Monday, August 05, 2013

Did Greenwald Get XKeyscore Wrong? (And Did He Do So Intentionally?)

I've largely been fretting silently about the ongoing NSA revelations...

But here's Charles Johnson at LGF pointing us to this by Joshua Foust, claiming that Greenwald's reporting is misleading. Foust and Johnson claim that Greenwald has only shown that the NSA has the capacity to do the things in question, but that he systematically suggests that it is actually doing those things. Johnson thinks that this aspect of Greenwald's reporting is so pervasive that it has to be intentionally misleading.

I find even the capacities in question rather alarming...but that's a topic for a different time...

1 Comments:

Blogger Pete Mack said...

Hey wow! You did at least as much work as Greenwald in determining whether your claim is true! (NOT!)

As a techie in this space (I worked for Bing for a while) the XKeystore story is completely plausible. The whole story for Bing is: what can we do to make stories about (X) more meaningful. The only place where this is not true is for customer information, because there are just too many potential legal and PR problems. (Ethics is very much conditional in the Big Data world.)

So, Greenwald may be wrong. But there's no prima facie evidence against him. And there's certainly not enough for a slander case...at least, not against him.

-mac

9:12 PM  

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