AMY GOODMAN: And the election is coming closer and closer and closer.
JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah, and they met with Taubman and Keller. And then we had -- you know, we in the newspaper, the editors and reporters -- met to discuss the story, and Bill Keller decided to hold it. And then the election -- you know, so he decided to not run it before the election. And then, after the election --
AMY GOODMAN: I mean --
JAMES RISEN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it could have changed the election? I mean, explain the nut --
JAMES RISEN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: -- of your revelation.
JAMES RISEN: Basically, the story was that we found out that the U.S. was spying on Americans -- the NSA was spying on Americans electronically, listening to their phone calls, international phone calls, back and forth with people overseas, and gathering lots of -- doing lots of data mining on their phone and email, and also getting the content of their email, and doing that without court approval. They were going around the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which had been set up specifically for that purpose of providing secret warrants for spying on -- for eavesdropping on spies and terrorists or suspected spies and terrorists. And the government had decided to go around the law, go around the courts, and not tell anyone else that they were doing that, except a couple hand-picked people in Congress, who were like the chairmen of the intelligence committees. And they were keeping this secret from everyone so they could do it on a vast scale. And we believed that what we were -- the people who talked to us about it believed that it was unconstitutional. And that's why we were pursuing it.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Bill Binney for a minute, who we had on Democracy Now! William Binney was the National Security Agency whistleblower, spent nearly 40 years at the NSA, but retired about a month after September 11, 2001, due to concerns over unchecked domestic surveillance. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2012, Binney explained what happened.
WILLIAM BINNEY: After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA, and they decided to -- between the White House and NSA and CIA, they decided to eliminate the protections on U.S. citizens and collect on domestically. So they started collecting from a commercial -- the one commercial company that I know of that participated provided over 300 -- probably, on the average, about 320 million records of communication of a U.S. citizen to a U.S. citizen inside this country.
AMY GOODMAN: What company?
WILLIAM BINNEY: AT&T. It was long-distance communications. So they were providing billing data. At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of -- plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms. I mean, all those laws were being violated, including the Constitution. And that was a decision made that wasn't going to be reversed, so I could not stay there. I had to leave.
AMY GOODMAN: That was National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney. So he leaves, and he ultimately has a gun put to his head by federal authorities in his shower -- he's a diabetic amputee -- his kid and his wife also being held at gunpoint.
JAMES RISEN: Right, yes, unfortunately, and I have a chapter in my new book about the NSA whistleblowers early on, including Bill and Diane Roark and Tom Drake and some of the others. And it's remarkable what happened to them at the NSA. What we found out, years later -- I did not know Bill, I didn't know Diane or Tom. They were never our sources. But what we found out was, the government thought that they were our sources for our New York Times story, and they were persecuted as a result, even though they had never come to the press. And I detail in the new book, Diane Roark, in particular, suffered amazing persecution. And she tried -- even though she tried to go through the channel --
AMY GOODMAN: Explain who she was -- is.
JAMES RISEN: Yeah, Diane Roark -- along with Bill, Diane Roark was the House Intelligence Committee staffer in charge of oversight of the NSA, and right at the time of 9/11. And Bill, right after he found out about this new program, went to her, her house in suburban Washington, and told her what he had heard about. And Diane was outraged and shocked, and she couldn't believe that it was authorized. She thought this must be some kind of rogue program that nobody really knew about. And so, she went to the chairman of the -- she went to her bosses, the staff director of the House Intelligence Committee and the minority staff director, to warn them that they've got to tell the chairman and the vice chairman of the committee what's going on.
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