As America marks the 19th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers by terrorists, it is a good time to ask when General Michael Hayden, head of the NSA at the time of 9\/11, will come forward and explain why the agency was unable to detect the chatter among those who had banded together to wreak havoc in the US.<\/p>\n
Before I continue, let me point out that nothing of what appears below is new; it was all reported<\/a><\/strong> some four years ago, but mainstream media have conspicuously avoided pursuing the topic because it would probably trouble some people in power.<\/p>\n The tale of how Hayden came to throw out a system known as ThinThread, devised by probably the most brilliant metadata analyst, William Binney, at that time the technical director of the NSA, has been told in a searing documentary titled A Good American<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Binney devised the system which would look at links between all people around the globe and added in measures to prevent violations of Americans’ privacy. Cryptologist Ed Loomis<\/a><\/strong>, analyst Kirk Wiebe, software engineer Tom Drake and Diane Roark, senior staffer at the House Intelligence Committee, worked along with him.<\/p>\n A skunkworks project, Binney’s ThinThread system handled data as it was ingested, unlike the existing method at the NSA which was to just collect all the data and analyse it later.<\/p>\n