William Binney Quotes

As digital communications have multiplied, and NSA capabilities with them, the agency has shifted resources from surveillance of individual targets to the acquisition of communications on a planetary scale.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record.

Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the 'USA Freedom Act,' designed to rein in the allegedly renegade NSA and its wanton depredations of American privacy.

The NSA is not listening to anyone's phone calls. They're not reading any Americans' e-mails. They're collecting simply the data that your phone company already has, and which you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so they can search that data quickly in the event of a terrorist plot.

What I believe is that a lot of the NSA's telephone metadata program is the result of misinformation spread by a traitor, Edward Snowden.

I believe there is significant overreach by the NSA in how it monitors American citizens.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.

I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

There's still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.

The NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year since Congress gave it broad new powers in 2008.

I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I've taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it's bad for American privacy.

I'm not against the NSA. I'm not against spying; I'm not against looking at phone records.