General Discussion

BlueCheese

(2,522 posts) Mon Jul 7, 2014, 12:49 AM Jul 2014

The NYT's ridiculous article on the NSA shows how the outrageous becomes accepted.

The Washington Post had a big article on Sunday in which they suggested, among other things, that around 90% of the people whose communications are being monitored are not the original targets of surveillance. The New York Times' rehash of the story about the administration's response is pretty weak sauce, but still manages to include two astounding mistakes. They serve as excellent examples about how programs that are outrageous become accepted, and how lies, if repeated often enough, become folklore.

Here we go:

“These reports simply discuss the kind of incidental interception of communications that we have always said takes place under Section 702,” (Robert Litt, general counsel to the director of national intelligence) said, referring to the law that governs the collection of information on foreigners. “We target only valid foreign intelligence targets under that authority, and the most that you could conclude from these news reports is that each valid foreign intelligence target talks to an average of nine people.” The administration has made no secret of the fact that, as it vacuums data from around the globe, it sometimes inadvertently collects information from innocent people, including some Americans. The Post article put that collection in deeply personal terms. It said baby pictures, risqué photos from webcam chats, medical records and conversations about sexual liaisons were among the N.S.A.’s documents.

Right. The administration has "made no secret" of it, except for the part where the entire freaking program was top secret and would never have come to light except for the actions of Edward Snowden. If the administration had had its way, nobody would ever have known they were doing anything remotely like this. But yes, sure, they made no secret of it, because in the NYT's world, these programs are just a fact of life.

And what about Edward Snowden?

The Post article suggests that Mr. Snowden, who fled to Russia after providing internal N.S.A. documents to reporters last year, had far greater access to people’s personal communications than had been previously disclosed. Government officials have said they do not believe he had any access to “raw” intercepts, the actual transcripts or audio of data as it was collected.

This statement is objectively false, or if we bend over backwards to give the NYT the benefit of the doubt, deliberately misleading. Snowden did not flee to Russia. He was in Russia on his way somewhere else when the government invalidated his passport. It was not his intention to end up there. But it's a common canard among administration apologists who continually try to tarnish Snowden personally, as if that would change anything about how the government is violating our civil liberties on a massive and ongoing scale.

Remember, this is the same NYT that discovered that the Bush administration was carrying out a warrantless wiretapping program, but decided to sit on it for over a year-- a year that included the 2004 presidential election. Its behavior there was so craven that Snowden deliberately avoided it when choosing which reporters to contact about his own revelations. Will they ever learn?