A Good American

Tuesday, 9:47 a.m.

Hi, baby. I'm... baby, you have to listen - to me carefully.

- I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. - I'm on the plane.

I'm calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you.

Please tell my children that I love them very much.

And I'm so sorry, babe.

I don't know what to say. There's three guys.

They've hijacked the plane. I'm trying to be calm.

- We're turned around, and I've heard that. - There's planes

That have been flown into the world trade center.

I hope to be able to see your face again, baby.

I love you. Good-bye.

Voicemail: End of message.

Well, the images I saw, the ones that, of course, uh,

affected me the most were the people diving off the building

when it was burning.

You know, to be put in such a desperate state, you know,

that shows you the human...

Human reaction to those kinds of conditions.

It just, uh, it was just revolting.

And disgusting that we allowed it, basically, to happen.

ThinThread was a program

that absolutely would have prevented 9/11.

So it all went back to that program.

The first time

I met Bill Binney,

the first thing he said to me was,

"I need you to know that I would never deliberately

commit suicide."

I thought he was being a little overdramatic,

but then when I started to hear what he had to say

about what our country was doing,

I worried about his safety, too.

I wanted to make one thing

very certain up front,

that she could be assured that I would not commit suicide.

And I said that because I knew that some of the people involved - in this activity,

And it was a pretty serious thing

because people at the highest levels

of the US government were involved

in all departments.

So I wanted to make sure that she understood

that if something happened to me, it was not suicide

because I was going to be in this with her

and everybody else to the end.

I grew up in central western Pennsylvania.

It was basically the wilderness of Pennsylvania.

It was out in the hills, in the Appalachia hills

just before the mountains.

This is my father's grave.

At one time, I asked him, I said, uh,

"in your service in war time, how many men did you kill?"

And he said, "maybe one."

So, but that's all he said.

He didn't really talk about it.

I think that was pretty typical of World War II veterans.

They did what they had to do and they didn't really

think that that was anything different than anyone else did - in World War II.

Nobody thought they were heroes. They just thought they did - their duty.

One of the worst things about war is those who start it

force others to be as vicious as they are to stop it.

That's what I'm sure he was feeling.

He just didn't want to talk about having to do

what he had to do when in the war.

One of the main reasons we get into war is by mistakes - by leadership

Because they're informed incorrectly

or they're uniformed about events, you know, totally.

So the principle I thought that I was working under

was to make sure that the information

that I could arrive at through the work I did

was informative to leadership so they didn't make mistakes.

Watch out, watch out.

Recapping now for you once again if you've just joined us,

an explosion underground in the garage section

of the World Trade Center in New York City

has killed now three people according to the New York - Port Authority

And has injured at least 150 people.

Hundreds of people as we speak are still being evacuated

from the twin story towers of the structure

at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

There was no hope whatsoever.

Trapped on 94 floors all the way up.

The walls just blew in and everything went blank - after that.

Walls collapsed, furniture's down.

It's a mess downstairs.

The first attack

on the Trade Centers in '93,

that was the first thing that woke everybody up

in terms of the threat of terrorism.

They took truck bombs into the basement

and tried to place the bombs next to the supports

for the building

and set them off to try to shake the building

or break the supports so the building would fall.

Technically, that didn't function that way,

but it killed a lot of people,

and CIA really did start pounding the drums

across the entire intelligence community

to go after the terrorism,

and that's what we did at NSA.

We were looking also at the same time

with the explosion in the digital age,

ballooning of communications in the internet and the phones,

and the terrorists were burying themselves inside

that ballooning communications network worldwide.

So we had to face that as a new technical problem

that we had to solve to figure out

who was communicating with whom and who were the terrorists

and try to extract that information out of that flow

of information.

When I first took on the duty of technical director

of the world geopolitical and military analysis - and reporting shop,

I pulled together analysts from all over the agency

around the world...

- And I said, "okay, we're going to start." - This little project here,

And here's what we're gonna do.

We're going to graph relationships

of everybody in the phone network in the world.

All we have to do is map all the relationships

"between two and a half billion phones."

And somebody in the back says, "you can't do that."

And I said, "why not?"

And they said, "because all the combinations are infinite."

So I said, "okay, think of it this way."

At any instantaneous point in time

the numbers of atoms in the universe are finite.

The relationship to 2.5 billion phones

is simply a smaller subset of that.

That's nothing.

Now you can get your mind around it.

That was the whole idea of the ThinThread program.

Of all the analysts I ever knew

in my entire career, spanning from US air force

through my career at NSA,

Bill was by far the most astute,

the most capable,

accurate.

He used all the tools necessary,

not only to find the story,

but to complete it.

Where we weren't able to actually read messages,

they were encrypted,

Bill found ways to leverage indicators

that I'd never seen anyone else do.

Bill was Mr. Externals at the NSA.

He was the person in the agency

who knew the most about what we now call

in the digital age, metadata.

If something was encrypted and you couldn't decrypt it,

you could still get information out of the external signals,

and that was Bill's forte.

Bill would find ways around the encryption

to see things that people didn't even look for...

Able to work almost any problem,

almost any challenge,

and draw upon mathematics

and other inherent analytical skills

and the willingness to be open-minded,

not close-minded.

He had a good B.S. detector

and he could tell when somebody was blowing smoke.

And he was the agency's

best traffic analyst, bar none.

- In '65, I was coming out. - Of school

And the Vietnam war was cranking up.

That was when we still had the draft,

and so people were getting drafted out of my community.

And since in the country,

you're usually pretty good with a rifle,

and if you go into the army, you end up in the front lines

doing sweeps through the jungles in Vietnam

and shooting people...

I simply did not want to participate in any of that

at all.

I even stopped hunting because I didn't like to kill animals.

So why would I want to get involved with Vietnam?

I had the option to volunteer for the army to go to Europe.

They gave me a whole battery of tests,

and they said, "gee, you have a fairly high aptitude - for analysis."

So they said, "hey, you're a prime candidate"

for the army's security agency,"

and they sent me to Turkey.

We had just come through the Cuban Missile Crisis

in 1962,

which was probably the closest time

we ever came to nuclear war,

and that kind of sensitized everybody to the real threat.

- Turkey was looking at the southern part. - Of the Soviet Union.

They had a lot of areas where they developed

military technology.

I was working a rather large military data system,

a Soviet data system, that had not been solved

at that point.

So they would look at things like manual Morse

or speech broadcasts or satellite communication.

Those kinds of things produced information

which they called traffic.

Some of it you would record, some of it you would either - get directly translated

Or converted into character streams.

Some of it would be continuously encrypted data,