*Well, what else can they say? Except nothing. Historically speaking they have long preferred nothing.
*One would think that the NSA might learn to talk like everybody else, but it's also likely that many other groups will learn to mimic the stately rhetoric of the NSA.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/guide-deceptions-word-games-obfuscations-officials-use-mislead-public-about-nsa
"A Guide to the Deceptions, Misinformation, and Word Games Officials Use to Mislead the Public About NSA Surveillance
"It's been two months since President Barack Obama first said that he welcomes a debate about NSA surveillance, which he once again reiterated last week at his press conference. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to have a real debate about a subject when the administration constantly and intentionally misleads Americans about the NSA’s capabilities and supposed legal powers.
"Infamously, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper was forced to apologize for lying to Congress about whether the government was collecting information on millions of Americans, but that was merely the tip of the administration’s iceberg of mendacity and misdirection. At this point, it seems nothing the government says about the NSA can be taken at face value.
"NSA’s Bizarro Dictionary
"The latest example comes from the New York Times last week, which reported that the NSA is "searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country." Despite the fact that millions of people’s communications are collected in bulk, the NSA says that this isn't "bulk collection." From the NYT story:
"The senior intelligence official argued, however, that it would be inaccurate to portray the N.S.A. as engaging in "bulk collection" of the contents of communications. " 'Bulk collection' is when we collect and retain for some period of time that lets us do retrospective analysis," the official said. "In this case, we do not do that, so we do not consider this 'bulk collection.'"
"In other words, because the NSA does some sort of initial content searches of the bulk communications that they collect, perhaps using very fast computers, then only keep some unknown subset of that greater bulk for a later date, no "bulk collection" occurs. This is ridiculous. No matter how you slice it, the NSA is mass collecting and searching millions of American communications without a warrant.
"Keep in mind that officials have previously said communications aren't even "collected" when they are intercepted and stored in a database for long periods of time, much less "bulk collected." Orwell would be impressed.
"We've long documented the NSA’s unbelievable definitions of ordinary words like "collect," "surveillance," and "communications," publishing a whole page of them last year. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer has added to the NSA's bizarro dictionary, with words like "incidental," "minimize" and even "no." (((And if you think that's great, you should hear coal companies talk about climate.)))
"The fact is, no one should have to read and parse a sentence a half-dozen times, plus have access to a secret government dictionary, in order to decipher its meaning. Yet, that’s apparently how the administration wants this debate to proceed.
"Question Misdirection
"When government officials can’t directly answer a question with a secret definition, officials will often answer a different question than they were asked. For example, if asked, "can you read Americans' email without a warrant,” officials will answer: "we cannot target Americans' email without a warrant." As we explained last week, the NSA’s warped definition of word "target" is full of so many holes that it allows the NSA to reach into untold number of Americans’ emails, some which can be purely domestic.
"Under this Program" Dodge
"Another tried and true technique in the NSA obfuscation playbook is to deny it does one invasive thing or another "under this program." When it's later revealed the NSA actually does do the spying it said it didn’t, officials can claim it was just part of another program not referred to in the initial answer.
"This was the Bush administration’s strategy for the "Terrorist Surveillance Program": The term "TSP" ended up being a meaningless label, created by administration officials after the much larger warrantless surveillance program was exposed by the New York Times in 2005. They used it to give the misleading impression that the NSA’s spying program was narrow and aimed only at intercepting the communications of terrorists. In fact, the larger program affected all Americans.
"Now we’re likely seeing it as part of the telephone records collection debate when administration officials repeat over and over that they aren’t collecting location data “under this program.” Sen. Ron Wyden has strongly suggested this might not be the whole story.
"From Downright False to Impossible to Understand
"Some statements by government officials don’t seem to have any explanation.
"The night before the New York Times story on "vast" warrantless searches of Americans’ communications came out, Obama told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, "We don't have a domestic spying program." Mr. President, what do you call collecting the phone records of all Americans and searching any email sent by an American that happens to cross the border? That sounds a lot like a domestic spying program.
"Similarly, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently said this: "[T]he government cannot listen to an American’s telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause." Leaked documents and, honestly, the FISA Amendments Act itself show Feinstein’s statement simply isn’t true—if Americans are talking to a "target" their telephone calls are listened to and their emails can be read without a warrant (and that doesn’t even include the searching of Americans’ communications that are "about a target"). All of those searches are done without a court order, much less a warrant based on probable cause.
"Previously, President Obama has called the inherently secret FISA court “transparent,” to the befuddlement of just about everyone. A court that has issued tens of thousands of secret orders, while creating a secret body of privacy and Fourth Amendment law, is not “transparent” by any measure.
"Just last week, the president claimed he would appoint an “independent” board of “outside” observers to review the surveillance programs, only to put DNI Clapper—the same man who lied to Congress and the public about the scope of the program—in charge of picking the members. The White House has since backtracked, but the DNI still will report the group’s findings to the President.
"These are not all of the misleading statements, merely just a few that stick out at the moment. If the president is serious about transparency, he can start by declassifying the dictionary his administration is using to debate, and start speaking straight to the American public. A one-sided presentation of the facts, without straightforward answers to the public’s questions, isn’t really a debate at all.
(((Well, yeah. Of course it's not a debate. If it was supposed to be a debate, one of the parties wouldn't be under the table wearing headphones and hiding from the other stakeholders.)))
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/dr-joseph-bonneau-wins-nsa-award-criticizes-nsa-0
Dr. Joseph Bonneau Wins NSA Award, Criticizes NSA
"Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I’m sad that we haven’t better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance. And like many American citizens I’m ashamed we’ve let our politicians sneak the country down this path." – Bonneau
"On July 18th, Dr. Joseph Bonneau, a software engineer at Google, received the National Security Agency’s award for the best scientific cybersecurity paper. According to its stated mission, the competition was created to help broaden the scientific foundations of cybersecurity needed in the development of systems that are resilient to cyber attacks. But Bonneau was deeply conflicted about receiving the award, noting on his blog that even though he was flattered to receive the award he didn’t condone the mass surveillance programs run by the NSA: "Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form."
"Bonneau elaborated on his feelings in a Twitter discussion as well as in an interview with Animal during which he said: "I’d rather have it [the NSA] abolished than persist in its current form. I think there’s a question about whether it’s possible to reform the NSA into something that’s more reasonable."
"Engineers and researchers like Bonneau have a unique and important role to play in fighting back against NSA oversteps. As Michael Hirsh noted in the Atlantic last month, "The government's massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors." As Hirsh explained, tech companies have contributed enormously to wiring up Big Brother – companies like Palantir Technologies, Eagle Alliance (of Computer Sciences Corp. and Northrup Grumman) and Booz Allen Hamilton. The only way the government gets to spy on everyone is when people who are intelligent and innovative enough to build scalable surveillance technologies decide to help them.
"We may never know all the people who chose to help build the National Security Agency’s unlawful spying apparatus. And we may never know all the ethical people who turned down contracts for the NSA because they did not want to support mass surveillance without warrants. But we can and should laud individual engineers like Bonneau, who used his talents to promote effective network security and his platform to take a public stance against the NSA’s unchecked surveillance program.
"Hopefully Bonneau’s example will inspire more cryptographers and security engineers to speak out against unlawful and unconstitutional surveillance, adopting the moral high ground in a battle against fear-driven surveillance that needs more outspoken leaders from the tech community."
Sign EFF’s petition here.
