Sixteen months before the attacks on America, our organisation [Signit Automation Research Center – Sarc] was running a new method of finding terrori… - William Edward Binney

Incompetence at this scale, when they're doing things at this scale, is really dangerous, you could end up on a kill list without knowing what the criteria is to get on there or what the criteria is to get off.

In the early summer, the Russians started to train or exercise along the border with Czechoslovakia. I started looking at the communications they were using to move around and that's when I started to pick up some very small number of unique things that was different from a normal training programme. So I started to capture that, and I said: it's obvious that they're going to invade. It was only two days later that they actually invaded

I found out later that, NSA had approached the telecommunications companies in February of 2001, this is 8 months before 9/11 asking for all the customer data, that is the billing data on phone calls made from US citizens to other US citizens. In fact, the entire customer set. So, and that's fundamentally what they did after 9/11, here they were asking 8 months before. And what that meant to me was that this was the design from the beginning that management had made the plans to spy on the United States and people in the United States even before 9/11. Ok, then, when 9/11 occurred, that was the pure excuse for them to go in and say, 'now, telecoms, we really need the data now, to be able to do this to be, to protect the United States from terrorism.' and that was simply false to begin with. We had no problem at all identifying these people from the beginning.