
The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism - daigoba66
http://www.zdnet.com/the-real-story-in-the-nsa-scandal-is-the-collapse-of-journalism-7000016570/
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AnthonyMouse
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the
collapse of credibility.

Here we have major publications publishing something and then major
corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not
entirely.

At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be
under a _legal obligation to lie_. If there is a room at Facebook that does
the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you
about it? Of course not.

So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources
legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know
what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit
the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers.

So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government
shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this
even though they _maybe_ haven't actually done anything. All because they
attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.

~~~
kllrnohj
Being under a gag order is _VERY_ different from being under a "legal
obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You
can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it,
yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not.

Maybe these companies have _VOLUNTARILY_ lied, that's possible, but that's
also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for
some reason.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie.

So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and
someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be
a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have
to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading
statement is particularly meaningful in this context.

~~~
varjag
You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a
company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by
gag order.

None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them
wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a
company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by
gag order.

But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag
order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse
corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much.

>None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them
wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.

As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.

~~~
jlgreco
> _As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience._

I wonder how that works. If stories about pervasive US surveillance of a
burgeoning tech startup cause their european market to be DOA, how could that
startup be correctly compensated?

------
bcoates
McCullagh's star named source Stewart Baker is not a credible source on this
sort of thing, he's effectively a PR flack.

He's made a career of banging the drum that the cyber-boogeyman apocalypse is
going to happen real soon now, and the ACLU and EFF are trying to get everyone
killed, since the clipper chip era.

------
trevelyan
Just saw the "Page One" documentary about the NYT and came to the same
conclusion. While the NYT staff spent most of their time talking about how
technology is affecting their "interests" there were only two people in the
documentary who mentioned the importance of a free press for promoting justice
and disseminating truth: Julian Assange and Markos Moulitsas.

So we see shots of NYT reporters checking Google News and talking about
twitter. And then the most appalling bit of the film where Judith Miller
justifies her behavior by trying to pass the buck to the government, as if
anti-war sources (like the FAS) who were actively debunking the crap she was
publishing and clamoring for attention did not actually exist.

~~~
gwright
Not sure if you really mean 'social justice' or the less controversial good-
old-fashioned 'justice'.

The overreach by various government agencies has been an injustice that needs
to be addressed but the issue doesn't have to be clouded by pulling in the
complicated disputes about 'social justice'

~~~
trevelyan
You're right. Assange uses the term "justice" in the documentary. It just
surprised me that he and Markos were the only two people quoted in the
documentary who actually referenced moral values when talking about why
society needs a free press.

------
eupharis
Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an
explicit correction. But this is still a major story:

> Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified
> knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
> were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate
> that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door
> search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in
> a search for someone else.

> “As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community
> from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been
> incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to
> deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,”
> Udall said.

US Senators with classified knowledge of the program __don 't have __knowledge
of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for
getting some of the details wrong.

~~~
brown9-2
They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified
program. That's what "unable" means here.

~~~
eupharis
Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence:

> Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose
> communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director,
> Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out.
> Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter
> stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to
> try to estimate their number.

This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how
exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.

Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say,
300 million?

~~~
AJ007
In the recent Senate Intelligence hearing Senator Wyden asked General James
Clapper "Does the NSA collect any data at all on millions or hundred of
millions of Americans?" Response: "No sir, it does not .. not wittingly, there
are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not
wittingly."

If ones assumes that William Binney both knows what he is talking about and is
telling the truth, then the NSA has been collecting data on Americans since
before September 11th.

If the rest of what William Binney says is also correct, then the NSA
initially was keeping the data on Americans anonymized, for viewing only after
a court order -- but then after September 11th disabled data anonymization for
some order of time.

If the data has been anonymized once again, this may present legal problems in
how officials can guarantee this because it would reveal past illegal activity
which those same officials may have been involved in.

------
scribu
Besides the usual damage caused by false allegations, the PRISM story also
confuses people into thinking that the other recent NSA-related story [1]
isn't true either, but it is.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-
spying-m...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-
millions-americans)

------
pfortuny
It has become a topic but once again, Orwell to the rescue: "the past is
alterable." 1984.

How true, in this case.

But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful
and pathetic.

~~~
kllrnohj
Correcting your mistakes is not shameful or pathetic.

~~~
pfortuny
Rewriting an article is. You can add a list of errata or write a new one.

------
cozeulodorieso
Yes, journalism truly has collapsed. That's why these scandals were outed by
Reddit and Twitter users, not journalists working at more-than-a-century-old
newspapers.

</snark>

------
room271
The collapse of journalism? Isn't this week's news some of the best journalism
of recent times?!

There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more
encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on
after this week.

------
kunai
PRISM and the Verizon scandal are two completely different fiascoes. PRISM was
a supposed program that archived and collected data of American citizens in a
widespread data mining project. The Verizon scandal was one where Verizon
agreed to the NSA allowing tapping of phones in specific areas.

Both are equally suspicious and egregious in their own rights. What is
important is the investigation of both of these programs and the final
conclusion. Until that conclusion is met, I think it's best for everybody to
shut up and get on with their lives.

It was bad, and I, like many others, was angry. But now is the time to wait,
and be careful about which services we decide to use.

------
brown9-2
As long as we are talking about jumping to conclusions, the author does the
same thing here:

 _Declan McCullagh of CNET examined the Washington Post story independently
and concluded that the Post story was wrong._

The Cnet "analysis" depends on the credibility of their unnamed source. The
reader is left to decide whose source sounds more believable, Cnet's or the
WaPo's, and which version of the story they find likely.

The problem inherent to secrecy (which isn't an argument for abolishing it) is
that the public is left to draw conclusions from partial facts and an
unverifiable amount of misdirection.

------
jdp23
Talk about click-baiting ...

Based on what we know so far, the stories have at a minimum gotten significant
press coverage about the volume of FISA requests and (per the NY Times and
Marc Ambinder) the cooperation of many US tech companies (though not Twitter)
in building a streamlined approach to surveillance of nonUS persons. With
public discussion, it ay be harder to invoke the state secrets clause. And
we're not done yet. "Collapse" seems a litte overstated.

------
teeja
None of this was news since William Binney,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29)
who estimated "that the NSA (particularly through the Stellar Wind project)
had intercepted 20 trillion communications 'transactions' of Americans (such
as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data but not including financial
data)" in the years following the 2005 James Riser NYTimes story.

IMO both journalism and the American people failed to pay adequate attention
to this issue, both have gotten what they paid for, and the faux-surprise act
of both is hilarious.

------
cpleppert
The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to.
The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over.

In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot
of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources
that came out after the slides were released.

But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many
actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly
contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.

------
ommunist
Welcome to the Web 3.0.1984. It is the read-write-rewrite one.

------
waterphone
Not really, no. It's not clear what's happening yet. The Washington Post has
backed down somewhat, but additional information from other sources, as well
as the initial document which was only partially leaked previously, is still
coming out which appears to further contradict the denials.

------
acqq
It is a common praxis today to extend the online version of the stories. As
far as I see, the changes aren't stepping back from the points already made,
and the zdnet article doesn't point to any significant correction that would
discredit the authors.

------
zwieback
I wouldn't call it the collapse of journalism. Over time the big brands will
learn how to wait out the initial twitter storm and then do what journalists
are supposed to do. Either that or they will become irrelevant.

