T.D.: The last thing is that that kind of culture... they don't want outsiders. NSA was incredibly resistant historically to any, incredibly insular and so the idea, especially headquarters especially what I call the command structure. The civilian command structure at NSA. You always had the military, you had the direct support of military office and all of that, but I am talking about the larger institution of the organization.
Incredibly resistant and yet every indicator said you need to change to remain relevant and the institution just kept digging in because psychologycally it was a direct threat to their identity and when your identity is threatened, when your identity is given by the very institution that feeds you and gives you sustenance and provides all the protection, you want to deal with the threat and so any outsider is usually quarantined.
Any outsider is usually blocked. Any outsider is, they ensure cannot actually effect real change, effect a real difference and that's precisely what happened to us and I saw that front and center, even in spite of 9/11.
R.K.: Now I interviewed Bill Binney Wednesday night and we talked about how it's an incredibly top-down organization where they're trying to control everybody's action and moves. Is that part of the problem?
T.D.: Well for the pathologies you need certainty and the way to have absolute certainty is to control everything from the top. I'll give you an example. NSA seriously considered, this is not passing like well do we or don't we? Seriously considered whether or not they would actually allow the workforce, they always referred to anybody that was there that was an employee of NSA other than the leadership as the workforce, right?
The workforce technically included them but the real work was done by the workforce. They just controlled, they actually had a serious discussion, I am talking serious about whether or not they would grant the workforce the ability to use email. And the reason why is they wouldn't know what they were sending each other. They wouldn't be able to control the messages.
Control here is important and that certainty, always wanting, and this is why it's crucial to understand the culture to understand why they would want to literally know everything by owning the net as we're now seeing on such a vast scale the likes the world has never seen.
The certainty drives this absolute obsession. Obsession, not just to control the information but to own it. And owning it for them means we need to take it and when we take it we store it and when we store it we get the control and when we control it we own it and if anybody wants it we get to say what happens to it and that includes any reporting on it.
R.K.: Wow. Now today Obama said he is talking about taking it away from them. Do you think that's going to happen?
T.D.: Yeah that's pixie dust. It's Presidential Pixie Dust. In his speech I have to give him credit, he's a master and he obviously has speech writers and he's the President, and I am going to use some really strong language and I will have to say he has this ability even though his poll numbers aren't doing very well these days, he has this ability that when you're actually in the reality distortion field, even reporters that should know better are caught up in that distortion and I just shake my head when I have read some of the follow-ons, for example there's one headline that says that the mass collection of phone data will end.
He didn't say it would end! He didn't actually say that, that it would end. In fact, if anything he is going to uphold the National Security Oath, and I put "Oath" in quotes. Now what is that oath? That oath is to preserve, protect, and defend the National Surveillance State. The rest is a mirage of mirrors. His speech I have to say is a presidential pack of spying lies hiding behind the mote of mendacity.
That's precisely so the message is I am going to appease the National Security Establishment, I am going to make it look like, create the space for the distance while I kick the can down the road and let my own executive branch kind of figure out how we transition this and then let congress try to figure it out knowing that's going to take awhile, right? Unless they act in a way that they haven't acted in recent memory and meanwhile I get to continue the bulk surveillance program.
Meanwhile I am using the bulk surveillance programs by the way there are any number of them that exist that have yet to be disclosed including credit card information by the way and vast amounts of email. Not just telephone data but I am going to use the meta-data program as the cloak and cover for the real secrets which involves content collection. As I was saying recently to somebody the Terror Surveillance Program is equal to meta-data but what's the analogy?
The TSP is to meta-data what the PSP is, which is the President's Surveillance Program, is to content. They're desperate to protect the fact that they're not only doing bulk meta-data collection which I actually call and more accurately refer to as meta-content, they're desperate to protect the fact that wherever they have access, the meta-data is simply an index of the content and just a click away.
R.K.: Really?
T.D.: I knew this after 9/11, OK? This is before any enabling act legislation, this is before any of the Kabuki Dance with the chief judge of the secret court without informing the rest of the court, this is the 2004 Ashcroft Bedside crisis that Comey, now FBI Director James Comey was involved with because even then they realized that the data mining, you didn't hear that term by they way, by the way Obama didn't make any reference why did I bring Operation Shamrock?
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