"As a contractor, Drake had become familiar with a data-mining program codenamed ThinThread, that had been tested within the NSA and could be deployed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regions where terrorism was prevalent. After 9/11, the program seemed ideal to address the suddenly urgent need to track down terrorist targets.
The program was created in the late ’90s by Bill Binney, a mathematician and head of the NSA’s SARC unit. It was designed to trap, map and mine vast amounts of data in real time to pick out relevant and suspicious communications, rather than requiring the data to be stored and sifted later. The New Yorker details it:
As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches,GPS equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.”
The program was “nearly perfect” except for one thing. It swooped up the data of Americans as well as foreigners and continued to intercept foreign communications as they traversed U.S.-based switches and networks. This violated U.S. law, which forbids the collection of domestic communication without a probable-cause warrant.
To solve this problem, Binney added privacy controls and an “anonymizing feature” to encrypt all American communications that ThinThread processed. The system would flag patterns that looked suspicious, which authorities could then use to obtain a warrant and decrypt the information.
ThinThread was ready to deploy in early 2001, but the NSA’s lawyers determined it violated Americans’ privacy, and NSA director Michael Hayden scrapped it. In its place, Hayden focused funding on a different program, codenamed Trailblazer, which the NSA contracted with outside defense companies, like SAIC, to produce.
That system ran into numerous problems and cost overruns, yet continued with Hayden’s support. Hayden’s deputy director and his chief of signals-intelligence programs worked at various times for SAIC, which received several Trailblazer contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2006, after eating up some $1.2 billion, Trailblazer was finally deemed a flop and killed.
But in the meantime, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, rumors began circulating within the NSA that the agency, with the approval of the White House, was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by conducting domestic surveillance. On Oct. 4, 2001, President Bush authorized the policy, which was operational by Oct. 6.
Drake said strange things began happening inside the NSA, with equipment suddenly being moved, and people who worked on FISA warrants being re-assigned. Drake saw this as a tipoff that the conventional legal surveillance process was being circumvented.
Binney, who wasn’t involved directly in the post-9/11 surveillance program, was certain that the rumored surveillance must be using components of the ThinThread program he helped design, but with the privacy protections now stripped out of it."
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