Watching the Watchdog: Famed Surveillance Watchdog Warns Canada
"William Binney is a man on a mission. He spent nearly 30 years as a top executive in America's super-secret National Security Agency (NSA), now he wants you to know that same spy agency is pushing western democracies -- including Canada -- toward fascism." ● Here's a clue about how he feels about his former employer's ability to carry out mass surveillance of citizens: "It's better than anything the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had." These words aren't meant as praise. Last Saturday Binney and I have lunch at a conference in Toronto. He's likely in his 60s, a thin, balding, passionate man in a wheelchair who you know without being told, lives and breathes his anti-NSA cause 24 hours a day. He's le Carré's Smiley not Fleming's Bond. The late Alec Guinness would play him. Not Daniel Craig. William Binney is the world's most famous critic of the NSA spy agency and the damage it's done and is doing to freedom in the world's democracies.