As I have documented over the last few weeks, story after story and claim after claim about the NSA from Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian have proven to be sensationalist tabloid journalism at its worst: A horribly misleading, deliberately inflammatory headline, followed by an article filled with wild exaggerations and mischaracterizations, including willfully twisting, ignoring, or entirely omitting material facts contrary to The Guardian's narrative -- all in an effort to paint a dishonest picture of wrongdoing and illegalities by the Obama Administration. The tiniest kernel of a fact about an NSA program's technical capabilities is spun, conflated, confused, and exaggerated; some scary language is mixed in; a healthy dose of outrage is added; and then it's all jumbled together into a mountain of manufactured bullshit.
As a refresher, here's a quick summary of just a few examples of the outrageous dishonesty of the reporting on the NSA from Greenwald and The Guardian:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
In furtherance of one of the brief examples I cited, now comes proof of what may be the most egregious example of the dishonesty of the Greenwald/Guardian bullshit machine -- the claim from the end of last week that the Obama Administration is using a "secret back door" to spy on all Americans.
First, the scary, sensationalist, and misleading headline from The Guardian:
NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens' emails and phone calls
Exclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans' communications
http://www.theguardian.com/...
Oh, no! There's a loophole! And not just any loophole -- it's a secret backdoor loophole! And it gives permission for warrantless searches of Americans' emails and calls! OMG! The sky is falling!
Er, no -- not so much. As always, it turns out the story is utter bunk -- just a load of "truthy" bullshit masquerading as "exclusive news." As usual, the truth of the NSA program is not at all as spun by the garbage-spewing fish-wrap [emphasis mine]:
The point of such a headline is obviously to serve as link-bait, as well as to incite further angst and paranoia among observers who appear to be addicted to outrage — those who can’t wait to get their routine fix of outrage porn, reality be damned. The hope is that these people won’t read thoroughly or critically enough to notice that analysts do not — repeat, do not — have permission to do this.
So, how do we know that analysts don't have the permission or authority to do what
The Guardian claims? Because the very document they cite, supposedly in support of their claim, expressly and explicitly
says that analysts don't have any such permission or authority:
How do we know for sure?
The Guardian‘s allegedly incriminating FAA 702 document specifically says, “…analysts may NOT/NOT implement any USP queries until an effective oversight process has been developed by NSA and agreed to by DOJ/ODNI.” The jargon “NOT/NOT” means “not, repeat not.” And it’s in all-caps, presumably for emphasis.
NSA analysts are explicitly “NOT [repeat] NOT” allowed to do what the article claims they have “permission” to do.
This “NOT/NOT” line appears in a graphical excerpt from the document, posted above the lede paragraph, and just below the byline. Yet readers are led to infer that analysts are doing it now, and without any oversight — administratively, judicially or otherwise.
So, this FAA 702 glossary document, updated in June 2012, states that analysts are not allowed to perform a search for metadata keywords or “identifiers” gleaned from inadvertently-collected communications by U.S. persons until the creation and implementation of “effective oversight” measures, which are to be approved by the Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence. By way of a refresher: the inadvertently-collected information is phone call and email “metadata” — which, again, refers to the “to” and “from” lines and so forth, and doesn’t include the content of the communications. Ackerman and Ball didn’t use the word “content” anywhere in the article.
But
The Guardian's bullshit was not limited to the headline:
Astonishingly enough, the article went on to state: “The document… does not say whether the oversight process it mentions has been established or whether any searches against US person names have taken place.”
Unbelievable. They don’t have any idea whether these searches have ever occurred. And as near as we can tell, the searches haven’t occurred. Why? Because the document expressly forbids the searches from being executed . . . Furthermore, the document excerpt provided by The Guardian includes the following lines:
“U.S. persons may NOT be targeted under FAA Section 702.
Persons in the US may NOT be targeted under FAA Section 702.
Accounts used, shared or in any way accessed by USPs or persons in the US may NOT be targeted or remain on target under FAA Section 702.”
*
“Until further notice, analysts must ensure that database queries… of any USP… are NOT run against collected FAA 702 data."
Now keep in mind -- and again, this is where the outrageous nature of
The Guardian's dishonest reporting becomes clear -- all of this is in the
very document The Guardian is citing for the absurd proposition that a secret loophole "allows" precisely the kind of spying that very document itself
expressly forbids.
So, how on earth does The Guardian get "allow," "permits," and "are authorized" from that document? That's a very good question:
I’d say that’s pretty damn emphatic. The all-caps word “NOT” appears in the excerpt a total of six times. Referring back to the subheadline, how the hell did Ackerman and Ball ascertain “permission” out of this document? It explicitly instructs analysts that they do not, repeat NOT have permission to do it.
Pretty outrageous, dishonest spin from
The Guardian, no? Oh, but
The Guardian's bullshit wasn't nearly done:
Worse yet, the article included leading phrases like “enabling it to search for US citizens’ email,” and “rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications” [emphasis mine]. Immediately following the latter phrase, the authors hedged by writing “potentially allowing warrantless searches,” which, by the way, falls in line with a well-worn pattern: the conflation of the ability to do something with the specific policy mandate to do it.
Of course, this is what we've seen since day one in the NSA reporting from
The Guardian and Glenn Greenwald: Wild, misleading claims which deliberately confuse and conflate hypothetical, theoretical
capabilities, if someone were to hack in (as, for example, Snowden did), managed to skirt all the safeguards, and deliberately wanted to break the law, on the one hand, with actual policy or actual wrongdoing, on the other. As I've documented, the same pattern of dishonest, misleading confusion and conflation has repeated itself over and over and over in virtually every one of the fairy tales told by Greenwald and his paper -- all in the service of an anti-Obama narrative rather than truth and accuracy.
More on the outrageously dishonest reporting from The Guardian on this matter here:
http://thedailybanter.com/...
The moral: Virtually every word reported by Greenwald and The Guardian is, has been, and continues to be misleading, dishonest, "truthy" bullshit. It's not just a matter of their complete lack of credibility -- it's the blatant dishonesty inherent in the entire NSA story so far. And make no mistake, that's all it is: A story -- a bullshit story.