Cited on HN 3 times, 2013–2017, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Cited as a primary source for Binney's claims about NSA surveillance, including the FBI raid on his home.
A New York Times Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling William Binney, a 32-year NSA veteran who helped design a secret program he says collects Americans' personal data.
“William Binney describing the FBI raid on his house while he was in the shower” (HN, 2017)
An executive of one of the US's largest private social graph repositories ends up working for the largest US spy agency known for maintaining their own "Big Ass Graph (BAG)" for many years longer* and it's "just a coincidence"?! Let me guess - NSA couldn't find anyone else who knew how to manage Hadoop. *Binney - [this video]
This is a blatant lie. But I guess this is the type of propaganda and JTRIG ops that we have to get used to. [link] > Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way. > Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted — and it was for blowing the whistle. William Binney describing the FBI raid on his house while he was in the shower: [this video] and > Top NSA Watchdog Who Insisted Snowden Should Have Come to Him Receives Termination Notice for Retaliating Against a Whistleblower [link]
their definition (via secret interpretation of USSID 18, according to Bill Binney[1]) is roughly that it's only collected if they actually go back and look at it at some point down the line. your web browsing history (or whatever) sitting on a hard drive in utah doesn't fall under this definition until they look at it. [1] [this video]
Binney on NSA's secret interpretation of collection.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more