More like A Beautiful Mind
You do realize a lot of these cryptographers are borderline psychotic while they are employed by agencies such as the NSA, and eventually progress into genuine mental illness.
From TFA:
"Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet, tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case."
At that age, if his diabetes is bad enough to have taken his leg, it has probably also afflicted him with dementia. The fact he is making accusations using such vague terms as "twisted" is another clue there's something not quite right upstairs.
Also TFA, it seems like the issue is that the ThinThread is so good it picks up everything of interest including data about Americans. So the NSA decided not to use it, even with filters and anonymizing controls, because those controls could always be turned off. After 9/11, they realized they desperately needed ThinThread, they started using it without any privacy controls. Computers don't discriminate, if ThinThread sees a patten it records it. That doesn't mean that data it gathers has been abused.
First of all, warrants are not needed for pen-registers and other metadata like IP addresses and email sender/recipient data. Never have been.
Second, even though FISA warrants were not always obtained like they should have been, it has been shown every time an American involved in a NSA wiretap, it was because they were communicating with a non-American person of interest. The wiretap was on the foreign national, not the American.
