ThinThread

[2] 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.

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,[7][8] part of the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks".

ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: One, the NSA had more information than it could digest, and, two, increasingly its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.

The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws erroneously flagging people as suspect, had produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources.

"[14] 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...'"[15] 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 .

Hayden confessed in his memoir that in 2000, fearing further terrorist attacks like the Millennium Plot, he gave the order to put ThinThread into action: "Let me be clear: This was me arguing for a limited use of the Thin Thread approach prior to 9/11."