

More Snowden leaks – and this time Al Qaeda is the surveillance target - csandreasen
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0130/More-Snowden-leaks-and-this-time-Al-Qaeda-is-the-surveillance-target

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csandreasen
Don't get me wrong, I think the terrorism card is definitely overplayed. The
article brings up an interesting point, though. The redacted portion flies in
the face of the accusation that the NSA isn't using its capabilities to pursue
legitimate terrorist targets. Yes, that one phrase doesn't prove that all of
its targets are legitimate, but it makes me wonder what else is in all of
those redactions and missing slides. Do they jive with the existing narrative?
How much is left out for national security and how much is left out to make a
better story?

~~~
krapp
To be fair though, how many people actually believed that none of what Snowden
revealed was ever being used for pursuing such legitimate targets? Or that a
news organization might not spin a story to fit a particular bias?

Even given everything else, I would think that would be a pretty obviously
extremist point of view.

~~~
csandreasen
Maybe I've just been reading too many comments on HN. :)

I think most of the reporting so far tends to further that bias. It seems like
a lot of the disclosures talk a good deal about how the NSA collects
information and just leaves the reader to fill in the part about who they're
targeting, which in turns causes most people to jump in and assume that it's
being used against _everyone_. I went back and re-read the articles on the New
York Times[1], Guardian[2] and Propublica[3] and I see something that I notice
in just about every NSA revelation: they always mention that the documents in
question don't say how much of the communications of Americans or ordinary
civilians were collected, but they also don't give any examples of whose
communications were being collected. The Angry Birds articles would be more
accurate if they said something like "The documents did not reveal if any U.S.
citizens were targeted, but did indicate that this information was being
gathered from members of a middle-eastern terrorist organization." But then,
if they said something like that, there wouldn't be so much of a civil
liberties angle to play (in fact, it might backfire and draw some outrage to
the news outlet itself).

Which brings me back to my original question - what's in all of the other
redactions?

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/spy-agencies-
scour-p...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/spy-agencies-scour-phone-
apps-for-personal-data.html?_r=0)

[2]
[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-)
gchq-smartphone-app-angry-birds-personal-data

[3] [http://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-
angry-b...](http://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-birds-
and-other-apps-for-personal-data)

~~~
krapp
Ok... HN users who already believed that governments were a facade built on
extortion and ultraviolence notwithstanding...

It's a good question. We see what's presented to us and what's presented to us
clearly is constructed as a narrative. Glenn Greenwald's agenda, at the very
least, is to keep people hooked in to the Guardian.

