WILLIAM BINNEY

There Is No Such Thing as
Artificial Intelligence

This is the edited transcript of an address by William Binney to the Schiller Institute conference in Morristown, N.J. on Feb. 16, 2019. Mr. Binney was Senior Technical Director at the National Security Agency (NSA), until he resigned—on October 31, 2001 after 34 years at NSA—to expose the fraud and corruption there. He is currently a member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Thank you! It’s a pleasure to be here and talk to you today about artificial intelligence (AI), actually, and I really want to address some of the latest developments we’ve had with Russiagate, the Democratic National Committee emails from Wiki Leaks, plus some of the Guccifer 2.0 fabrications and things of that nature.

Artificial Intelligence Is
Not Artificial

But first I wanted to say that this idea, the concept of artificial intelligence, has been around for a long time. I first ran across it in the 1970s, and I was saying, “Well what is this?” And I kept thinking about it, and I said, “This doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing artificial here.” Because what they’re doing basically is capturing the thought process of humans, and formalizing it in a set of code, so they can execute that electronically and do it a lot faster than humans. But the point is, there’s nothing that isn’t known by humans or input into the machine by humans, to replicate what humans do. So, it’s not a question of something just being artificial. It’s really tangible: It’s the capture of the thought process of humans.

A case in point. When I was working there, at one time there was a small change—we won’t talk about what the change was—but people said at the time, “Well, we have all this programming going on, let’s just take all this data, throw it in the computer, and the computer will tell us what the answer is.” This is the top thinking of NSA people, OK? So, you have to understand, they’re much like the KGB. [laughter] That went on for a couple of weeks; they kept throwing the data in, but nothing came out. Surprise, surprise!

Emotional, or Professional?

After a while I got kind of upset about this whole process and I said, “Well, now I’ll take my pencils and solve it.” So, that’s exactly what I did; I took two other people, and we sat down with pencils and paper, solved the problem, put the solution into the computer so it would operate electronically, capturing the thinking process. Then the whole business worked, and we got the answers. It’s the idea though, that this is kind of what people are doing; they’re distorting the thinking process here in the United States. The whole process is being distorted; it’s becoming more what some would call political. I think it’s more like emotional; it’s a shift to emotion as a basis for thought, as opposed to discipline and professionalism.

I take the case in point: the DNC emails that WikiLeaks had. There has been evidence there that the data was downloaded to a storage device. That had been present in that data all along; but nobody had looked at it until we took a look at it—some of our people who are associated with our research, looked at this, and they said, “Hey! Look at all these last modified timings all ending in even numbers.” Well, the random probability of that happening is one in two for every time it occurs; it could be either even or odd. So, the whole idea is the probability. We looked at 500 of these, and the probability of all 500 ending in an even digit is one in two to the 500th power. I reduced it to Base 10, because people think in Base 10 instead of Base 2, so I said that’s one in ten to the 150th power. I called it an “infinitesimal of higher order,” and somebody changed that to “infinitely small” or something.

But the idea is: the discipline of looking at data to see what the consistencies are in the data, and to figure out what the chances are of that randomly happening, using a disciplined thought process, instead of emotion. “I hate Trump, so therefore, he did it.” That’s what the mainstream media does.

I came out with the Guccifer 2.0, and we could prove in a court of law that this guy was fabricating the data. First of all, the data he put out there, it was his big mistake. It’s hard to make something look legitimate, if you’re really doing something nefarious and you try to put data out for people to look at: “See, here. I’ve got the evidence; this is what I did.” It really gets pretty hard to make it to the point where people would be convinced, especially if you have people like us looking at it, because we will tear every bit apart. We just like to know what the real truth is, not the emotion.

We know what the emotion is: nobody likes Trump. They want to get rid of him, and it’s a conspiracy to do that. We had a soft coup from the Department of Justice and the FBI; that’s been clear for a long time. Plus, I know some of these people, and they’re really not very nice people—let’s put it that way. I had an axiom when I was working at NSA: “If a politician opens his mouth and talks, there’s an 80% chance they’re lying. If a bureaucrat does it, it’s 90%.”

Case in point: DNI James Clapper, or the NSA Director, Keith Alexander, or any number of them who have been up there. By the way, they’ve not been charged with anything, have they? And yet, Roger Stone gets—what did he do? He was in for a five-hour interview. I looked at it this way: If you’re in for an interview with the FBI for five hours, they’re going to talk about a lot of things, and you have to have everything exactly right. Otherwise, they could charge you with lying. Who could actually tell everything correctly in a five-hour interview? You’re going to make a mistake somewhere. But they’re charging him; they’re not doing it with FBI Director McCabe or any of the other people in the DOJ or the FBI, let alone Hillary Clinton or any of the people with her; or all that mishandling of classified material by those people.

DNC Emails Leaked, not Hacked

Going back to our investigation, our guys saw this even-numbered pattern in the last-modified-time field. It turns out that’s a property of the FAT format (file allocation table format), where you’re reading data to a storage facility—that means fundamentally devices like a thumb drive or some kind of CD-ROM, something like that—reading it for storage. So, it’s kind of indexing at the same time; then it modifies the time to the nearest even second. So, that implied that this data—these are the DNC emails from late May, and it’s WikiLeaks data, WikiLeaks posted this—so, in looking at the WikiLeaks data that they had, it has evidence of reading to a storage device, which further implies that it wasn’t hacked, it was transported by physical means. That was with the DNC data.

That says that [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s indictment is kind of in jeopardy, because he no longer can claim hacking. He has to now prove that the download did not occur at the DNC network. Otherwise, any smart lawyer would say that there’s obviously evidence here of a download to a storage device. “Where was that, and who did it, and why are you claiming it’s the Russians, instead of somebody else?” [laughter]

Corruption at the Top

I’m just after the truth here; I think these people will lie through their teeth to get anything they want. Their whole objective is to achieve their emotional end, and they’ll do it any way they can. I think the evidence is pretty much showing that. Look at what they’re doing to Roger Stone and all the other people. They’re going back and interrogating them, and if they don’t tell the truth, they get charged with telling a lie to the FBI.

In our case—the NSA whistleblowers case—the FBI lied to the court to get an indictment on us. They also lied in the indictment. And they also lied in the case of the Christopher Steele dossier. They lied to the FISA court to get one, and the FISA court has known this all along. It was back in August of 2002 that they discovered the FBI had lied to them in getting 75 warrants; so this is a long-standing, well-known problem that these people lie through their teeth to get anything they want. Look at the business of the National Security letters. They lie about that, too. They say this is in the Constitution. Well, it isn’t. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals took it on and said what the FBI was doing was unconstitutional. So the FBI dropped it right away because they didn’t want it to go any further; if it went to the Supreme Court, the whole nation would know it was unconstitutional. So, they can still issue national security letters and people tend to abide by them and say, “Hey, this must be right.” Well, it’s wrong; it’s unconstitutional. It’s already been in the courts.

It’s the same thing about the lying and getting up the emotions; this is how they’re twisting thought. The whole concept goes back to the Sophists, the School of Sophism in ancient Greece. So, this is nothing new. You take many different people from different directions and you have them all say the same thing over and over again. What that means is, people receiving that barrage say, “Gee! This must be true, everybody is saying it.” Whereas people who are in positions of power—like in the House or the Senate or various other places, FBI themselves—I mean, they’ll say anything. At any rate, the whole idea is that when you say things like that over and over again, the repetition gets to people. After a while, they simply accept it.

It was Adolf Hitler who said, “If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big one, and tell it often until it’s believed.” Then there was Goebbels who said, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” Then we get Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) saying that the President can declare anybody a terrorist threat and imprison them and give them no due process at all, and keep them indefinitely. That’s also Special Order 48, issued by the Nazis in 1933, after the Reichstag Fire; that’s how they got rid of all their political enemies and anybody else they didn’t like.

The Change in the Thought Process

So, this is a trend that I saw coming right when Director Michael Hayden started to introduce the process at NSA; it was very clear that this was a totalitarian process, and he started that. It was all done under the emotional sense of “we have to stop another 9/11” when we could have stopped it anyway, but didn’t.

That’s basically the thought process that happened with the DNC emails, which really were the issue. This is what they’ve been claiming all along was taken by the Russians and given to WikiLeaks. They can’t even show anything going to WikiLeaks. I would also point out that Julian Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London is watched like a hawk from all different directions. If he yells out the window, they know it. And all of the people that he knows are watched also like a hawk. Everything they do on the Internet, or phone network, or anything electronic, is watched. So, anybody giving data to them would be seen; yet there’s no evidence of anybody getting it to them.

My point here is this change of thinking that’s been going on, in destroying the discipline of thought, including labelling things as artificial when they’re not. It’s just a continuing process of degenerating really the progress of civilization through thinking new things, new items, new ways of achieving things, new ways of doing things. That was basically going on in the East German State Security Service (Stasi) when they had this bulk monitoring of their people. They did it on paper, though; we have it in electronic form, digital form, so it’s much easier to get to. And it’s easier to manipulate, change, and modify; those are things they can also do with this. They tried a little bit, did that with us.

Fortunately, I was watching them, and I caught them at it. I had the goods on them. I keep telling them, “Let’s go to court! I’ll bring all this stuff up and we can address everything.” I’ve got filed affidavits in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals—also the Ninth—talking about the unconstitutional spying on U.S. citizens. I used some of the Snowden material as exhibits. I invented half this crap [used at NSA], so I’m ready to testify in court. The government is trying to keep me out. This has only been going on for two years now, and about six years with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). But the government’s afraid of discussing this in open court, because they know what they’re doing is unconstitutional.

The Crime of Bulk Acquisition of Data

We’re getting progress I think in Europe. The Austrian government has started to say things like “Well, this bulk acquisition is. . . .”—the senior courts in Austria have ruled it unconstitutional. The entire Parliament has voted down bulk acquisition, and a bill is attempted to be passed there in Austria. So, that was the first country in Europe that started to go and do the right thing. Now, the Germans have come out and said Facebook, Amazon, all these other companies that are taking data on people and accumulating it to advertise to them and things like that, is now illegal; that process can’t be used that way. You can’t sell that data.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe also says that the data held by these third party companies, like Facebook and Google, belongs to the person who originated it. That means the individual European citizen owns his data, wherever it is. If those companies want to transfer that data or share it with anybody—including with the U.S. government—they have to get the permission of that person. They’ve been violating that all along.

My argument in Europe has always been that the weak Achilles’ heel in this entire bulk acquisition and spying is the companies doing it and assisting the government. You can try to sue the government, but they’ll drag it out for decades until you die. That’s what they’re hoping with me, I think. But I’m going to be there until the end. This is in my view a war. When the FBI raided me at my home in 2007, that started the war; so now it takes two people to end the war, and I’m not giving up yet. [applause]

Guccifer 2.0 Is a Total Fabrication

Coming back to what we were doing with Guccifer 2.0’s data, which he came out and said it was hacked from Russia— [Binney turns to Theodore Strzhizhovskiy, sitting next to him] You guys are the bad guys, OK?

Theodore Strzhizhovskiy: I must thank the organizers of this conference for their brilliant sense of humor to put William Binney and me together on this podium. But, let me underline one thing: The Russian Federation didn’t interfere into William’s speech process. [laughter]

Binney: You’re allowing me to have free speech, that’s true.

But at any rate, with the Guccifer 2.0 data, we were looking at that also. I was doing this with Duncan Campbell in the U.K., and it turned out that the highest transfer speed for that download—we went through and calculated all the speeds for every file transferred—was 49.1 megabytes—bytes, not bits—per second. That’s pretty fast for a general transfer of data across the Atlantic using the World Wide Web. We therefore asserted that the Guccifer 2.0 data couldn’t have been transmitted across the Atlantic via the Internet.

Even inside VIPS we had groups of people who thought it could, again because the emotional effect was there. But we said, “OK, we’re going to try this.” So, I got some hacker friends in Europe and some friends over here to put a gigabyte of data out, and see how fast you can get it over there.

Actually, I worked out the formula companies are using to limit the use of their Internet, because you can’t open up to—if I had a terabyte of data to send, and if I wanted to send it all at once, I could occupy the line for a period of time, and no one else could use it. So, the companies—and I think I’ve got the right formula now—have the right to have a limitation on the amount of data that you can actually pass through the Internet. It worked out to be 0.8 megabytes [per second] for a 100 megabit line, and 1.6 megabytes for a 200 megabit line. This is from our testing. Also, 12 megabytes per second for a 1.5 gigabit line. So, that works out to be the equivalent of ten 64-kilobit phone lines; that’s the maximum you can use.

So, at least that’s consistent with all the readings we got. We tried it from Albania, Belgrade in Serbia, the Netherlands, a couple of places, and the U.K. The best we got was 12 megabytes per second between two data centers—one in New Jersey and one in London. So that meant the best we did was less than one-quarter what was necessary to transmit that 49.1 megabytes. Technically—and I like to do the technical stuff, because there’s no emotion in it—it’s just there. So, technically, that was not a hack. But the 49.1 and all the other speeds we got are compatible with a download to a thumb drive! So, all of that kind of fits, even with the Guccifer 2.0.

The Even-Number Giveaway

Then, the real kicker was, he had the data from the 5th of July and also from the 1st of September, and we looked at that, and said, “Gee, if you look only at minutes and seconds and ignore the day and the hour, those two files merge just like that, without conflict.” Now, what’s the random probability of that happening? There are nine groups over here, so I figured it was like 9 to the 60th power, something like that. So it was also a rather small number.

The point is, it’s the proof that Guccifer 2.0 was playing with the data. It’s pretty clear what he did. He took a file on one download and split it into two; then did a range change on the date and a range change on the hour in one file, and let them sit there. But if you looked only at minutes and seconds, you could see right through that, and merged the two. And so it’s a total fabrication, Guccifer 2.0.

And yet, that’s what [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein based his indictment of the Russian GRU on. I said he was indicting spies for being spies. I said, if you take the consequence of what he’s doing, we [the U.S.] have spies who do more spying than any other spies. So, does that mean the rest of the world is going to indict our spies for being spies? This is insane. These people need to get a brain down there at the DOJ. Their brains are artificial, that’s right.

That just shows the fabrications involved in Guccifer 2.0, and basically, downloading what the DNC did itself, says that all this has just been a manufactured episode from the beginning.

Something Positive

Dennis Speed is requiring me to say something positive, so I’ll say something positive. I should say this, though, because we are also doing something positive. We’re devising routines—not artificial, of course—but doing routines that will work out very large-scale problems like Medicare and Medicaid fraud, things of that nature, without violating anybody’s privacy.

And also, we have a policy now of building in software that nobody knows about, to combat evil at the top. We’re assuming, since everything is basically a double-edged sword—it can be used for good or bad, as we experienced with the spying—so we need to build things in that we don’t document and nobody knows about, unless they go through every line of code that executable. So, that’s going to be a real trip for them to do that. The whole idea is that if somebody in the top decides they want to do something evil, then this software will pick it up and automatically alert everybody, and they won’t even know what happened.

So, that’s the whole idea, to do that in a positive way so you can actually succeed at doing things like stopping terrorists or things like that. Things that aren’t being done now because they’re looking at too much data, and they don’t have enough analysts to look at the data to find the threat coming. So, it’s just pathetic what they’re doing. It’s the change of the thought process making it more political, more emotional, and not being disciplined and structured. So, that’s the positive side.

Speed: I think the exchange that went on between you and Mr. Strzhizhovskiy was quite positive as well. [applause]