The New Yorker's Mayer is paraphrasing an anonymous source, which she then counter-points in the very next sentence of the article with a quote from NSA historian Matthew Aid, who says: “The resistance to ThinThread was just standard bureaucratic politics. ThinThread was small, cost-effective, easy to understand, and protected the identity of Americans.” [1]
That's what Binney and Drake have said all along.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...