SurveillanceNSA shelved collection program which could have prevented 9/11 attacks: Critics
Fourteen years ago the NSA research unit developed a collection program called Thin Thread which, its authors say, could have detected the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and prevented it. Critics of the program agreed it was a good program, but that it picked up more Americans than the other systemsthen being considered, and was thus deemed too invasive of Americans’ privacy. In the fall of 2000 General Michael Hayden, then-director of the NSA, decided against the program largely because of the legal implications.
As the NSA continues to collect massive amounts of communication information, some analysts ask, “how much is too much?” Bill Binney, the former technical director of an NSA research unit which developed ThinThread, a targeted data acquisition program which was later set aside and replaced with a bulk data collection program, says that the NSA could be missing indications of terrorist activities due to the massive amount of data the agency has to monitor and review.
Binney added that the NSA’s decision to harvest “everything” has overworked its analysts, causing them to miss vital intelligence. “That’s the problem,” said Binney. “They’re basically buried in information and that’s why they can’t succeed.”
Computer Weekly reports that after 9/11, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake used elements of ThinThread to discover that the agency had suppressed a report on al-Qaeda’s movements in the United States before the attack on the World Trade Center towers. “Make no mistake,” Drake wrote in an open letter to President Barack Obama, “that data and the analytic report could have, should have, prevented 9/11.” Upon Drake’s revelations, “the remnants of ThinThread were unceremoniously put on the shelf in NSA’s ‘Indiana Jones’ data warehouse, never to be seen again,” Drake wrote.
Binney claims that even Edward Snowden’s massive theft of classified materials would have been detected earlier on under ThinThread. The program operated an internal monitoring system which would have noticed a mass download such as Snowden’s and “we’d have known as soon as he started doing it,” Binney said.
Critics of ThinThread say that pilot tests of the program months before 9/11 proved the program successful, “it was nearly perfect,” according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications but it documented signals when communications crossed into the United States. ThinThread was deemed too invasive of Americans’ privacy, so in the fall of 2000, General Michael Hayden, then-director of the NSA, decided against the program largely because of the legal implications.
