William Binney

When I left NSA, it was with an understanding that you can never underestimate the power of large numbers of stupid people.

I think the FISA court's basically totally irrelevant.

We're not getting a good return on investment on all that money we're pumping into the intelligence community. One of the first things I would suggest is that if there's an attack and they fail to stop it or to alert us before it happens, that we ought to start cutting their budget, and for every attack they should lose ten percent of their budget.

As I have said in the past, revealing specific targets or successes of U.S. intelligence activities is not in the public interest.

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the U.S. to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores.

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control, but I'm a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.

I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors.

You don't hear anybody talking about what FBI is doing with the NSA collected data. That's because they're doing it in secret. I mean, they're also using it to convict people of crimes, and that's what they're doing - they're looking at it for criminal activity.

If you're in government, that's one of the one things you have to do is to always avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Reagan used to say that 'we're a country with a government.' Well, now we're a government with a country, and we're making everybody else that way, too.

No NSA director did as much damage to the agency as Gen. Michael V. Hayden.

You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.

Trailblazer was the NSA's attempt to catch up with the digital age. The problem is, Trailblazer didn't do anything. As far as I know, it didn't produce anything for roughly a little over $4 billion.

The problem with a group is, the more people you add, the lower the average IQ.