Video: Glenn Greenwald Is Grilled on BBC Newsnight, Spews Insults Like a Firehose

By Charles Johnson/Little Green Footballs:

Today on BBC Newsnight, activist Glenn Greenwald faced an uncomfortable grilling from the host and several guests, including former senior GCHQ officials who openly scoffed at Greenwald’s tales, particularly his claims that the Russians couldn’t possibly have gotten access to Edward Snowden’s stolen NSA files, and his claims that intelligence agencies are not harmed by massive leaks and that terrorists are not aided.

Many of the questions he faced are the same ones we’ve been asking here, about the discrepancies and problems in his stories about Snowden and the NSA. And when the heat was finally turned up, Mr. Greenwald responded with an utter lack of grace, insulting and patronizing everyone on the show. It’s an amazing, thoroughly unpleasant performance, and shows why Greenwald normally only grants interviews to sympathetic hosts, because he comes off as … well, basically a terrible person. As if someone combined the worst qualities of a weaselly cheap lawyer with a narcissistic fame-seeking paparazzi, and added too much nasty sauce to the mix.

Take it away, Glenn.

In the following clip, former chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee Pauline Neville-Jones says there’s no way the Russians don’t have access to Snowden’s files. Greenwald responds:

The ignorance of those comments is truly astounding to me. First of all you would think that a rational person before making an extremely serious accusation like ‘Russia and China has gotten all of his data’ would have at least a little bit of evidence before saying that? There is NONE. What is the basis for it, some tingly sensation in the stomach?

[…]

She said, they got the data on his laptops. That isn’t how data works, it’s not 1998. Data is stored on thumb drives, and on those thumb drives are very sophisticated means of encryption shells, that as I said before and I know this because I’ve read the documents that I have on this, not even the NSA can break.

The encryption codes are 4,000 characters long…

I did a double take when I heard him say that, because in his patronizing lecture to Baroness Neville-Jones (who has spent much of her life involved in national security and intelligence at the highest levels), Greenwald actually got this important detail completely wrong, in a very amateurish kind of way. The type of encryption he’s talking about (XAES) uses a key with a length of 4096 bits, not “4,000 characters.”

The difference between “4,000 characters” and 4096 bits is huge. He’s off by several factors of 2. Oops.

Did the British Have Good Reason to Detain Greenwald's Partner?

 by Spandan C/The People's View:

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald made an international incident out of the fact that his partner was detained in London's Heathrow airport for questioning. But in a comical twist only Greenwald can tie himself into, Greenwald can't seem to settle on whether in this trip, his partner was his errand boy or just an uninvolved person. On the one hand, Greenwald's tirade against the British authorities mentions:

 “This is obviously a serious, radical escalation of what they are doing. He is my partner. He is not even a journalist.”

Well, neither is Glenn, but I digress. So on the one hand, Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, is an uninvolved bi-stander. But on the other Miranda was carrying documents on his trip to Berlin for Laura Poitras, Greenwald's colleague in reporting the Snowden stories. The Guardian - Greenwald's employer -paid for the trip.

And that, fellow traveler, brings us to what could be the real reason Greenwald and his employer are trying to make this an international incident and concentrating fire on the British authorities. In public, they may be focusing on the fact of the detention, but in private, they are soiling their undergarments not over the detention itself, but over this:

 David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, was held for nearly the maximum time authorities are allowed to detain individuals under the Terrorism Act’s Schedule 7, which authorizes security agencies to stop and question people at borders. Greenwald saidMiranda’s cellphone, laptops and memory sticks were confiscated.

Now, Greenwald of course claims that this was a blatant attempt to intimidate journalism. Except, what if it wasn't? What if the equipment seized contains evidence of criminal activity?

Huh? Whacha talkin' 'bout, Mister? Follow me.

Back in June, Greenwald backpedaled ferociously on an important story: after bragging about how he had been working with Snowden since February (i.e. before Snowden took the latest job from which he stole the classified data), he suddenly insisted that he didn't even know Snowden's name till May. At that time, I pointed out a distinct possibility as a reason for this ferocious backtracking: if it's true that he had been working with Snowden since February, one could legitimately raise the issue of whether the information Snowden obtained was gathered on Snowden's own initiative or instigated by Glenn Greenwald and/or Laura Poitras.

Greenwald isn't the sharpest lawyer you'll ever meet, but he's nonetheless a lawyer. He knew the clear implications of that line. If he, his cohort or his employer had any role in instigating the theft of US national security documents, he would go from being a reporter immune from prosecution under the first amendment to an accessory to espionage and theft, and no law or Constitutional amendment would cover his behind.

One person - that we knew of - knows the answer to that question, of course, and that's Edward Snowden, who is now been granted asylum by the bastion of free press and transparent government that is Vladimir Putin's Russia. At the time, I had assumed that without Snowden spilling the beans, it would be difficult to meet the legal standard of proof it would take to nab Greenwald.

But imagine a scenario under which - through intelligence gathering operations - the US and/or the UK government has found sources to corroborate that exact story. Imagine a scenario in which intelligence has found evidence to link Greenwald as an instigator to Mr. Snowden's crime rather than just a reporter, and the detention and questioning of Mr. Miranda and confiscation of his equipment was in fact to gather physical evidence to prove this crime. If that's the case, it wouldn't be any wonder that Greenwald would be very, very worried.

And if that's the case - if the British and American intelligence is closing in on just what (more preciselywho) made Edward Snowden do what he did, and just who helped him plan his escape, and the evidence points to Glenn Greenwald - then of course, the detention of Mr. Miranda is in fact part of a criminal and terrorism investigation, and not, as Greenwald would like you to believe, an attempt to intimidate journalists.

Of course, no one but the British authorities really know exactly why they detained Miranda. Even if this is the case, there is no guarantee that what was confiscated would actually produce evidence strong enough to use in a criminal case against Greenwald or his associate(s). It could also be that the British simply got news that Greenwald's partner may be traveling with stolen property (classified documents from the US government). And yes, admittedly, as I outlined in my June piece, I am rather convinced - based on circumstantial evidence and logic - that Greenwald's role in this whole affair is more than just that of a reporter, so I leave it up to the reader to decide how likely one believes the above scenario to be. But at the very least, there is no reason to jump to Greenwald's preferred conclusion that it was an attempt to intimidate anyone rather than aiding the investigation of espionage.

Glenn Greenwald Is Ralph Nader

By Jonathan Chait/New York Magazine

The debate over domestic surveillance is not a debate about what we think about Glenn Greenwald. But Greenwald is a fascinating character. His resemblance to Ralph Nader is not one that, so far as I can tell, anybody has thought to make. But the resemblance is striking. It’s not a resemblance of historical place — Greenwald is neither going to lead a new regulatory wave nor get a Republican elected president. The resemblance is characterological and ideological.

For Greenwald, like Nader, the lawyer is the key protagonist in his political drama. Political victory is a series of successful lawsuits. He is wildly litigious:

In 1997, Achatz and Greenwald filed another lawsuit for broken elevators in their building. (They lived on the 32nd floor.) They later moved into another building in Midtown Manhattan, and countersued after being sued by that landlord for having a dog that weighed more than 35 pounds. They sued American Airlines and its parent company for not placing the right number of miles flown in their frequent-flier account.

Greenwald, like Nader, marries an indefatigable mastery of detail with fierce moralism. Every issue he examines has a good side and an evil side. Greenwald, speaking not long ago to the New York Times, said something revealing about his intellectual style:

“I approach my journalism as a litigator,” he said. “People say things, you assume they are lying, and dig for documents to prove it.”

That is a highly self-aware account. Of course, the job description of a litigator does not include being fair. You take a side, assume the other side is lying, and prosecute your side full tilt. It’s not your job to account for evidence that undermines your case — it’s your adversary’s job to point that out.

I won’t pretend to be neutral here — I’ve tangled with Greenwald numerous times. So, for instance, he called me a “McCain worshiper,” and it is true that I have written some highly favorable things about John McCain. I’ve also written some highly critical things. I pointed out to Greenwald that, when I have called McCain, among other things, a “dangerous sociopath,” it would at least complicate the picture in such a way as to preclude me from being called a “worshiper.” But no, Greenwald dug in deeper, assembling all the evidence he could muster for his side and ignoring all the evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

Greenwald, like Nader, does not believe in meliorist progress. If you are not good, you are evil. Even at the heyday of his career, when he was one of the most powerful figures in America and his brand of crusading regulation reigned nearly unchallenged, Nader was constantly denouncing congressional liberal allies for failing to pass sufficiently pure iterations:

 In 1970, Nader championed a report by his staff savaging Ed Muskie, the liberal senator from Maine. Muskie, who helped engineer the Air Quality Act of 1967, had a reputation as an environmental ally, but Nader's report called the act "disastrous," adding, "That fact alone would warrant his being stripped of his title as 'Mr. Pollution Control.'" 

That same year, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill to create a Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), what Nader called his highest legislative goal. But, just days after praising the bill, Nader turned against it, saying that "intolerable erosions" had rendered the bill "unacceptable." As Martin writes, "Without Nader's backing, the bill lost momentum" and died in committee. The pattern repeated itself, as the CPA passed either the House or the Senate five more times over the next six years, but Nader rejected every bill as too compromised.

That is the echo of Greenwald’s suspicions of the Democratic agenda. President Obama scaled back some of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies — torture, warrantless wiretapping — but kept in place others. One could make the case that he did not change enough, but that is not a Greenwald sort of argument. He insists that Obama is worse than Bush. Obama’s health-care reform was not just a step along the way to Greenwald’s ideal, it was a monstrous sellout that probably did no good at all (“there is a reasonable debate to be had among reform advocates over whether this bill is a net benefit or a net harm.”).

This way of looking at the world naturally places one in conflict with most liberals, who are willing to distinguish between gradations of success or failure. Nader and Greenwald believe their analysis not only completely correct, but so obviously correct that the only motivation one could have to disagree is corruption. Good-faith disagreement, or even rank stupidity, is not possible around Greenwald. His liberal critics are lackeys and partisan shills. He may be willing to concede ideological disagreement with self-identified conservatives, but a liberal who disagrees can only be a kept man.

For Greenwald, like for Nader, the evils of liberals loom far larger than the evils of conservatives. The most annoying question in the world is the one posed to them most frequently: Aren’t the Republicans worse? They are loath to give their critics the satisfaction of an affirmative response, which they fear will justify ignoring their urgent denunciations. So much of their intellectual energy is devoted to formulating complex chains of reasoning as to why just the opposite is true. “The only difference between [Gore and Bush] is the velocity at which their knees hit the floor,” said Nader. Greenwald insisted that “even if Obama is the lesser of two evils, he’s the more effective of two evils.” Statements like this make their putative allies more nervous, or even provokes them to break with them altogether. But this only convinces them all the more deeply of their uncorruptable virtue.

Greenwald Backtracks: I Did Not Have Working Relations With that Man... (in February Like I Told You I Did)

by Spandan C/The People's View

Saint Glenn Greenwald is a little irked by suggestions that he may have aided and abetted NSA leaks that came from his 'source' (and fellow Ron Paul admirer) Edward Snowden. Being a lawyer, Greenwald of course knows that such a possibility removes from him the cloak of journalism and instead makes him an instigator in a criminal conspiracy. So what if he bragged just earlier this month that he'd been working with Snowden since February,before Snowden's job with NSA contractor Booz Allen, a job Snowden reportedly admittedly took with the specific intent and purpose of collecting intelligence information he could leak?

Greenwald spoke with Greg Sargent, basically saying "I did not have working relations with that woman".

 It was only in May — and not before — that Snowden told him who he was, who he worked for (at that point he identified himself as affiliated with the NSA) and what sort of documents he had to share, Greenwald says. It wasn’t until June — when Greenwald visited Snowden in Hong Kong — that Snowden told him he worked specifically for Booz Allen, Greenwald adds. [...]

“We had early conversations about setting up encryption, so we worked early on to set that up,” Greenwald says. “We didn’t work on any documents. I didn’t even know Edward Snowden’s name or where he worked until after he was in Hong Kong with the documents. Anyone who is claiming that somehow I worked with him to get those documents or helped him is just lying.”

What? Did I say I worked with Snowden since February? I meant I did not work with that guy I didn't even know the name of until May!

Here's what you're supposed to believe if you believe Glenn Grenwald: A completely anonymous source calls him and tells him he's got "explosive" documents to expose the NSA (which turned out to be completely legal, court-permitted intelligence gathering). This source also tells him that he needs to set up a secure channel of communications. Greewald's response: mmkay. He doesn't bother to find out who this guy is, if he is credible and if so why, what type of documents, or what those documents would show. After all, Greenwald explicitly claims that they "didn't work on any documents." And that encrypted communications system? It took 3 months to set up - whoever was setting it up sure as heck took their time.

Then Snowden took the documents, flew to Hong Kong, which of course Greenwald also could not have known, contacted Greenwald and dropped the pile of documents in his electronic lap.

That's it, that's all there is to it. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

Except there is. Was the twit-bragging about working with Snowden just chest-thumping? If you look at the stream, Greenwald's tweet that he'd been "working with" Snowden came in response to someone asking him if Snowden went to The Guardian because the Washington Post insisted on publishing all the PRISM slides, which Greenwald says Snowden didn't want to publish documents indiscriminately. If all that "work" involved was setting up a secure communication system (without even knowing this guy's name), then why mention it when the conversation is explicitly about the documents/slides?

Next, think about the statements that he did not work with Snowden on the documents - presumably even the nature of the documents except that they were "explosive" and from the NSA (and really, I think GG would be hard pressed to think any document coming from the NSA can possibly not be 'explosive') - he went along setting up the communication system without knowing if this guy was really some 14-year-old pulling a prank? Who the heck does that?

There are two explanations for the confluence and sequence of events here: the first is that Greenwald is a attention-seeking chest thumper who likes to exaggerate and give false impressions of the true nature of his relationship with his 'sources.' He is also too dumb to realize that his twitter stream could be discovered later and put in context by people with a critical eye on it. This would explain why his tweet seems more than he now says it was meant to convey. I don't think Greenwald is this dumb, but maybe he is.

The second, and in my mind more likely explanation is this: Greenwald is an attention-whore, and he was saying in that tweet exactly what most reasonable people thought he was saying: that he's been working with Snowden on the documents since February. Which would mean that he is now lying to Greg Sargent because he's afraid of that being discovered.

But why? Working with a source over a period of months on the content of the source material is not a crime! It would only be a crime if he were instigating and influencing (or directing) his source about the documents/what documents to get/etc. The logical conclusion from that would be that the only reason Greenwald would be worried about this timeline being exposed is because he wasn't simply workingwith his source to get the material, but that his involvement was more than that of a journalist. And hence now the backtracking and the handwringing about how he had no idea who Snowden even was at the point (February) he himself admitted to "working with" him.

Of course, Greenwald, to his worshipers Transparency Personified, could clear this all up: release all of his communications - emails, phone calls (which I am sure he recorded as a journalist), notes he took - with Edward Snowden. That way, we can all know. But you won't do that, will you, Mr. Transparency? I wonder why. After all, it could no longer hurt the reporting, since the reporting is done already.

I don't know about you, but something smells. Something smells fishy here.

Through a PRISM Darkly: Is There Less Here Than Meets the Eye?

by: David Harada-Stone/The Big Slice

What do you get when you combine a cheesy PowerPoint presentation, an IT geek with delusions of grandeur, an Obama-hating narcissist who fancies himself the blogosphere’s champion of civil liberties, and a punditocracy whose members make their living on the Internet but can’t explain the difference between Dropbox and Gmail? Behold PRISM.

The existence of PRISM was the subject of the second in a series of blockbuster stories detailing the activities of the National Security Agency, its revelation the product of a “crisis of conscience” on the part of NSA spy, whistleblower defector(?) Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old high school dropoutturned NSA security guard turned CIA techie turned employee for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in Honolulu. Snowden apparently used his position as a computer security consultant toabscond with four Booz Allen laptops copy a bunch of files he wasn’t supposed to copy (despite his “top secret” security clearance) onto a thumb drive and then leave his girlfriend and his $200,000$122,000-a-year job to hop a flight to Hong Kong.

Once in Hong Kong, Snowden provided classified NSA files to activist/pundit/journalist Glenn Greenwald, formerly of Salon.com and now with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman.

The Guardian broke the first story based on Snowden’s purloined NSA files on June 5, posting a copy of an order marked “top secret” from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requiring Verizon Business Network Services – a Verizon subsidiary providing phone service to business customers – to turn over “telephony metadata” for calls within the United States and between the U.S. and foreign numbers. The information subject to the order includes phone numbers, IMEI numbers and call durations. The order did not cover the contents of calls or subscribers’ names or addresses. Most in the media assumed – and no one has denied – that the court has issued similar orders to other U.S. phone companies.

As an aside, it is useful to know that the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA Court, dates back to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.  The law was passed in response to revelations about the Nixon administration’s use of federal agencies to spy on political opponents and activists and requires the government, before it commences certain kinds of intelligence gathering operations within the United States, to obtain a judicial warrant similar to that required in criminal investigations. The court consists of 11 life-tenured U.S. District Court judges (the same sort of judges who hear civil and criminal matters at the trial level in federal courts throughout the United States) selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to serve for seven-year stints. They travel from their home districts to Washington, D.C. to hear FISA warrant applications on a rotating basis. At least one of the judges must be a member of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  Because of its subject matter, the FISA Court’s proceedings are secret, as are its orders.

Although the FISA Court prohibited Verizon from disclosing the existence of the order obtained by the Guardian, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), chair of Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the committee’s ranking Republican, confirmed the NSA program’s existence on June 6, noting that the order published by the Guardian appeared to represent a routine three-month renewal of a program authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act that had been going on since 2007 and was subject to both congressional and judicial oversight. Indeed, prior to 2007 the Bush administration had conducted a nearly identical program, but without court approval. USA Today did a story about the program in 2006 that you can still find online. The only thing new in the Guardian’s story was the existence of the court order.

A day after the Guardian’s story broke, on June 7, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper declassified details about the NSA’s collection and storage of telephone metadata. According to Clapper, the NSA is prohibited by the FISC from “indiscriminately sifting” through the metadata. He said individual records can only be reviewed “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” That would seem to rule out scrutiny of your phone calls to your pot dealer or to phone sex lines (though keep in mind that the DEA and local cops were seizing phone records and tapping phone lines long before the Patriot Act was even a twinkle in Dick Cheney’s eye).

Clapper also said that only counterterrorism personnel trained in the program may access the records, though this statement somehow seems less reassuring when you consider that the IT guy at the branch office in Hawaii managed to get his hands on the “top secret” court order.

NSA computers can reportedly analyze the metadata for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify networks of callers in contact with suspicious phone numbers overseas. If the NSA (or the FBI, in the case of a subject inside the United States) wants to actually listen to calls, it needs to go back to court for a wiretap warrant.

So, that’s the telephone metadata story. Not much new, though thanks to the country’s short attention span and the media’s collective amnesia, it caused a fair amount of excitement, and deservedly so. Do we want the government indiscriminately collecting and storing information about our phone calls (even if it doesn’t listen to the calls themselves)? Keeping in mind Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor safety,” we have to ask ourselves whether the program makes us safer and, if so, whether that increase in safety is worth the erosion of our privacy. It’s a debate we should have had years ago. Still, better late than never.

The telephone records story generated a lot of heat (though both support for the program andcriticism were bipartisan, the hypocrisy and faux outrage from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and SeanHannity, supporters of the “surveillance state” under Bush, were predictably hilarious), but there were few outright denials. The media, politicians and even civil libertarians seem to generally agree about what is going on, even if they differ strongly on its merits. But that’s not the case with the second “blockbuster” story to come from Snowden’s thumb drive.

On June 6, both the Guardian and the Washington Post published articles based on several slides from a PowerPoint presentation about “PRISM.”  As Gellman at the Post breathlessly described this program:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The Post added that the NSA is “reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.”  The story identified the companies involved as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Dropbox was said to be joining the program soon.  According to the PowerPoint slides, the program began in 2007 (under Bush) and was expanded over the years as more Internet companies joined.

The Guardian’s Greenwald likewise reported that the NSA had obtained “direct access” to the Internet companies’ servers and implied that the agency’s spies could retrieve emails, Internet searches, photos – whatever – unilaterally and at will:

The Prism program allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

Both the Post and the Guardian based these sweeping conclusions on a line in the PowerPoint slides referring to “collection directly from the servers” of the listed U.S. service providers. However, it appears neither the Post nor the Guardian made much of an effort to determine what this admittedly inartful wording meant. The PowerPoint slides themselves appear rather amateurish, and given their “top secret” nature it seems likely that they were not meant for distribution outside the NSA. Reporters at the Post and the Guardian seem to have used their imaginations to fill in the blanks.

Within hours of the stories’ publication, most of the companies named were strenuously denying the assertions that they had provided the NSA with direct access, or a “backdoor,” to their servers or that the agency was unilaterally downloading users’ information. Although critics of the NSA were calling the denials “carefully parsed,” they were, in fact, pretty unequivocal. Google co-founder Larry Page wrote:

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government – or any other government – direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received – an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

On June 7, the day after the PRISM story broke in the Post and the Guardian, the New York Timesreported that rather than direct, unfettered access to the companies’ central servers, what really happens at those companies that have made arrangements with the NSA is that data the companies are required by law to produce pursuant to a warrant or other court order is placed in a separate “secure portal.” The Times further described this “portal” as being similar to “a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers.”

On June 11, Google confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that the process for turning over data to the government is even less “high tech” than the Times piece had made it sound. According to Google spokesman Chris Gaither, when the company receives a court order to turn over information, it usually does so using a secure FTP, or “file transfer protocol,” server. The current specification for FTP dates to 1985. Gaither said Google occasionally even hands the data over to the NSA or law enforcement in person.

So basically, it appears that the process by which the NSA obtains data from Google and other companies is more akin to accessing a shared file on Dropbox than it is to tapping into or intercepting Internet traffic in real time. When you send someone a link to a shared file or folder on Dropbox, you are not giving that person access to your entire hard drive or a window into your Internet activity. Rather, your computer uploads the specific folder or files to be shared to the “cloud,” and the person you’re sharing it with then downloads it to her computer. In the case of PRISM, “Direct access” may mean access to a dedicated FTP server at Google, but it does not appear to mean access to Google’s “central servers.”

The Post began backing off some of its claims the day after its June 6 story, wiping a statement from the article that the Internet companies had “participated knowingly” in PRISM. Without running a correction or acknowledging any error on its part, the Post substituted the following phrase:

It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.

Of course, it is more than a little weasely for the Post to refer to the “conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen,” since the slides were never meant to describe or explain PRISM to the Post or anyone else outside the NSA, and the PowerPoint’s authors can hardly be held responsible for assumptions made by reporters.

The Guardian’s Greenwald, a longtime proponent of the “Obama is worse than Bush” school of civil libertarians, has been even more reluctant to concede his own fallibility.  In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on June 12, Greenwald steadfastly refused to admit any error in his reporting:

Our story was the following: we have documents, a document, from the NSA that very clearly claims that they are collecting directly from the servers of these Internet giants. That’s the exact language that this document used. We went to those Internet companies before publishing and asked them, and they denied it, and we put into the story very prominently that they denied it. Our story is that there is a discrepancy between the relationship that these, that the private sector and the government has, in terms of what the NSA claims and what the technology companies claim.

There’s a “discrepancy” all right, but it’s not between the PowerPoint slides and the statements of the Internet companies. It’s between Greenwald’s article, on the one hand, and the reporting of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, The Nation  – oh hell, just about everyone who has done any digging on this story – on the other.  Indeed, even the Guardian now implicitly concedes that its “direct access” charge is a crock. But rather than run a correction, it buried the admission deep in a follow up story that ran almost a week after the original piece, and then continued to pretend that it was the Internet companies – rather than the Guardian itself – that are being evasive:

The Guardian understands that the NSA approached those companies and asked them to enable a ‘dropbox’ system whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server out to an NSA-owned system. That has allowed the companies to deny that there is ‘direct or indirect’ NSA access, to deny that there is a ‘back door’ to their systems, and that they only comply with ‘legal’ requests – while not explaining the scope of that access.

In fact, as the Guardian well knows, the companies are precluded by the very court orders compelling them to turn over the data from disclosing the targets or scope of the FISA Court’s orders. That is why Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter have pleaded with the U.S. Department of Justice to permit them to disclose the number of government requests they receive and their scope.

Some of the best reporting on PRISM has come from tech blogs such as ZDNet and CNET. Within 24 hours of the original publication, ZDNet’s Ed Bott did an epic takedown of the Post’s sloppy reporting and surreptitious updates, even posting a redlined comparison of the original and modified articles. CNET’s Declan McCullagh schooled the Post and its Pulitzer Award-winning reporter Gellman on how to quickly and thoroughly vet and run down a source’s story about the NSA and Internet surveillance, obtaining interviews with former government officials, Google’s former deputy counsel and the NSA’s former general counsel. McCullagh also provided a succinct layman’s explanation of Section 702 of FISA, the statutory provision under which the NSA obtains data from Internet companies.

The difference between the original Post and Guardian stories about PRISM, alleging “direct access” by the NSA to Internet companies’ servers, and the reality emerging from the companies’ denials and the reporting of multiple news outlets is enormous. Without this key and now debunked allegation, the only “stories” here are the poor PowerPoint skills of our country’s premier cyber warriors and Mr. Snowden’s handiness with a thumb drive. The fact that the government can compel Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. to produce data from a user’s account pursuant to a warrant or court order is most decidedly not news. Companies have been complying with subpoenas and warrants for their customers’ records for decades, if not centuries. Nor does it make much difference whether the companies produce such data in the form of reams of paper packed in banker’s boxes, a DVD, or through a secure FTP server or electronic drop box.

Indeed, there is some reason to believe that PRISM is not a data collection program at all, but an unclassified data management tool for use by the military, which after all, is in charge of the NSA. If so, PRISM is less a surveillance program than a software app through which NSA analysts can retrieve data already produced in response to court orders.

As Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum notes, these questions about the nature of PRISM also go to Snowden’s credibility as he continues to serve as a source for additional revelations, something Greenwald has repeatedly promised. Snowden either knows what PRISM is but failed to explain it to Gellman and Greenwald, or he really is just a glorified tech support guy who stole classified files he did not fully understand and gave them to a couple of reporters. Given Snowden’s dubious boasts that he could wiretap anyone, even the president, and that he had access to every CIA station around the world, his credibility is hardly a given.

Snowden’s motives are also coming under increased scrutiny. His apparent disclosure of NSA documents detailing the hacking of computers in China to the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper whose owners are reported to be friendly with the leadership in Beijing, seems to belie his claim that he is not out to harm U.S. interests. The same can be said of his disclosure of a directive by President Obama to draw up a list of targets for cyber attacks in the event of a crisis. Whatever the wisdom or morality of cyber warfare (and yes, I know the Obama administration’s hands are hardly clean given the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s uranium centrifuges), there is no doubt that America’s adversaries are planning for attacks on the U.S. as well.

But this isn’t just about the messenger. The questions about the nature of PRISM are more than a matter of semantics. The original stories’ suggestion that the government has been monitoring Americans’ emails and Internet usage and indiscriminately vacuuming up audio, video, photographs, messages, documents and connection logs has caused widespread alarm. Such a program would be far more intrusive than the telephone metadata collection that was the subject of the Verizon court order. Moreover, the failure of the Post and the Guardian to issue any corrections or clarifications has left pundits, bloggers and cable news hosts free to repeat and perpetuate the original conjecture about “direct access” to Internet companies’ main servers. Allusions to “Big Brother” are all the rage. On the bright side, I’m betting that a record number of Americans now know the phrase originated with a George Orwell novel and not the CBS reality show.

Suddenly, millions of Americans who never gave much thought to third-party tracking cookies, call center workers in Mumbai accessing their credit card records, or spring break photos posted on friends’ Facebook pages are freaking out over the government learning about the porn sites they’ve visited, the subversive (or reactionary) blogs they’re reading and the boxes of ammo they’re buying online. Woe unto anyone who tries to talk them down. It will only get you labeled an “apologist,” an “Obamabot,” a “fascist,” or worse.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the government isn’t engaged in pervasive snooping, and some future whistleblower may well expose a nefarious government conspiracy to spy on all of us 24/7. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. But if such a program exists, it doesn’t appear that PRISM is it.

Greenwald: We never claimed “direct access” was true

From simoom via Little Green Footballs

Today, in his regular “On Security and Liberty” Guardian column, Glenn Greenwald sought to address some of the criticisms of his PRISM reporting. As when asked about his “direct access” claims in a recent interview, Greenwald again framed his PRISM story as not being about details of any actual program, but instead, as being about the discrepancy between his read on the leaked PowerPoint slides and the denials from internet companies (and the government).

Here’s the relevant part of Greenwald’s new column:

On PRISM, partisanship and propaganda

The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That’s because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies’ servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:

The NSA document says exactly what we reported. Just read it and judge for yourself (PRISM is “collection directly from the servers of these US service providers”). It’s endearingly naive how some people seem to think that because government officials or corporate executives issue carefully crafted denials, this resolves the matter.

As a reminder, here are some of the most explosive allegations found in Greenwald’s original PRISM article:

NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information.

…

Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users’ communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies’ servers. The NSA document notes the operations have “assistance of communications providers in the US”.

…

When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA’s inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.

…

The Prism program allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.

With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

We are shocked, shocked…

David Simon/DavidSimon.com

Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.
–
Because the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans would suggest that much of our political commentariat, many of our news gatherers and a lot of average folk are entirely without a clue.

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.

Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

Think about it. There is certainly a public expectation of privacy when you pick up a pay phone on the streets of Baltimore, is there not? And certainly, the detectives knew that many, many Baltimoreans were using those pay phones for legitimate telephonic communication. Yet, a city judge had no problem allowing them to place dialed-number recorders on as many pay phones as they felt the need to monitor, knowing that every single number dialed to or from those phones would be captured. So authorized, detectives gleaned the numbers of digital pagers and they began monitoring the incoming digitized numbers on those pagers — even though they had yet to learn to whom those pagers belonged. The judges were okay with that, too, and signed another order allowing the suspect pagers to be “cloned” by detectives, even though in some cases the suspect in possession of the pager was not yet positively identified.

All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal. Why?

Because they aren’t listening to the calls.

It’s at that point, people, that law enforcement requires a full-throated argument of probable cause. It’s at that point that privacy rights must be seriously measured against the legitimate investigate needs of law enforcement. And it’s at that point that the potential for authoritarian overreach becomes significant.

I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a data base of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the internet. And it’s scary that your cell phones have GPS installed. And it’s scary, too, that the little box that lets you go through the short toll lane on I-95 lets someone, somewhere know that you are on the move. Privacy is in decline around the world, largely because technology and big data have matured to the point where it is easy to create a net that monitors many daily interactions. Sometimes the data is valuable for commerce — witness those facebook ads for Italian shoes that my wife must endure — and sometimes for law enforcement and national security. But be honest, most of us are grudging participants in this dynamic. We want the cell phones. We like the internet. We don’t want to sit in the slow lane at the Harbor Tunnel toll plaza.

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As happens the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.

Keep in mind that the FISA court was created as a means of having some definitive oversight into a world that previously had been entirely unregulated, and wiretapping abuses by the U.S. executive branch and by law enforcement agencies were in fact the raison d’etre for the creation of FISA and a federal panel of judges to review national security requests for electronic surveillance. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it problematic that the court’s rulings are not public? Surely.

But the fact remains that for at least the last two presidential administrations, this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon Bombing before they occur.

So think for a minute about a scenario in which, say, a phone number is identified overseas as being linked to terror activity. It is so identified by, say, NSA overseas intercepts or through intelligence gathering by the CIA or the military. And say that there exists a database of billions and billions of telephonic contacts in the United States over a period of months or years. And say a computer could then run the suspect number through that data base and determine a pattern of communication between that overseas phone and several individuals in New York, or Boston, or Detroit. Would you want that connection to be made and made quickly? Or do you want to leave law enforcement to begin trying to acquire the call history on that initial phone from overseas carriers who may or may not maintain detailed retroactive call data or be unwilling to even provide that data fully to American law enforcement or do so without revealing the investigative effort to the targets themselves?

Keep in mind that law enforcement must still establish probable cause to then begin to actually monitor conversations on the domestic numbers, and that this request for electronic surveillance is then, of course, subject to judicial review by the FISA court.

Yes, I can hear the panicked libertarians and liberals and Obama-haters wailing in rare unison: But what about all the innocent Americans caught up in this voracious, overreaching dragnet? To which the answer is obvious if you think about the scale of this: What dragnet?

Your son’s devotional calls to 1-800-BEATOFF? Your daughter’s call from the STD clinic? Your brother-in-law calling you from his office at Goldman with that whispered insider-tip on that biomed stock? Is that what you’re worried about?

Take a deep breath and think:

When the government grabs the raw data thousands of phone calls, they’re probably going to examine those calls. They’re going to look to establish a pattern of behavior to justify more investigation and ultimately, if they can, elevate their surveillance to actual monitoring of conversations. Sure, enough.

When the government grabs every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years, it is not a prelude to monitoring anything in particular. Why not? Because that is tens of billions of phone calls and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do? When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a data base that is being maintained as an investigative tool.

There are reasons to object to governmental overreach in the name of law enforcement and anti-terrorism. And it is certainly problematic that our national security apparatus demands a judicial review of our law enforcement activity behind closed doors, but again, FISA is a basic improvement on the preceding vacuum it replaced. Certainly — and I find myself in rare agreement with the Rand Pauls of the world on this one — we might be more incensed at the notion of an American executive branch firing missles at U.S. citizens and killing them without the benefit of even an in absentia legal proceeding. Or ashamed at a racially-targeted sentencing guideline that subjects rock cocaine users to seventeen times the penalty of powdered-cocaine users? Or aghast at a civil forfeiture logic that allows government to seize private property and then requires citizens to prove a negative — that it was not purchased with money from ill-gotten gains.

There is a lot of authoritarian overreach in American society, both from the drug war and the war on terror.

But those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically-motivated enemy. And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks. After all, we as a people, through our elected representatives, drafted and passed FISA and the Patriot Act and what has been done here, with Verizon and assuredly with other carriers, is possible under that legislation. Indeed, one Republican author of the law, who was quoted as saying he didn’t think the Patriot Act would be so used, has, in this frantic little moment of national overstatement, revealed himself to be either a political coward or an incompetent legislator. He asked for this. We asked for this. We did so because we measured the reach and possible overreach of law enforcement against the risks of terrorism and made a conscious choice.

Frankly, I’m a bit amazed that the NSA and FBI have their shit together enough to be consistently doing what they should be doing with the vast big-data stream of electronic communication. For us, now — years into this war-footing and this legal dynamic — to loudly proclaim our indignation at the maintenance of an essential and comprehensive investigative database while at the same time insisting on a proactive response to the inevitable attempts at terrorism is as childish as it is obtuse. We want cake, we want to eat it, and we want to stay skinny and never puke up a thing. Of course we do.

When the Guardian, or the Washington Post or the New York Times editorial board — which displayed an astonishing ignorance of the realities of modern electronic surveillance in its quick, shallow wade into this non-controversy — are able to cite the misuse of the data for reasons other than the interception of terrorist communication, or to show that Americans actually had their communications monitored without sufficient probable cause and judicial review and approval of that monitoring, then we will have ourselves a nice, workable scandal. It can certainly happen, and given that the tension between national security and privacy is certain and constant, it probably will happen at points. And in fairness, having the FISA courts rulings so hidden from citizen review, makes even the discovery of such misuse problematic. The internal review of that court’s rulings needs to be somehow aggressive and independent, while still preserving national security secrets. That’s very tricky.

But this? Please. This is bullshit.

In Baltimore thirty years ago, after the detectives figured out which pay phones were dialing pagers, and then did all the requisite background checks and surveillance to identify the drug suspects, they finally went to a judge and asked for a wiretap on several pay phones. The judge looked at the police work and said, okay, you can record calls off those public pay phones, but only if you have someone watching the phones to ensure that your suspects are making the calls and not ordinary citizens. And if you make a mistake and record a non-drug-involved call, you will of course “minimize” the call and cease recording.

It was at that point — and not at the earlier stage of gathering thousands and thousands of dialed numbers and times of call — that the greatest balance was sought between investigative need and privacy rights. And in Baltimore, that wiretap case was made and the defendants caught and convicted, the case upheld on appeal. Here, too, the Verizon data corresponds to the sheets and sheets of printouts of calls from the Baltimore pay phones, obtainable with a court order and without any demonstration of probable cause against any specific individual. To get that far as a law-abiding investigator, you didn’t need to know a target, only that the electronic medium is being used for telephonic communication that is both illegal and legal. It’s at the point of actually identifying specific targets and then seeking to listen to the conversations of those targets that the rubber really hits the road.