(ZHE) Legendary NSA whistleblower William Binney (and creator of NSA’s global surveillance system) confirmed to Fox News, that President Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored… he was.
As Zero Hedge noted previously, Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”). Binney is the real McCoy.
Binney resigned from NSA shortly after the U.S. approach to intelligence changed following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He “became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring program he had helped develop — nicknamed ThinThread — were being used to spy on Americans,” PBS reported.
On Monday he came to the defense of the president, whose allegations on social media over the weekend that outgoing President Barack Obama tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign have rankled Washington.
“‘I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored,’ Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday.
“Everyone’s conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.”
Binney also told Sean Hannity’s radio show earlier Monday, “I think the FISA court’s basically totally irrelevant.” The judges on the FISA court are “not even concerned, nor are they involved in any way with the Executive Order 12333 collection,” Binney said during the radio interview. “That’s all done outside of the courts. And outside of the Congress.”
Binney also told Fox the laws that fall under the FISA court’s jurisdiction are “simply out there for show” and “trying to show that the government is following the law, and being looked at and overseen by the Senate and House intelligence committees and the courts.”
“That’s not the main collection program for NSA,” Binney said.
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What Binney did not delve into, however, was if Obama directed surveillance on Trump for political purposes during the campaign, a core accusation of Trump’s. But Binney did say events such as publication of details of private calls between President Trump and the Australian prime minister, as well as with the Mexican president, are evidence the intelligence community is playing hardball with the White House.
“I think that’s what happened here,” Binney told Fox. “The evidence of the conversation of the president of the U.S., President Trump, and the [prime minister] of Australia and the president of Mexico. Releasing those conversations. Those are conversations that are picked up by the FAIRVIEW program, primarily, by NSA.”
Since Binney designed the NSA’s electronic surveillance system, he would know.
By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge / Report a typo