The Snowden Effect, Continued

We cannot call these lies. We call it "misinformation" by high government officials because to call them "lies" would be to call high government officials "liars" and that would be very impolite and uncivil. As would be calling them, "goddamned liars," if you're scoring at home. We have to been lied to. We have been misinformed. We came to Casablanca, it appears, for the waters.


The dog ate their surveillance records. Honest.

Jane Harman, a former ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that speaking about secret programs can be a "minefield" for public officials. "Are people deliberately misleading other people? I suppose it can happen," Harman said in an interview. Facts can be obscured through "selective declassification that means you put out some pieces but not others," she said. "But I assume most people are acting in good faith."

And you, madam, are a sap.

For now, the crumbling secrecy surrounding the programs has underscored the extent to which obscuring their dimensions had served government interests beyond the importance of the intelligence they produced...The careful depiction of NSA programs also served diplomatic ends. Until recently, the United States had positioned itself as such an innocent victim of cyber intrusions by Russia and China that the State Department issued a secret demarche, or official diplomatic communication, in January scolding Beijing. That posture became more problematic after leaks by the former NSA contractor and acknowledged source of the NSA leaks, Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong and is thought to be stuck at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.

The problem with all of this always has been mission creep -- re-purposing what is allegedly being done to safeguard the United States into tools for diplomacy and, worse, for conventional law enforcement. (What happens if the NSA snoops happen upon a run-of-the-mill drug deal? How is any evidence they gain from their snooping even marginally admissable? The first time a court says that it is, that's the ballgame for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.) At which point, I am sure, we will be confronted with some more barefaced misinforming. If they're trying to make Edward Snowden look like an extremist, they're really doing a lousy job of it.

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