Bill Binney is the former technical director of the NSA — its fourth-ranking official and, John Kiriakou says, one of the country’s leading technical thinkers. Binney stated on the record that the Russians were not behind the DNC email leak: analyzing the speed at which the documents were uploaded, he concluded it was “impossible” to have taken them remotely, and that they could only have been copied in person onto a thumb drive.[1][2] Kiriakou uses Binney’s analysis as a pillar of his case against Russiagate.
Kiriakou also cites Binney’s own treatment as a whistleblower as emblematic of how the government responds to national-security dissent: Binney, he says, was pulled naked out of a shower by the FBI and handcuffed behind his back with one leg raised — treatment Kiriakou calls absurd given that Binney posed no plausible danger to the American people.[3]