know you can do anything you want to do with it thats why theyre being so successful with this reach through across the internet with the 5 eyes and roughly 9 other countries i think that are participating with them in this bulk acquisition of data around the world it does lend some credibility to the fear about why wait and then oh yeah oh well well ive jab my meatball away just to have it all in playing on every deployment you have your you have your own network see thats exactly the 3 that what they want to do is prevent china from having the same thing that we did to the world so thats all. To what extent do you just get overwhelmed with too much data well i see that that was the problem even in the 1990 s. Thats why we did the thin Thread Program inside is a huge sign of well i had a good hand at it yeah i did that cath ed loomis did the front half which was acquiring data and i did the back half managing the data but the whole idea was even back then i mean the analysts were making pulls on their data even with the really. Minor collection of the internet that they had at that time it was still overloading the adults i mean they get 1250000 items every day for theyd sit there and theyd start going through and come across something had to report the stop to the report and come back to it that never made it through the entire days data next day a whole new set of data comes back in same thing again so the whole idea was how to how to filter filter and how to look into the data without actually having to look at the figure out whats important. For the animals to look at and thats exactly what we designed in the thin thread and that meant you could have privacy and security at the same time that was a lie they told from the beginning you had to give up privacy to get security thats been a lie all along and they know that its just that it didnt it didnt give them power over everybody because they didnt have data on everybody and it didnt give them big a budget to build a big empire because it costs a lot of money to do that so you dont load anime now every which you blew the whistle on for which you paid a pretty hefty price but. You know were all modern yep. And thats all this information is stored in perpetuity yep and is it just stored in perpetuity the way the old stalinist system was so that when you want something on somebody you just pull the file is that yeah thats thats exactly what director mueller the f. B. I. Testified to in the 30 to march of 2011 when he was testifying to the Senate Judiciary committee on how to stop a future fort hood u. S. Person becoming radicalized and killing people and he said well he set up this Technology Database with the with the department of defense where he could with one query go in and get all past emails and all future ones as they come in a person well that tells you hes going into the n. S. A. Database pulling out all the data they all the emails from that person that theyve got stored which goes back to at least 2001 and even before that on some selected one so so that and then anything that comes in is an automatic routing to them so its a matter of any analyst at the f. B. I. Without oversight by the way going into the n. S. A. Data pulling out all this information on anyone and anyone they want to target well we know from you know the f. B. I. And j. Edgar hoover and that its a very easily leaches over into a way to blackmail and and. Stroy in the lives of dissidents thats what cohen tell pro was right. And these were any war activists peace activists Civil Rights Act was part of their king himself was a victim of this but that we raise this to a whole new level yet at the time that was the same 3 agencies n. S. A. F. B. I. And cia n. S. A. Had a program called minaret that parallel the cointelpro and chaos was a parallel at cia put the same 3 agencies today doing the same thing but on a much larger more more comprehensive scale and one of the things that we know you go back and look at the 154 arbenz cuckoo is that they often will because some Intelligence Services are separated between operations and intelligence were not so this intelligence becomes actionable in terms of carrying out dirty tricks. I mean it gives you leverage moments once you know everybody and what theyre doing what theyre thinking what theyre planning i mean you have the opportunity to manipulate them any way you want causing certain things to occur or making certain suggestions in certain areas or you know just simply blackmail against them or anything you can leverage against them or anything that they against somebody they really care about so you have an opportunity to do all of that where do you think were headed i often wonder if were all going to the weavers one day i mean the chinese theyre part of a couple steps ahead but were certainly moving in that direction yeah especially with things like the internet of things and also it gives them the opportunity to do any kind of things like using existing kinds of weapons to to like the cubans did in our embassy or the russians did with microwaves in our embassy in moscow they could do the same thing here with other people and we have some people complaining thats in fact what is happening so explain what the microwave s