Overview

What if the World Trade Center attacks could have been thwarted? This is one of the theories put forward by Bill Binney, former technical director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), who resigned after 9/11. Long before Edward Snowden, he denounced the intelligence services' inadequate methods in the fight against terrorism, particularly the massive collection of data. Drowned in a continuous flow of information, analysts are unable to exploit the data quickly. In the 1990s, a program called "ThinThread," implemented by the NSA, was supposed to allow targeted searches by focusing solely on useful metadata for tracing the communications of suspicious individuals. But a few weeks before the 9/11 attack, the project was abandoned in favor of private financial interests. In the United States, the surveillance market is thus 80% owned by private companies.