NYT Ed Board calls BS on the NSA: "More Fog From the Spy Agencies"

The New York Times Editorial Board is calling bullsh*t on the the NSA's effort at "limited hangout" yesterday.

More Fog From the Spy Agencies
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: July 31, 2013

The Obama administration released narrowly selected and heavily censored documents and sent more officials to testify before Congress on Wednesday in an effort to defend the legality and value of the surveillance of all Americans’ telephone calls. The effort was a failure.

The documents clarified nothing of importance, and the hearing raised major new questions about whether the intelligence agencies had been misleading Congress and the public about the electronic dragnet. At the end of the day, we were more convinced than ever that the government had yet to come clean on the legal arguments and court orders underlying the surveillance.

-edit-


The administration released three documents. One was an April order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates in secret, approving the collection of “all call detail records” from a company that was not named but was a Verizon subsidiary. The order resolved nothing about the fundamental question of why the program was needed and authorized in the first place.

-edit-

The two other documents released Wednesday were letters to Congress saying the N.S.A. had really analyzed only a tiny fraction of the data it was collecting but failed to say why the enormous collection was necessary, legal or wise. Those legal arguments remain classified. The declassified letters said the collection efforts “significantly strengthen” the discovery of terrorists and their plots; the agency has previously claimed that 54 plots were disrupted by the collection of phone records and a separate, targeted collection of Internet data.

But those claims seemed to fade away on Wednesday. In his testimony, the best that John Inglis, deputy N.S.A. director, could come up with was that “there is an example” that “comes close to a ‘but for’ example.” Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who have been arguing for the termination of the bulk collection of telephone data, were joined by Mr. Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in criticizing the N.S.A. director, James Clapper Jr., for falsely telling Congress that the agency was not collecting large volumes of data on Americans’ phone calls.


-edit -

More at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/opinion/more-fog-from-the-spy-agencies.html?ref=opinion