 enjoying shots and so far. That sounds a little bit tame for the first day. Come on, how are you enjoying shots? That's better, that's better. So we've just had a very interesting talk by Bill Binney, talking about how the NSA affects people. We have another talk by an ex-NSA employee and whistleblower. This is Kirk Wiebe and he's going to talk about corruption and management of the NSA and how that has affected people. Thank you, give it up for Kirk. I don't think I have to define the word corruption for anyone in this audience. But corruption is a real problem because it's driving people to do things that are denying all the rest of us, privacy rights, civil rights, whether it be the illegal things governments do that Bill talked about, the United States legal system. So we have a big problem. Corruption matters, it kills, and I will be talking about that a little bit because my thesis is corruption is why the events of 9-11 happened. Lots of money wasted in excess of $200 billion a year are lost because of corruption. It kills the human spirit and it really undermines the relationships amongst humanity. It destroys trust at all levels at the home and around the world. So you've heard a lot of reasons, a lot of theories about why 9-11 happened. Some people will even tell you it was a U.S. conspiracy that the president made it happen, not true. Wasn't that sophisticated? And it certainly was not because 19 very sharp people knew how to fool the United States defenses. No, the real answer is corruption. By a lot of different people all the way from the White House, all the way down to the security people that belong to the airlines at airports who should have been tipped off and who should have been watching for Atah, Muhammad Atah, when he went through the gate at Boston and so forth. There was a whole trail of legal incidents that some of these guys were involved in. Atah seemed to really ignore the law. He had a speeding ticket a couple of weeks before 9-11. The police let him go, lack of follow-up, lack of interest, you name it. So decisions have consequences, they always do. And you and I usually don't get a vote in most of them. But suddenly we have 3,000 innocent people simply going about their daily jobs and two airliners crashing to the Twin Towers and within the next couple hours they're dead. You heard some of the phone calls in desperation calling home to families as these people face that ultimate tragedy. Lots of money and the bad guys psychologically it was a huge win. They used the success of 9-11 as a recruiting tool to show their power against the mightiest enemy of the Western world, the United States. How does that happen? We had a very honorable president, what, 47 years ago? His name was Dwight David Eisenhower. He had just been Supreme Allied Commander in the European theater fighting the Nazis. He came out of the World War II highly respected by the American people and we made him our president. When he left office on the evening of January 17th, 1961, he participated in the very first presidential goodbye to the American people broadcast nationally on American television. I want you, I'm going to stop speaking and please just take a moment to read these words because they apply to what you're seeing today. What Eisenhower was trying to say? There's a tremendous relationship between industry and a government who needs technology to wage war. The technology of war-waging mushroomed after World War II with nuclear power, the ability or the need, perceived need to be able to launch nuclear weapons from sophisticated submarines and other kinds of platforms. So even Eisenhower realized that you can't start up nuclear submarine technology and shut it off because you're not having any wars. These kinds of technology, especially allowing submarines to be very stealthy and quiet and undetectable in the depths of the world's oceans is very hard to do and you just can't stop it. So the logic was, and he understood, there's going to be this relationship between industry and defense. But he also warned the disastrous rise of misplaced power exist and will persist. If Eisenhower were with us tonight on this stage, I think he'd be heartbroken, I think he'd be totally dismayed and frustrated because that military industrial complex has grown, not just military but intelligence. So we have now the power of weaponry, we have the power of cyber warfare, we're getting ready to turn everyone's lights off, imagine what happens when you take the lights out of Europe. What happens to humanity in the countries? You might go two or three weeks before things shut down, you can't get food, water, and pretty soon, things fall apart, society disintegrates. Fast forward 40 years, you've seen this picture, National Security Agency, a once respectable place to work. Bill and I remember a time, Bill Binney and I, remember a time when you could work here and feel pretty proud about most of the work that was going on. We're not gonna tell you we know it all because even we didn't know everything the government was doing. No one lets you know that. But we at least worked on honorable projects and didn't get pushback. The NSA's way of obtaining capabilities to spy are regulated by something called the United States Federal Acquisition Regulation. Now, this is important for you to know, this strategy of acquiring capabilities, think of IT capabilities, generally speaking, allows for strategic thinking and strategic development over time. Kind of a long-term transition. And I would say our long-term transition for NSA was going from analog switched communication networks to packet switched and the development of the internet. That was the challenge. Bill Binney saw that challenge. And he said, I need to get together with a team because I think we can do something here. We just need to get the right talent in a small group and see what we can do. So Bill was suggesting, we don't need a long drawn out project. We can do a rapid spiral kind of development that says, let's go out and see what we can do quickly. What kind of a capability can we prototype and see if we can make it work? Now, I'm not gonna go through that whole business about the prototype. We tried and failed. Tried and failed. Tried and failed. And then guess what? Bingo. We learned something technically and how to do it. And then we found out that relational databases fail under large volumes of input. So we had to find another way to database data to feed it to a system that's rapid input, rapid output. How do you keep up with the volumes? General Hayden comes in in 1999. Hayden is a history major. He has a couple of connections with the Bush family, especially President Bush 1941, or Bush 41. Bush says to his son, George, hire Hayden, good man. Hayden comes in, doesn't know what he's doing. He completely relies on business to tell him what to do. He brings in Oracle. He brings in other people. Every major Beltway bandit you can think of in the United States, every large company, some of them with presence right here in the Netherlands and around Europe. And he says, you guys are gonna help me do this. So he says, I gotta modernize NSA. We gotta get to this digital world and dominate it, control it, manage it, whatever. It's industry-driven, but they make a fatal mistake. Nobody talks to Bill Benny. Nobody talks to Kirk Wiebe. The guys who have been trying to forge this new understanding of how you go from nothing to something effective, usable, with privacy. In fact, I will tell you Hayden's deputy, the deputy director of NSA, who sponsored Bill for promotion, knew him, came down to see this prototype we built. It was called Thin Thread. You probably have heard of that. And he said, my God, you have made huge technological breakthroughs. Why are you being so shy? Why aren't you tooting your horn and demanding? And we said, Bill, we're trying. NSA is a big place. It has a development organization of thousands who want to stop us because we threaten careers, we threaten all kinds of cultural issues in the workforce. So Bill goes off excited about what he saw, and we never hear from him again. What do you think happened? Michael Hayden, general, director of NSA, told him to shut up and keep his mouth shut. Why? Because Hayden had been downtown in Congress saying, I'm your man, I'm your hero, I'm gonna carry NSA forward in time, and we're gonna modernize, we're going to invigorate, we're gonna make NSA agile, so it's not this clunky, slow machine that can just about address any kind of a cyber threat, exploitation, new protocols showing up on the internet, we're gonna do it all. So he ignores the analysis business process. That's an aspect of what we call knowledge management. If any developer wants to improve your organization and doesn't find the smartest, most capable people in the workforce that have been storing the knowledge of the place, you're gonna miss all that and probably end up delivering something that really sucks. Anybody ever seen this? Raise your hand. A poor implementation happens all the time. People getting rich off that stuff, by the way. It should never happen. So they skip the business process, that allows vendors to just dream it up and write use cases that are not grounded in reality, but sure wins contracts. Sounds good and it sounds good to Congress. So Congress is throwing billions of dollars at Hayden, especially after 9-11 happens. Just throw money at it, get industry in here from Silicon Valley, they'll fix it. We saw this happening, Bill and I, and we said, look, do what you're gonna do. We have a prototype. No, it's not everything, but it's something. It's a start and it works and it protects privacy. Why not use it for what we would call a risk mitigation strategy, a fallback? Because the director's dream was something called trailblazer and it was PowerPoints. That's all that existed. Bunch of vendors with PowerPoints. Nope, isn't gonna happen. Why? Because we threatened. We threatened the director's budget. Our solution was cheap. We couldn't spend $1.2 billion. It wasn't expensive enough. Hayden wanted the charisma, the reputation of a three-star general with a big budget, making Congress happy as he spends money on businesses in their congressional districts. As a result of this experiment to save it one last time where we find the evidence that they already knew about 9-11 didn't know that was in the databases. Now, this isn't a whole story. This is the most shocking part. There was a small element of people at NSA that knew about 9-11. In other words, NSA's existing infrastructure already captured the data about the attack, but they were ordered not to tell anyone. Now, you're only gonna hear that here. That's not well-reported or understood by anyone. And it was Thomas Drake, another NSA whistleblower who was in charge of that look at the database. And he said, Kirk, you cannot imagine when I saw what was in the database that Synthread was able to find, but nothing else did. But it's an embarrassment, right? That embarrasses the director so he kills it, wipes it off the face of the earth. Fast forward to 2005. I don't know what else to call this. I don't like using those words in the States. I'd get in trouble for calling it that. But I want you to know, it was the most tragic situation in the history of probably the United States since before the Civil War. All those people that died. All the billions of dollars lost. Even Congress saw that it was such a farce what Hayden did with Trailblazer, they revoked Hayden's authority to fund any more large programs. That's how bad it was. That has to be really bad when that happens. Largest intelligence failure in the history of probably the United States, and I would suggest NSA has never recovered. When you lose five years of capability and the world's changing and you lose continuity, where do you start? You have to start over again. Huge loss. But Hayden's happy. See the smile? He's still smiling because he gets promoted. Congress said, what happened to Trailblazer? He said, we bit off more than we could chew. And that was the only question he was ever asked about the fiasco at NSA. So he goes on to become deputy director, director of central intelligence. This is how you succeed. Screw up, move up. Get paid, get promoted, get rewarded. Anybody ever run into this kind of stuff over here? I hope you never do. So how do you explain it? People are willing to cheat. People are willing to forget honesty. Here's some statistics. You read them. I don't have to read it for you. We're now harvesting the cheaters in positions of responsibility at your company, in your government, in mine, across the board. So we have this E word. We had a interview with a young guy that wanted to work with us. And he said, I'm an ethical hacker. Do you know how my ears picked up when I heard ethical? I said, wow, this month, and I asked Ariane Comfus. I said, is ethical hacker, is that a new thing? Did he do that? Or do the hackers generally think of themselves as ethical or not? Now you tell me, how many people in here consider themselves an ethical hacker? Can I see the hands? How about just ethical people interested in honesty? I applaud you. You stand for something. Keep it up, because we're all in one community striving for something better than what we're seeing today. How do we make it better? There are some people, including yourselves, especially in academia. I suggest you take a look at their website. It's nothing fancy, but this is more of your community. This one happens to be a professor, Dr. Michael Van Houten. That's his address. Feel free to email him. We had a talk with his colleague, Professor Wempe of Amsterdam University, and he asked us if we would mind coming to his university and working with some of his students, talking to them, be part of a panel to forward the whole issue of ethics and what can we do? How can we action it? So some interesting ideas. I suggest you please do the same. Finally, there's a conference coming up in Copenhagen in 2018. If you can make it, please do. This gives you plenty of time to prepare. This organization goes back also in the 1980s. I think it's 1983. And they're struggling with corruption as well. And I suggest you join them. Thank you for listening. Any questions? Thank you, Kirk. You finished very, you finished some time early, which is great. So we have a lot of time for questions. I should also inform you that we, after his talk and after the discussion here, we can continue the discussion together also with Bill Binney in the tent next door, the big TP tent called Explody. And they'll be available there for discussions. But for now, please use one of the microphones to ask your questions to Kirk. Any questions? Maybe it's too simple, but what kept you from designing a whole circus of very costly window dressing around your project? A potemking project. With fantastic fronts and bells and whistles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's... Yeah, yeah. Why didn't you? Yeah, I will tell you that. Interestingly, while Bill and I were developing this technology, a friend called me, who actually had worked for me at NSA and now was in a position to have a voice in Congress through the chief of staff of the Intelligence Committee. And she called me one night and said, Kirk, a new person from Congress is taking over the NSA budget, monitoring it, checks and balances. And she was very good, but she said, she doesn't know where to begin. Would you mind meeting with her? And I said, Linda, I would love to. So we had to be very quiet about this and a little bit secret because I was down in the NSA organization. I wasn't at the top and NSA doesn't like people down here. Talking to people who oversee the top. So, but she knew I would be honest, brutally honest. So I met with her in the back of a diner. And you won't believe this, but when I saw her enter, I knew her by her maiden name. When I heard from Linda, I was gonna talk to this lady. The name had changed because she had gotten married. So we already had known each other from a previous business relationship with NSA. So the trust factor was there right away. And I said, Diane, there's some really neat stuff going on in an organization hidden down in the basement of NSA with Bill Benny and Ed Loomis and a handful of other people. She said, great. Next time I schedule a visit, I'm gonna ask to see it. And nobody has to know where I found out about it. And so she did. She came out. She told the director's legislative staff. She wanted to see it. We met with her. She loved it. She said, you're the only place in NSA that's really doing anything positive in this whole arena. And she wanted to keep track of, well, long story short, Diane actually got money for what we were doing. It was a small amount, but we were thankful to get any kind of money because the internal NSA process wasn't giving us anything. So she gave us $9 million and said, do you have a strategy, this is before 9-11, do you have a strategy for monitoring flare ups and hotspots in the world like the Middle East? Bill did. He said, I know exactly where to put our prototype and we'll go from there. She says, great, do it. NSA refused to do it. NSA said to Congress, we're not gonna do it. And nobody confronted NSA. They let them get away with it. In other words, we don't have honesty and integrity in oversight in Congress needed to oversee the executive branch of the US government, which NSA belongs to, because it's subordinate to the United States Department of Defense. That's why we never got any funding. And the director did the rest by destroying thin thread after Drake demonstrated the facts it discovered in the NSA database about 9-11. But that's really the answer. Yes, sir. That's right. I got three questions. My first question is, can I ask two questions? Okay. My second question is, yeah, I saw for engineer. Yeah, that's okay. Is it corruption or incompetence that causes this? I could entertain the idea of incompetence if this had been a small organization. But we know that NSA had lots of smart achievers, technical people. The problem was they tended to act like sheep. Don't, in other words, go along to get along. Right. Don't make waves. Right, they're working at the wrong level. They're the mathematicians, the engineers. Yes, absolutely. So it's management incompetence or bad people, like corrupt people. Now the director doesn't make a unilateral decision. He has a board. And most of those board members were techies years ago that came up through the management chain and got corrupted. And the director said, anybody got a better plan than I do? Trailblazer? They said, of course not. They weren't going to embarrass themselves and weaken their position as supporters. You always want the chief to hear yes. So no one opposed him. He had agreement with Congress to throw money at the problem. Everything looked great. He enjoyed those metrics, getting a big budget, the opportunity, and he made a failed mistake. He brought industry in and he counted 100% on them solving the problem. Five years later, he's told by industry out of Silicon Valley, I'm sorry, Mikey Hayden. We don't have applications that big to deal with this kind of thing you're trying to do. We just don't have a clue. Now we became persona non grata because by now we're going out in public saying NSA really screwed up and they sold out American security, indeed the world's security for money by throwing the whole thing over to industry and then when they had a workable prototype going all along until they killed it. Right, because that's some fun times on Wikipedia just now, reading that the FBI raided your house. Yes, that was fun. Must be a super scary experience. My third question is, shouldn't I, as a non U.S. citizen, but U.S. resident in my case, shouldn't I be happy that it's such a mess at the NSA? Shouldn't I feel safer that they can get useful data out of their data? No, no, no. I mean, you can get some semblance of ease out of that. Yes, and even Bill and I have shared those sentiments. He's saying no, basically. But here's the problem, here's the problem. We're a nation of what, 300 million people in the United States. Let's say NSA can only make 20,000 surveilled and make their lives miserable and destroy their privacy. Do the rest of us look and say that's okay, it's not me, it's somebody else. Well, you know the story. When does that problem come home to roost on all of us? And that's the problem with that. So yes, there are capabilities they don't have, we believe, that could make their job even easier and more probing, but do not take comfort in the fact that they're framing people by using NSA data in court and not telling the attorney for the defense so people's rights are being stripped in the courtroom and don't forget that they can make life. And now we're hearing the Obama administration people actually responding on the Trump campaign. Now once you use a tool of government to undermine democracy, that's the very thing that we warned about long ago. So the takeaway is that I should start a company in machine learning. I work for Google, we do some stuff in machine learning and talk to them and sell them some better systems. I'd like to thank you for that idea. That is worth thinking about. Thank you. Anyone else have a question before we break up? All right, I suggest you get something cool. Oh, please, one more. The idea that military intelligence is a conflicting concept, is that true? Military intelligence, yeah. Military and intelligence is, in one word is conflict? No, I don't think so. Again, it's all about authority. The enemy for the United States military has always been some foreign entity with threatening weapons and so forth. But what changed with an NSA is fully legal chartered to spy on foreigners. That's okay. But it was never chartered to spy on Americans unless there was evidence of crime, terrorism, some wrongdoing, then they could do it. But now it's grab everyone's data because you don't know when you might want to use it against them, put it in a database and that's the threat constantly hanging, but not just for Americans, all of you as well. And they have partners in Europe that help with that effort, yeah. Yes, sir. You're creating this image of the NSA being a not very capable organization? Capable? Well, I mean, could it be possible that they'll just have programs superior to the prototype that you were developing at a level of classification that you weren't authorized to see? Well, it is possible, but then I question this. If ours observed privacy in accordance with the constitution and the privacy rights of individuals, why doesn't theirs? Why can they just unmask and look at anything they want to without going to a court? I understand correctly, the FISA court is a court. FISA? Oh, FISA. Yeah. A FISA court is one person. And an NSA person comes in and says, judge, we, the NSA, the United States Department of Defense declare that we need to unmask the identity of this person. The FISA judge isn't cleared to see why. He just has to believe the lawyer. And there's no defense standing up for this person that's about to be looked at, their private data. Is that a court in the traditional sense of a... Well, Obama made it and he was a lawyer, so... Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. He was a lawyer, but that doesn't mean what he thought was right. Well, we're looking at an organization that's meant to systemically reduce privacy all over the world. So I don't think Wright enters into the consideration here. So what you would say is, as long as we're all being screwed, that's okay. What I'm saying is, you're looking at an organization that's designed to be above the law. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, it is. I agree. And above the law, it is designed to steal corporate secrets all over the world and reduce the privacy of any foreigner to absolute zero. And now they've found excuses and methods, given that are above the law. It should be easy to do the same thing for Americans as well. Yeah, so what's the benefit of all that? Oh, the benefit to the organization should be pretty obvious. Yes, but what is the benefit to the people we rule over? You're looking here at a group of people that might know a thing about this. And outside of this event, you'll look at people that have absolutely no idea. Yes, in other words, they're not conscious of all this that's going on. A lot of people don't know the threat or what can be used. Well, I've heard this argument that the NSA is not that big a deal because they are concerned with issues of national security, which in the case of the United States government are indeed very serious things of national security. I'm just wondering what my privacy has to do with your national security, and probably the same thing goes for every individual. Well, no, our concern for your privacy is a matter of ethics. That's just our personal ethic that we built into the prototype because we thought it was wrong and actually troublesome to spy on people who are not connected with some kind of threat. It actually dirties up your database. Why should I look at all the stuff that's on the internet when 0.0001% is really of interest? So why you clog up the system? Well, I might throw up that all of this information could be used for machine learning and artificial intelligence and eventually lead to a net benefit to national security, especially in the case of violent revolution. I would agree with that if the topic were people who are candidate terrorists, criminals, but not the world. How do I develop an algorithm based on innocent people? Every innocent person will have a full life around them and the way that they behave will tell you something about the way others behave. I don't think innocent people will tell me much about bad people. I think you're making too clear a distinction there. Really? Guys, I think we should take this discussion to the other tent, I think. Are there any more questions? Do you think the big data in the database of NSA are right or might it be corrupted or is the bigness to corrupt it? Yeah, it's a good question. I cannot speak definitively about today's NSA database, but one thing I can say, it's full of stuff that's not important, and that makes the life of the analyst more difficult because he has to find needles in a growing haystack of data. So it actually works in reverse when you take that kind of an approach. There must be some corruption. I don't know what processes they use, but I know they couldn't find the 9-11, and that was a database, and that was standard internet data. I don't know what format the evidence was in, but it was there, and Drake saw it. So I think we have to assume that there's some level of corruption. If not in the data, the processes that feed the analyst desktop, by the time it gets there, something isn't right. But I think it's a selection problem. How do you select from a fire? How do you sip water from a fire hose? That's what NSA has to try to do. Yes, sir. Last question. Innovation and new technology from outside the United States that's to America. Do the corporations, in other words, do corporations want certain things not to be invented or developed? Yeah, but it's like all technology. It's, technology can be used to kill. Technology can be used to save lives. Technology can be used to undermine personal rights. Technology can be used to protect rights. And there are people in this audience that work on that problem every day. How can we help protect journalists? How do we protect truth anymore? Because if the bad people who invent technology want to change the records in the database, change your personnel files to make it look like you're a criminal, and oh, by the way, the Stasi did that, what's to say someone else won't? The only thing that makes NSA good are the people that run it. Are they ethical? The only thing that made the Stasi bad is the people who ran it. Are they ethical? Is it, can corporations look in the NSA database? You know, that's an interesting question. Maybe not directly, but maybe to some degree because there's such a tight relationship between the ISPs and some of the other people supplying NSA with data under the program Bill Binney showed you. Prism, yeah. And so we don't know that answer, but we do suspect that some of the intelligence NSA derives is economic in nature. And then the question is, does NSA share those insights with business to make it easier for them to compete against Europe or some other part of the world? Some would suggest, yes, that's happening. I have not definitive proof, but I'm suspicious. Any other questions? You have been wonderful and patient, but you must be hungry or thirsty. Give yourselves an applause. Thank you. Thank you, sir.