Alexa O’Brien – Based on a work at alexaobrien.com – “I had an opportunity to attend a presentation by a retired technical director at the NSA, William Binney, which provided context for some of the published documents released by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden. Because of the public value of Binney’s expertise on the subject, I decided to publish his presentation and comments on my website. Binney also mentions how the current NSA mass surveillance regime differs from aspects of an earlier less expensive program, called THINTHREAD, which both he and the former NSA senior computer scientist, Edward Loomis, invented. As Tim Shorrock has already reported, the back-end of THINTHREAD was used by the NSA in a later program called STELLARWIND (thereby forgoing front end privacy protections both Binney and Loomis built into their earlier, less expensive system). NSA then “illegally directed” STELLARWIND en masse sans privacy protections on Americans and the rest of the world. The presentation began with a cursory display of the first three slides. Binney then explores the remaining slides in greater depth. The presentation contains Binney’s own slides and published documents released to journalists by Snowden. The presentation begins below…”