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The Project- P3- Thin Thread
Public access America, Please review and subscribe @Applepodcast
ThinThread is the name of a project that the United States National Security Agency pursued during the 1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article in The Baltimore Sun. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.[2]
The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections. A consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop Trailblazer in 2002
The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced. ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: One, the NSA had more information than it could digest, and, two, increasingly its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.
NSA's existing system for data-sorting had produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws erroneously flagging people as suspect, had produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources. NSA leads had resulted in numerous dead ends.
NSA dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance. Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor. Taylor has retired from the NSA.
One intelligence official told the Baltimore Sun that ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately." However, Michael Hayden asserts in his memoir that in 2000 lawyers at the NSA and Justice Department would not allow the deployment of ThinThread because it would be illegal, despite its use of encryption for US citizen data: "The answer from Justice was... clear: 'You can't do this...'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
Public Access America
PublicAccessPod Productions
Footage downloaded and edited by Jason at PublicAccessPod producer of Public Access America
Podcast Links
Review us Stitcher: goo.gl/XpKHWB
Review us iTunes: goo.gl/soc7KG
Subscribe GooglePlay: goo.gl/gPEDbf
YouTube goo.gl/xrKbJb YouTube
“Not for ourselves alone, but that we must teach others.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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By Public Access America
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Public access America, Please review and subscribe @Applepodcast
ThinThread is the name of a project that the United States National Security Agency pursued during the 1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article in The Baltimore Sun. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.[2]
The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections. A consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop Trailblazer in 2002
The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced. ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: One, the NSA had more information than it could digest, and, two, increasingly its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.
NSA's existing system for data-sorting had produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws erroneously flagging people as suspect, had produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources. NSA leads had resulted in numerous dead ends.
NSA dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance. Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor. Taylor has retired from the NSA.
One intelligence official told the Baltimore Sun that ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately." However, Michael Hayden asserts in his memoir that in 2000 lawyers at the NSA and Justice Department would not allow the deployment of ThinThread because it would be illegal, despite its use of encryption for US citizen data: "The answer from Justice was... clear: 'You can't do this...'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
Public Access America
PublicAccessPod Productions
Footage downloaded and edited by Jason at PublicAccessPod producer of Public Access America
Podcast Links
Review us Stitcher: goo.gl/XpKHWB
Review us iTunes: goo.gl/soc7KG
Subscribe GooglePlay: goo.gl/gPEDbf
YouTube goo.gl/xrKbJb YouTube
“Not for ourselves alone, but that we must teach others.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton