NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney estimated that there were some two and a half billion phones in the world and one and a half billion IP addresses. Approximately 20 terabytes of unique information passed around the world every minute. So he started assembling ThinThread, a system that could trap and map all of it.

By 2000, Binney, using fiber optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. Although ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S….