Glenn Greenwald's 'Epic Botch'?

[struggle4progress]

Rick Perlstein on June 13, 2013 - 2:57 PM ET

... The “crucial question,” as Fogel frames it in a blog post, is this: “Are online service companies giving the government fully automated access to their data,” as Greenwald says they are, “without any opportunity for review or intervention by company lawyers?” This is what the companies have been denying—in statements that critics have been interpreting as non-denial denials. (Apple: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” So what if Apple et al. knew the formal name of the program? And what about indirect access? Or government contractors? And how are they defining “customer data”? Etc.)

Fogel points out that a widely read post to this effect called “Cowards” from the blogg Uncrunched—“What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?”—is “mostly wrong.” He says, “It looks like Greenwald and company simply misunderstood an NSA slide because they don’t have the technical background to know that ‘servers’ is a generic word and doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as ‘the main servers on which a company’s customer-facing services run.’ The ‘servers’ mentioned in the slide are just lockboxes used for secure data transfer. They have nothing to do with the process of deciding which requests to comply with—they’re just means of securely and efficiently delivering information once a company has decided to do so.”

In other words, this slide describes how to move data from once place to another without it getting intercepted in transit: “What the hell are the companies supposed to do?” Fogel jokes. “Put the data on a CD-ROM and mail it to Fort Meade?” ...

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174783/glenn-greenwalds-epic-botch

[MjolnirTime]

1. Greenwald has his entire leg in his mouth now.

[Life Long Dem]

2. Was it a mistake Mr. Greenwald?

Greenwald has not yet made a public evaluation of whether or not he agrees that he made that mistake. He owes it to us to do so, with as much speed as practicably possible.

Was it all a mistake?

[SunSeeker]

3. Well, he did promise some mind-blowing revelations over the coming months....nt

[GeorgeGist]

4. That really isn't the "crucial question" as Fogel frames it ...

but it is an effective distraction.

[geek tragedy]

5. So it doesn't matter if the government has direct access to Google's core servers?

I guess Fogol committed the sin of questioning St. Glenn.

[pmorlan1]

6. Wishful thinking

LOL Are they still trying this line? LOL Ole Bob Cesca used this same silly argument on his Greenwald hit piece.

It was fun reading through the comments on that piece. Did you guys check those?

As any reporter would do, Greenwald reported what the NSA's slide said. He then contacted the service providers to let them know what the slide said and to get their comment about it. He included in his piece what the NSA said in their slide and also the denial by the service providers. The NSA says one thing in their slide and the service providers say another. Now the search is on for the truth of just how much info the NSA is getting from the service providers and how are they getting it. It's not complicated except for people who are clutching at straws to try to "get" Greenwald rather than find out exactly what the NSA is collecting and how they are collecting it. Quite frankly, this is just another obvious distraction from the real story.