ThinThread

ThinThread was an intelligence gathering project by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) conducted throughout the 1990s. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data. The program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U. S. intelligence authority. The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U. S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections. A consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop Trailblazer in 2002.

[[File:Redacted dod oig audit requirements for the. pdf|page=1|thumb|250px|right|Redacted version of the DoD Inspector General audit, obtained through FOIA)—believed the operational prototype system called ThinThread was a better solution than Trailblazer, which was just a concept on paper at the time. They complained to the DoD Inspector General office in 2002 about mismanagement and the waste of taxpayer money at the NSA surrounding the Trailblazer program. In 2007 the FBI raided the homes of these people, an evolution of President Bush's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks" after the New York Times disclosed a separate program (see NSA warrantless surveillance controversy). In 2010, one of the people who had helped the IG in the ensuing investigation, NSA official Thomas Andrews Drake, was charged with espionage, part of the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks".

The program would have used a technique of encrypting sensitive privacy information in an effort to comply with legal concerns, and would have automatically identified potential threats. The sources of the data for this program would have included "massive phone and e mail data," but the extent of this information is not clear. Only once a threat was discovered, would the data be decrypted for analysis by agents. ThinThread would have bundled together four cutting edge surveillance tools. :

Intelligence experts describe as rigorous the testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeding at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat related communications far surpassed the existing system. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U. S. related communications to ensure privacy. However, Michael Hayden asserts in his memoir that in 2000 lawyers at the NSA and Justice Department would not allow the deployment of ThinThread because it would be illegal, despite its use of encryption for US citizen data: "The answer from Justice was clear: 'You can't do this '"

The project was ended by General Michael Hayden after successful testing, and while the privacy elements were not retained, Hayden admitted that the analysis technology is the underlying basis of current NSA analysis techniques, saying in an interview: "But we judged fundamentally that as good as [ThinThread] was, and believe me, we pulled a whole bunch of elements out of it and used it for our final solution for these problems, as good as it was, it couldn’t scale sufficiently to the volume of modern communications
Some anonymous NSA officials told Hosenball of Newsweek that the ThinThread program, like Trailblazer, was a "wasteful failure".