Glenn Greenwald's 'Epic Botch'?
Rick Perlstein
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The NSA slide that tech experts say Glenn Greenwald misinterpreted. (The Guardian/NSA, US Federal Government.)
Bloggers and experts in the tech world have been raising an important caveat to a key aspect of Glenn Greenwald’s world-shaking scoop about the NSA’s PRISM story—an aspect my friend Karl Fogel, an open-source software guru, blogger and the proprietor of QuestionCopyright.org, calls an “epic botch” by Greenwald. People outside of the tech world absolutely need to know about this debate too, which is why, though I’m no expert, I’m sharing it with this wider audience. I deeply admire what Greenwald and his team at The Guardian are doing. I write in the interest of helping them do it better.
The “crucial question,” as Fogel frames it in a blog post, is this: “Are online service companies giving the government fully automated access to their data,” as Greenwald says they are, “without any opportunity for review or intervention by company lawyers?” This is what the companies have been denying—in statements that critics have been interpreting as non-denial denials. (Apple: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” So what if Apple et al. knew the formal name of the program? And what about indirect access? Or government contractors? And how are they defining “customer data”? Etc.)
Fogel points out that a widely read post to this effect called “Cowards” from the blogg Uncrunched—“What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?”—is “mostly wrong.” He says, “It looks like Greenwald and company simply misunderstood an NSA slide [see image at the top of this post for the slide] because they don’t have the technical background to know that ‘servers’ is a generic word and doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as ‘the main servers on which a company’s customer-facing services run.’ The ‘servers’ mentioned in the slide are just lockboxes used for secure data transfer. They have nothing to do with the process of deciding which requests to comply with—they’re just means of securely and efficiently delivering information once a company has decided to do so.”...this slide describes how to move data from once place to another without it getting intercepted in transit: “What the hell are the companies supposed to do?” Fogel jokes. “Put the data on a CD-ROM and mail it to Fort Meade?”
The implications of this interpretation, if correct, completely shift the grounds for the discussion of how the NSA’s PRISM program works—“the difference,” as Mark Jaquith of WordPress writes, “between a bombshell and a yawn of a story.”
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http://www.thenation.com/blog/174783/glenn-greenwalds-epic-botch#axzz2W9DN9MQV
= new reply since forum marked as read
From Greenwald:
"Democratic partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories - the only one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) - in order to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in general is discredited.
They are wrong. Our story was not inaccurate. The Washington Post revised parts of its article, but its reporter, Bart Gellman, stands by its core claims ("From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may 'task' the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company's staff"
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The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim"
"Greenwald reported what the NSA slide said and reported the tech companies' disagreement with the NSA's interpretation of "direct access." The comments section on that article immediately point out the BS reasoning."
...desperate hogwash. The NSA didn't provide the information to Greenwald. It's not the government's job to fact check media reports even for a typical story. If someone is going to break information, especially based on a leak, that person better be damn sure he/she has the facts straight.
Trying to blame bad reporting on the NSA is beyond ludicrous. In fact, it's downright funny.
from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-surveillance-prism-obama-live?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20full-width-1%20bento-box:Bento%20box
osition2#block-51b36893e4b0cc6424372292
It clearly says PRISM collects data "directly from the servers" of the listed companies. This is what Greenwald reported. He also reported that the companies denied this.
Not hogwash. Accurate reporting.
Read this whole article, but here is one salient part:
Reporting by the New York Times and CNet offers some clues about how PRISM works.
The Times says that major tech companies have systems that “involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company’s servers.”
Data is “shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk,” the Times reports. The scheme is “a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.”
A source told CNet’s Declan McCullagh that PRISM is “a very formalized legal process that companies are obliged to do.” A source — perhaps the same one — says that “you can’t say everyone in Pakistan who searched for ‘X’ … It still has to be particularized.”
Doesn’t that contradict what the slides released by Snowden say?
Not necessarily. Here’s the key slide from the PRISM presentation:
This slide draws a distinction between NSA surveillance programs that collect communications “as data flows past” on fiber optic cables and PRISM, which collects communications “directly from the servers” of U.S. Internet companies.
Some have interpreted this to mean that the NSA has “direct access” in a technical sense: automatic, unfettered access to the servers’ contents. But in context, “direct” is more likely to mean that the NSA is receiving data sent to them deliberately by the tech companies, as opposed to intercepting communications as they’re transmitted to some other destination. That’s not inconsistent with tech company lawyers scrutinizing each request before complying with it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/heres-everything-we-know-about-prism-to-date/
In other words, direct access does not mean that NSA has unfettered access to the companies' server contents, but that, pursuant to specific FISA requests, the companies must comply by sending them the requested materials directly through their servers. This is as opposed to the kinds of meta-data collected on fiber optic cables or other infrastructures the NSA scrutinizes in real time.
You poor thing...
RL
