Trailblazer Case Summary

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Despite director Hayden’s declaration that Trailblazer would be the only program of its kind that the organization would use, Binney and his team continued to work on Thin Thread as they were skeptical that Trailblazer could match their programs powerful functionality. Binney requests a list of website url’s that could lead to legitimate intelligence on terrorist activities from internal sources in the NSA. He made a proposal to have data from those sites be read in by the Thin Thread program starting in January of 2001, but it was rejected.2 In late 2000, Bill Black a former SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) employee was brought in for a leadership position in the NSA. He then hired Same Visner, who was a former executive at SAIC; not so coincidentally SAIC would get the lead contract for the Trailblazer program.2 5 6 On August 20th 2001, Maureen Baginski the third in the chain of command at the NSA, told Binney and Ed Loomis (one of the SARC team members) that Thin Thread would not be officially …show more content…

The NSA was presumably unaware of any possible indicators of this impending attack or they would have informed the executive branch and the department of defense to take preemptive action. Just days after, according to Binney’s account, the president of the contracting company that had worked on Thin Thread informed Bill that he had just spoken to Sam Visner who said to him “Do not embarrass large companies. Do your part you’ll get your share, there’s plenty for everybody.” And “We can milk this cow for fifteen years.“2 Thomas Drake a senior executive at the NSA and future Whistleblower recounts that when he and Baginski went to meet with their demoralized work force (traumatized that they were unable to stop this horrific event that killed so many of their fellow citizens) Baginski told them that “9/11 was a gift to NSA, we’re going to get all of the money we need and then

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