On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Drake tells Host Paul Jay that mass surveillance is not about protecting people, in the end itâs about social control. This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced August 5, 2015, with Paul Jay.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. Iâm Paul Jay. And weâre continuing our series of interviews with Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who blew the whistle on the NSAâs inability or unwillingness or deliberateness to not deal with intelligence or act on intelligence they had that might have prevented 9/11. He blew the whistle on a billion-dollar boondoggle of creating a intelligence surveillance apparatus that on the whole seems to be completely worthless, and blew the whistle on the whole mass surveillance program itself. Thanks for joining us again.
THOMAS DRAKE, WHISTLEBLOWER AND FMR. NSA SENIOR EXEC.: Thanks for having me. So where we left off, we were talking about the instruction toâthe NSA gives to its peopleâand I guess one assumes this begins with Cheneyâget it all, meaning the Constitutionâs not really an issue right now because weâve been attacked. Letâs get every piece of data on everyone we possibly can. Is that kind of describe it?
DRAKE: No, and the programâs name at NSA was called Stellar Wind. It was actually a secret. Itâs now been made available. Youâll you go on to the website, youâllâwebsites have it now. But President Bush, October 4, 2001, actually signed a secret presidential finding order authorizing what was called the Presidentâs Surveillance Program. It was known as âthe Programâ by those who knew about it or read into it.
JAY: Now, Iâve always thought, rightly or wrongly, or speculated that a lot of this went on pre-9/11 anyway. Out of the Cold War, they already had their justification [incompr.] national security state. They were spying on people in all kinds of ways. Did 9/11 just give them the means to justify an enormous new expenditure to kind of do what they were doing, but just on a much bigger scale?
DRAKE: Much faster scale, basically carte blanche, licensing unto themselves in secret the means to just expand this far beyond any constraints that had existed. It didnât matter what the law said. It didnât matter what the statutes said. Weâre going to just treat the United States as if it were a foreign nation for dragnet surveillance. And they started with phone numbers. They started with the big telcos. They had secret agreements that already were in place, particularly with AT&T. A lot of those were expanded greatly, as we know from the Snowden disclosures. We know at least Verizon, for many, many yearsâand continues to do so to this dayâwas turning over all phone numbers via the FBI to NSA every day. So it started with phone numbers, and then it went to emails, email addresses, internet service providers, internet usage, internet data, data mining, as well as financial records.
JAY: Now, the claim all along was weâre only looking at metadata.
DRAKE: Yeah, thatâs actuallyâthatâs a government meme, because theyâre desperate to protect the fact that wherever possible, âcause of the advances in technology, they want the content as well. Metadata in some ways is a misnomer. Itâs really meta-content. You can get to know an awful lot about a person by virtue of just the metadata, as I call it, meta-content.
JAY: Break that down. What does that mean for people that donât know?
DRAKE: Metadata is reallyâitâsâif itâs, like, a phone number, itâs just the phone number itself, the duration of the call, your phone number, the numbers that youâre calling, location information, basically subscriber information, your account information, similar to what you get in a billing statement. That would be the metadata.
JAY: But they were doing more than that.
DRAKE: Increasingly, as time went on, the advances in technology have allowed vast amounts of the content to be kept as well.
JAY: âCause otherwise whatâs the point? What do you get out of having just metadata?
DRAKE: Thatâs part of the mindset. Do you want to collect it all? You donât want to just stop the collecting of metadata, because the technology allows you to collect the content along with it as well. In fact, the metadata really is the context for the content.
JAY: Now, in various TV shows and movies weâve seen NSA guys with their headphones on just willy-nilly listening to all kinds of conversations.
DRAKE: I used to do that for years overseas, listening in on communications of other countries.
JAY: So thatâs whatâs started happening here.
DRAKE: Right. But you donât have enough people, you donât have enough pairs of years, so you increasingly go to technology.
JAY: But this is without warrants; the listening that is going on is happening without warrant.
DRAKE: Well, there are cases where they still do the warrant process, you know, they do more the traditional warrant process. But weâre talking about the wholesale violation of thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people living in the United States.
JAY: And in this get-at-everything, are they recording actual calls in data banks?
DRAKE: Wherever possible, where the technology afforded. See, digital, ironically enough, the digital revolution, the digital ageâweâve had an information age for quite some time. Go back to Marconi or go back to the telegraph, right? Thatâs radio, Marconi. Go all the way back to the 1840s when the telegraph was invented, you know, see the people that [incompr.] Morse codeâyou know, as we called them in the military, the ditty boppers, right, just dots and dashes, right? Weâve had information, the information age for quite some time, right, sort of along with the Industrial Revolution. Weâre talking about the digital age. It makes it much easier to store it, much easier to keep it, âcause itâs not analog; itâs digital. Itâs all ones and zeros. It can be storedâ.
JAY: But Iâve always imagined that in theory they record, like, this massive amounts of actually recording peopleâs conversations,â
DRAKE: Increasingly.
JAY: âand then they can do keyword search, and if they want to pull up a particular personâs call, they can. Is that what theyâve done?
DRAKE: They can. They can, yes, increasingly so, or do machine conversion, where they actually are converting it into text and then doing very rapid scans in terms of keyword searching.
JAY: So this is quite contrary what weâve been told, if I understand it correctly, âcause as far as I understand it, they keep saying itâs just metadata. If we want to go past that, we get a warrant.
DRAKE: Yeah. Well, without getting into the weeds of the legality, theyâve argued whatâs called third-party doctrine. Itâs based on Smith v. Maryland from the late â70s, this argument that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to metadata. Thatâs basically their argument, which theyâit was a secret interpretation of the original Patriot Act, which was signed into law in October 2001. Essentially meant I could just show up at any business, right, and I could get the business records, and the fact that you have an account with them, the fact that youâre a subscriber doesnât matter. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. For national security purposes, we can ask for it. And increasingly theyâre using that mechanism to gather as much of that subscriber data as possible,â
JAY: But they goâ.
DRAKE: Under the guise of national security. They go much further than that. And theyâve been going much further than that for many, many years.
JAY: Which means recording actual calls without warrants.
DRAKE: Yeah, or getting entire billing statements, and not just the metadata but now being able to take the actual calls themselves,â
JAY: Who you calledâ.
DRAKE: âthe fullâthe content of text messages, the content of emails.
JAY: And what do they do with this massive amount of data?
DRAKE: Store it and search through it, or just keep it in case they need it later or for parallel construction. This is one of the other things that is now being used routinely, where under the guise of national security or the guise of intelligence, youâre actually collecting it and then your repurposing it. So youâre actually using it for law enforcement. Youâre using it to go after people. Youâre using it to create crimes.
JAY: Where the FBI can charge someone based on the NSA information, but then theyâ.
DRAKE: But itâs already tainted. [incompr.] youâve tainted it, but it doesnât matter, because now youâre hiding it behind national security.
JAY: Yeah, and the FBI creates its own scenario how they supposedly got to this information without the NSA.
DRAKE: Yes, when in fact what theyâre hiding, what theyâre obscuring is where it actually came from or what the trigger information was.
JAY: Now, we knowâ.
DRAKE: Theyâre completely bypassing due process, which protects persons under the Constitution.
JAY: Now, when youâre hired in 2001 and you start working at the NSA, one of your jobs, if I understand it correctly, was you had to actually decide what would be the software that was going to do all this. And there were two different paths to go down. Is that right?
DRAKE: Well, one path is mass surveillance or collect-it-all, just take it all in the digital age. The other path is you get much smarter about it. You only take what you need. You only target. I was taught to target. This goes back to the Cold War. Even the Cold War, with the advancing technology, we didnât take it all. We used to joke about we were, like, one of the vacuum cleaners of the sky. But even though we were a vacuum cleaner, we only sucked a little bit of it.
JAY: Take-it-all was called Trailblazer.
DRAKE: The take itâwell, take-it-all actually was the mass surveillance regime. Trailblazer was supposed to be NSAâs answer to the 21st century, because they realized they were coming up increasingly short in making sense of large volumes of data. So they needed something that was completely different, right? But they used their mindset, right, from the old analog days, the traditional ways, and just said, well, letâs just build something thatâll take it all. The Trailblazer itself was an utter failure. They never did deliver. They just spent a whole lot of money.
JAY: Well, I was about to say that a lot of that is not actually driven by the amount of money you can spend, the amount of contracts youâre giving out. And back to something that was said in the earlier segment, how banal so much of this is is âcause itâs about making dough.
DRAKE: But a criticalâand what enabled that was a critical strategic decision that General Michael Hayden at the time made as the director of NSA. Heâs said, weâre going to buy the solution; weâre not going to make it. Buying it meant weâre going to go to the military-industrial-intelligence complex and weâre going to spend lots and lots of money for them to provide us a solution. If youâre the military-industrial complex, youâre not going to provide a solution that youâre going to deliver within just a few months or a couple of years; youâre going to milk it for all itâs worth, because thatâs the nature of the military-industrial complex.
JAY: How much did it wind up costing?
DRAKE: Well, the original program was almost $4 billion. They spent several billions above that by the time all was said and done over a six-year period.
JAY: And it didnât work?
DRAKE: It didnât work. They never actually delivered anything. All they did was spend a whole lot of money and create a whole bunch of PowerPoint slides. It became the seed moneyâin the year after the last year of the Trailblazer program, when General Keith Alexander in 2005, August 2005, becomes the new director of NSA, they use the remaining monies of Trailblazer to start up his answer to Trailblazer, which was the collect-it-all approach, literally, called Turbulence.
JAY: And so what are they using now?
DRAKE: Itâs the follow-on to Turbulence.
JAY: Turbulence.
DRAKE: And a whole bunch of other programs.
JAY: Any idea what that would have cost?
DRAKE: Billions and billions. I donât even know what the full cost is. It was already several billion when I left in terms of Turbulence. This big data requires big programs and big money [crosstalk]
JAY: And is there any evidence turbulence has made the country any safer?
DRAKE: No, other than collecting a whole lot of data. I mean, theyâve got this massive facility theyâre building out in Utah, the Utah data facility. Theyâre also building an even larger facility at the main campus at Fort Meade, Maryland, on what used to be the golf course that I used to run around.
JAY: I know William Binney, who was involved in developing it, who was at the NSA, who retired just around the time you started working there, right, had developed something called ThinThread.
DRAKE: ThinThread was an extraordinary program. It was actually to answer the key challenge problem. They called itâthey had challenge problems. One of the key challenge problems is how do you make sense of data, right, when thereâs vast amounts of it. So what they calledâit was volume, variety, and velocity. So you have tons and tons of it, all kinds of it, and itâs coming at you faster and faster each and every day. This is the explosion of the digital ageâfiber optics, massive bandwidths, super high-speed. How do you make sense of it? Far more than weâd ever had in the analog. In some cases it makes the era that I grew up in, although I saw that transition in the early â80s from the analog to the digital age, in terms of regular tape recorders and headsets, to actual computer-basedâso I lived that transition in the early â80s when I was overseas flying in RC-135s and doing electronic warfare. So in the â90s, they realized post-Cold War, with internet explodingâand, of course, internet had been developed, ironically enough, to deal with a nuclear winter: in case you blew out all your communication nodes, you could still get the message through. So hereâs the â90s. What do we do about all this data? And a very smallâit was called the SIARC. It was the SIGINT, signals intelligence analysis research center. Soâautomation, the SIGINT Automation Research Center, otherwise known as a SIARC. SIARC was like a Skunk Works operation. And Bill Binney was the crypto mathematician as well. And I got to know themâI actually got to know them before 9/11. I got to know them after 9/11 when I was there as a senior executive, because they actually had the answer. They had developed this over several years. It was ready for operational deployment well before 9/11. It was never given the green light. It was actually formally canceled in August 2001. I attempted to resurrect it shortly after 9/11âit was, again, a burden that I carry: it had a two-page classified implementation plan, and it was all rejected.
JAY: And justâif I understand it correctly, what it did is you would have someone you had some reason to believe was involved in no good, and then you could build patterns of interconnections, so youâre actually targeting something based on some actual evidence rather than just get-it-all. And then Binneyâs argument now is get-it-all means that you actually just made a haystack bigger within which youâre trying to find a needle.
DRAKE: Yeah, a completely different approach. One is you build bigger haystacks. The other one is you actually look for needles.
JAY: So how much do you think this is just driven by getting to spend billions and billions of dollars?
DRAKE: It is. I can make a very powerful argument that that was one of the primary drivers, massive national security jobs program, that weâre going toâ. And I know senior executives and program managers who spoke to this quite openly. You know, weâre going to make us superrich from 9/11 and from all these programs. Even before 9/11, it was already going in that direction with very large programs. So you can imagine Hayden making a strategic decision to go to the military-industrial-intelligence complex and simply buy the solution. That meant youâre going to have to spend lots and lots of money. These companies are not going to belly up to the billions of dollars that are available. We used to joke about the Trailblazer bar for nothing.
JAY: And from a strategic point of view, is it in their consciousness? How concerned are they about domestic dissent? How are they concerned about if thereâs ever 20, 25, 30 percent unemployment, if you actually get into a place where you start to have a real mass movement in this country, is this in their mind, that this might help us in those days?
DRAKE: [incompr.] national security state. You know, weâve got priority, and itâs an existential threat, so weâll spend many, many billions to deal with the threat.
JAY: But you donât think itâs also, at some point, they think, could be used domestically to controlâ.
DRAKE: If youâre talking mass surveillance.
JAY: Thatâs what Iâm talking.
DRAKE: Again, this is another one of those elephants in the room. Mass surveillance is not about protecting people. Itâs about social control in the end.
JAY: Thatâs what Iâm asking.
DRAKE: You donât bring all this information, you donât store it allâthis is like The Minority Report, right? You have this vast amount of data, youâre going to use it against people. And part of what youâre going to targetâand this is from withinâis any potential threats that exist, similar, just on a large much larger scale and a much more automated scale, that happened during the Nixon administration. Nixon had enemies, and he used the FBI and other instruments of national power, including NSA. NSA had a program called operation MINARET. It was literally to take the power of NSA back in the â60s and the early â70s to target those who were designated as threats to the state, in total violation of the Constitution.
JAY: Iâve been suggesting that what happened in Baltimore after the death or murder of Freddie Gray and all the resistance that rose up here, that this seemed to also be letâs takeânever not take advantage of a good crisis. The National Guard comes in. They get to learn how to occupy a fairly big American city. They have a curfew. They get to learn how to implement a curfew in a fairly big American city. I mean, it seems such overkill that youâve got to wonder why spend so many millions of dollars on this unless itâs kind of a dress rehearsal. And then I wonder, we know thereâs such a thing as fusion centers, which is where the various intelligence agenciesâI think even military intelligence is involved, local police force, FBI. Like, everybodyâs supposed to be collaborating there. I mean, to what extent do you think this listening ability, I mean, get-it-all ability, can be driven out of a fusion center, could be focused on like a Baltimore?
DRAKE: Thatâs an end state. Itâs a day-to-day end state. You never can get enough data. Youâre addicted to the data. Itâs like youâre a drug addict and youâre mainlining every day and thereâs always more data to feed you. And thereâs many, many veins you can stick the needles in.
JAY: But do you think when you have something like the Baltimore resistanceâsome people call it uprisingâgoing on, I mean, are these fusion centers listening to everybodyâs phone calls?
DRAKE: Increasingly, yes. Thatâs how you maintain social control. Thatâs how you keep track of people. You donât want uncertainty. You donât wantâyou want control. I keep coming back to that. The whole point is control. You canât have people just acting on their own, because you might not be able to control it. Now youâre back to authority, youâre back to structures of power to keep people in their place. It doesnât matter whether or not authority abuse their power, as we know happened. But thereâs long-standing issues in terms of the social structures that created it.
JAY: And here the social structureâ.
DRAKE: And this is so egregious, that someoneâs actually murdered in a van, right. Murdered. Murdered.
JAY: And the social structure that has to be defended is the one that has chronic poverty at its heart.
DRAKE: Yes. Tragically so. Why do you want to really fix that? Why would you want to actually empower people? Why would you want to let them have that opportunity to self-actualize? Youâve got to keep that in place. So it makes it very difficult to get out of that. So, yeah, you look the wrong way, youâre on the wrong side of the street, hey, weâre going to just pick you up. People actually wereâhere I am, a white man. My private attorney, when they actually indicted me, I didnât know theyâd indicted me. Iâm at lunch down in Bethesda, just minding my own business, although I was waiting for this. I had already been secretly charged. It was just a matter of time in which they would actually drop that sword of Damocles on me and actually indict me. And I knew it was going to be quite public, just by virtue of what was about to happen. I didnât know exactly when. We knew it was imminent. And he calls me and heâs on the phone [incompr.] where are you? I said, what do you mean, where am I? He says, yeah, where are you? He actually thought I had been taken right out of the store. Iâd just beenâand incarcerated, that he was going to have to come and actually either post bail, if that was possible, or actually visit me in jail.
JAY: Okay. Weâre going to continue. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Thomas Drake on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.
