William Binney is a mathematician/analyst and a former high-level National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement after 30 years, blew the whistle on NSA surveillance programmes. Even before Snowden, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 to 20 trillion domestic communications. In his work for the NSA he applied mathematical discipline to collection, analysis and reporting, making it possible to code and automatically execute functions without human intervention from the point of collection to the end product. The successful automation of analysis demonstrated how to handle massive amounts of data effectively and relate results to military and other customers. For correspondence: <mailto:williambinney0802@comcast.net>. DOI: 10.21552/edpl/2017/1/4