After waiting another month for the latest installment from Glenn Greenwald, and being disappointed, yet again, to find that the claims made in his latest piece still amount to mere assertions about the supposed potential capabilities that the systems may have for eavesdropping, assuming someone wanted to go around any and all existing safeguards and break the law, I am left wondering, once more, "Where is the evidence of any actual abuse, much less any government-sanctioned abuse? Where is any evidence, therefore, that the safeguards are insufficient?"
This leads to a further, very puzzling question about this story.
It was, after all, Greenwald who started this whole affair with this rather startling claim from Snowden:
“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail.”
And as Greenwald himself characterized it:
“All they have to do is enter an e-mail address or an IP address, and it does two things, searches the database and lets them listen to the calls or read the e-mails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories and Google search terms.”
“It’s done with no need to go to court, no need to get approval . . . But it allows them to listen to whatever e-mails they want, telephone calls, browsing history, Microsoft Word documents.”
Putting aside the rather dubious question of whether Snowden actually had the "authorities" to do what he claimed he could do, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Snowden and Greenwald's basic claim about the system's capabilities and lack of safeguards are true: That if an analyst wanted to, he or she could brazenly and illegally eavesdrop on anyone, anytime, anywhere in the country without a warrant, without specific authorization, and without consequence.
Which leads to the puzzling question:
If, as Snowden claims, he could have sat there and at any time eavesdropped on anyone, anywhere, without authorization or consequence, then WHY DIDN'T HE? That is, if the entire point of his caper was to show how expansive and easily abused the NSA eavesdropping program is, and how any analyst supposedly could have unfettered access to eavesdrop on anyone, then why didn't he do it? Why didn't he do the one, supposedly simple, supposedly unrestrained, and supposedly consequence-free task that would be all it would have taken to prove his claim? If, as he claims, he was "authorized" to do it, then why didn't he?
I mean, he's already proven that he was willing to commit serious crimes, even potentially committing treason, to make his claims. He's already proven that he would deliberately break the law by covertly infiltrating a federal contractor under a false pretense solely to work on a highly-classified program with the sole intent of stealing highly-classified materials, including many national security documents having nothing to do with his allegations; that he would then immediately flee to China and then Russia with the information; and that he would even threaten to harm the US with release of additional, highly-damaging national security documents which would "harm the country" should any harm come to him; so clearly, when he planned his crimes and stole the documents, he was fully aware of the risk of both being charged with very serious, potentially capital crimes and/or (at least in his mind) suffering serious bodily harm or even death as a result.
So why, then, if he was willing to go through all that and become a fugitive from potential espionage and treason charges, even willing to live in exile forever in supposed fear for his life, did he not provide the simplest evidence of his claim by simply doing what he claimed he was authorized to do, and which he claimed was so easily done without consequence? Why, for that matter, did he apparently not gather any evidence that any illegal, warrantless eavesdropping was actually occurring with the approval of the government?
It seems to me, based on his behavior, and based on what he and Greenwald are not providing by way of any evidence of actual wrongdoing with these systems, that there are only two possible answers: either (a) he could not actually do what he claimed he could; and/or (b) he knew that if he tried, he'd be caught.
In either case, the fact that Greenwald and Snowden have provided no evidence at all that Snowden could actually do what he says he could so easily, much less any evidence at all of any sanctioned abuse of the eavesdropping programs, strongly suggests that -- gasp -- whatever safeguards exist are working. Why else would Snowden not provide any evidence of doing what he claims was the simplest of tasks?
In other words, given that the entire point of infiltrating the program was to gather proof of how horrible these programs are, the fact that he didn't provide himself proof of his claim when he himself had the chance certainly suggests that the meat of his claim -- that any analyst, anytime, could easily eavesdrop on anyone's calls, emails, and internet browsing -- is a load of bunk.