Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 8

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Snowden elected as rector by students at University of Glasgow

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David Miranda detention at Heathrow airport was lawful, high court rules

Detention of former Guardian journalist's partner was justified by 'very pressing' interests of national security, judges say

Three high court judges have dismissed a challenge that David Miranda, the partner of the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was unlawfully detained under counter-terrorism powers for nine hours at Heathrow airport last August.

The judges accepted that Miranda's detention and the seizure of computer material was "an indirect interference with press freedom" but said this was justified by legitimate and "very pressing" interests of national security.

The three judges, Lord Justice Laws, Mr Justice Ouseley and Mr Justice Openshaw, concluded that Miranda's detention at Heathrow under schedule 7 of the Terrorism 2000 Act was lawful, proportionate and did not breach European human rights protections of freedom of expression.

The ruling says that Miranda was stopped in transit between Berlin and Rio de Janeiro after meeting the film-maker Laura Poitras, who had been involved in making disclosures based on documents leaked by the US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Miranda was carrying encrypted files, including an external hard drive containing 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents, "in order to assist the journalistic activity of Greenwald". The Guardian made his travel reservations and paid for the trip.

Laws said he noted that the seized material included personal information that would allow staff to be identified, including those deployed overseas.

Greenwald told the judges that the security services were well aware that the seized material was in connection with journalism and not terrorism. He said there was no evidence to indicate that any disclosure had actually threatened or endangered life or any specific operation.

"In my view, this is not surprising, given the care we took not to create such a risk," Greenwald said in his witness statement. Miranda said the material was so heavily encrypted that he was unable to open it.

The judges dismissed Greenwald's claims, saying there was "no perceptible foundation" for the suggestion that they were not putting national security or lives at risk by possessing the material.

Laws accepted that agreeing not to publish material simply because a government official had said it might damage national security was antithetical to the most important traditions of responsible journalism, but said this was trivial compared with the threat to security.

He said that neither Greenwald nor Miranda was in a position to form an accurate judgment on the matter because they would depend on knowing the whole "jigsaw" of disparate pieces of intelligence.

Laws said he had no reason to doubt any of the evidence from Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser at the Cabinet Office, that the material was likely to cause very great damage to security interests and possible loss of life.

"In my judgment, the schedule 7 stop was a proportionate measure in the circumstances. Its objective was not only legitimate but very pressing," he said.

Miranda said he would challenge the decision. "I will appeal [against] this ruling, and keep appealing until the end, not because I care about what the British government calls me, but because the values of press freedom that are at stake are too important to do anything but fight until the end," he told The Intercept website, which is edited by Greenwald. "I'm of course not happy that a court has formally said that I was a legitimate terrorism suspect, but the days of the British empire are long over and this ruling will have no effect outside of the borders of this country."

A Guardian News & Media spokesperson said: "We're disappointed by today's judgment, which means that an act designed to defeat terrorism can now be used to catch those who are working on fundamentally important issues. The judgment takes a narrow view of what 'journalism' is in the 21st century and a very wide view of the definition of 'terrorism'. We find that disturbing."

Miranda's solicitor, Gwendolen Morgan of Bindmans, said her client had no option but to take the case to the court of appeal as the ruling meant that journalism was at risk of being conflated with terrorism. The high court turned down a direct appeal, but Miranda has the right to petition the appeal court judges to hear the case.

The ruling was widely condemned by human rights groups, including Liberty, English Pen, Article 19, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, and the Coalition of Media and Free Speech Organisations, who actively intervened in the case, but Helen Ball, the Metropolitan police's national counter-terrorism co-ordinator,welcomed the ruling. She said Miranda's detention was lawful and undertaken for pressing reasons of national security. "Some commentators have characterised the stop as an attack on journalistic freedom. This was never the case. The judgment is a clear vindication of the officers' conduct, demonstrating that they acted lawfully and in good faith throughout," she said.

The ruling prompted strong criticism from some politicians. Former Conservative shadow home secretary, David Davis, said that when the counter-terrorism law was passed it was never thought that its powers would be used against journalists.

"There can be no suggestion that Mr Miranda was a terrorist or that he was seeking to abet terrorism, and it was for these purposes that this power was given to the politicians and the security agencies," he said.

Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said the ruling showed schedule 7 was too broadly drafted. "We have already made some changes to the law which are about to take effect, but I think there is still more to do," he said.

The Tory MP Julian Smith, a strong critic of the Guardian, said: "This always seemed a bizarre complaint for Mr Miranda to have made since he was transporting such sensitive information about our national security. Let's hope the full truth about the risks to which he and the Guardian continue to expose the UK is now given the full focus it deserves. That is where there is a real legal case to be made."

Rosie Brighouse, Liberty's legal officer, said: "If such a barefaced abuse of power is lawful, then the law must change. Miranda's treatment showed schedule 7 for what it is: a chillingly over-broad power, routinely misused. People are held and interrogated for hours, their property confiscated while they're swabbed for saliva – all without any suspicion that they've done anything wrong."

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On the UK’s Equating of Journalism With Terrorism

As my colleague Ryan Devereaux reports, a lower UK court this morning, as long expected, upheld the legality of the nine-hour detention of my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport last August, even as it acknowledged that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom”. For good measure, the court also refused permission to appeal (though permission can still be granted by the appellate court). David was detained and interrogated under the Terrorism Act of 2000.

The UK Government expressly argued that the release of the Snowden documents (which the free world calls “award-winning journalism“) is actually tantamount to “terrorism”, the same theory now being used by the Egyptian military regime to prosecute Al Jazeera journalists as terrorists. Congratulations to the UK government on the illustrious company it is once again keeping. British officials have also repeatedly threatened criminal prosecution of everyone involved in this reporting, including Guardian journalists and editors.

Equating journalism with terrorism has a long and storied tradition. Indeed, as Jon Schwarz has documented, the U.S. Government has frequently denounced nations for doing exactly this. Just last April, Under Secretary of State Tara Sonenshine dramatically informed the public that many repressive, terrible nations actually “misuse terrorism laws to prosecute and imprison journalists.” When visiting Ethiopia in 2012, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns publicly disclosed that in meetings with that nation’s officials, the United States “express[ed] our concern that the application of anti-terrorism laws can sometimes undermine freedom of expression and independent media.” The same year, the State Department reported that Burundi was prosecuting a journalist under terrorism laws.

It should surprise nobody that the UK is not merely included in, but is one of the leaders of, this group of nations which regularly wages war on basic press freedoms. In the 1970s, British journalist Duncan Campbell was criminally prosecuted for the crime of reporting on the mere existence of the GCHQ, while fellow journalist Mark Hosenball, now of Reuters, was forced to leave the country. The monarchy has no constitutional guarantee of a free press. The UK government routinely threatens newspapers with all sorts of sanctions for national security reporting it dislikes. Its Official Secrets Act makes it incredibly easy to prosecute journalists and others for disclosing anything which political officials want to keep secret. For that reason, it was able to force the Guardian to destroy its own computers containing Snowden material precisely because the paper’s editors knew that British courts would slavishly defer to any requests made by the GCHQ to shut down the paper’s reporting.

That such repressive measures come from British political culture is to be expected. The political elite of that country cling desperately to 17th century feudal traditions. Grown adults who have been elected or appointed to nothing run around with a straight face insisting that they be called “Lord” and “Baroness” and other grandiose hereditary titles of the landed gentry. They bow and curtsey to a “Queen”, who lives in a “palace”, and they call her sons “Prince”. They embrace a wide range of conceits and rituals of a long-ago collapsed empire. The wig-wearing presiding judge who issued this morning’s ruling equating journalism with terrorism is addressed as “Lord Justice Laws”, best known for previously approving the use of evidence to detain people that had been derived from torture at Guantanamo (he can be seen here).

None of this behavior bears any relationship to actual reality: it’s as though the elite political class of an entire nation somehow got stuck in an adolescent medieval fantasy game. But the political principles of monarchy, hereditary privilege, rigid class stratification, and feudal entitlement embedded in all of this play-acting clearly shape the repressive mentality and reverence for state authority which Her Majesty’s Government produces. That journalism disliked by the state can be actually deemed not just a crime but “terrorism” seems a natural by-product of this type of warped elite mindset, as does the fact that much of the British press led the way in demanding that the Guardian’s journalism be criminalized (not unlike how many members of the American media have become the most devoted defenders of the NSA and have taken the lead in demonizing the journalistic transparency brought to that and other government agencies).

As we made clear long ago, the obvious objective of these attacks – to intimidate the journalists working on this story and deter future disclosures – will remain completely unfulfilled. Since David’s detention and the compelled destruction of the Guardian’s computers, there have been a spate of top secret GCHQ documents reported on and published around the world: many of which, to its credit, have been published by the Guardian itself.

They include detailed reports on GCHQ’s attempts to compromise basic encryption methods used to safeguard internet security, the GCHQ’s role in spying on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, the GCHQ’s targeting of UN charities and officials, the GCHQ’s use of “dirty tricks” including “honey traps” and fake victim blog posts, the GCHQ’s attacks on “hactivists”, GCHQ’s surveillance of YouTube and Blogger activity and related activities to covertly influence internet discourse, GCHQ’s surveillance through phone apps such as “Angry Birds”, and – just yesterday – GCHQ’s covert monitoring of visitors to the WikiLeaks website. Needless to say, there is much more GCHQ reporting to do, and nothing about today’s ruling – or anything else the UK Government can do – will stop that.

It is not difficult to apprehend the reason the UK government is so desperate to criminalize this reporting. The GCHQ itself made the reason clear in a once-secret memo previously reported by the Guardian. The British agency “has repeatedly warned it fears a ‘damaging public debate’ on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes.” Among other things, “GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.” In particular, the spying agency feared that disclosures “could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime.” Privacy groups have now commenced such lawsuits against the GCHQ.

In sum, the UK Government wants to stop disclosure of its mass surveillance activities not because it fears terrorism or harm to national security but because it fears public debate, legal challenges and accountability. That is why the UK government considers this journalism to be “terrorism”: because it undermines the interests and power of British political officials, not the safety of the citizenry. I’ve spent years arguing that the word “terrorism” in the hands of western governments has been deprived of all consistent meaning other than “that which challenges our interests”, and I never imagined that we would be gifted with such a perfectly compelling example of this proposition.

As David told The Intercept this morning, he intends to appeal this ruling, and to keep appealing it, until the end if necessary – up to the highest UK court and then to the European Court of Human Rights – not because he cares what the British Government calls him, but because of the press freedoms at stake. But whatever the outcome, the reporting will continue as aggressively as ever no matter how many threats are made by the British (or American) governments to prosecute.

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Unnamed Officials Tell Wall Street Journal They May Keep More Data Because of NSA Lawsuits

Unnamed United States government officials have apparently told the Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency might have to expand its “collection” of Americans’ phone records because people are suing the government to stop what they consider to be intrusive and unconstitutional surveillance.

This idea being floated in a major national newspaper is the first that any lawyer involved in cases against the government have heard this wild argument. Is it some kind of ham-handed attempt to help the NSA retain control of the phone records?

What government lawyers happen to believe, suddenly, is that federal court rules for preserving evidence “related to lawsuits require the agency to stop routinely destroying older phone records.” So, in theory, they should store more data on Americans while lawsuits are pending because they can’t destroy “evidence.”

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed a lawsuit over the phone records collection program under the PATRIOT Act, questioned why the government was just now “considering this move.” EFF has had a lawsuit over NSA surveillance since 2008. “I think they’re looking for any way to throw rocks at the litigation…To the extent this is a serious concern, we should have had this discussion in 2008,” Cohn added.

What Patrick Toomey, an ACLU lawyer involved in also suing the government over the program, said is “it’s difficult to understand why the government would consider taking this position, when the relief we’ve requested in the lawsuit is a purge of our data.”

The EFF lawsuits involves a coalition of organizations, which allege the NSA is violating their First Amendment right of association by “illegally collecting their call records.”

In that case, the government has argued plaintiffs do not have “standing” for the suit. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court considers the collection to be “lawful.” The Court has never decided that collection violates the Fourth Amendment, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to details of “intelligence-gathering activities that could undermine the government’s compelling interest in preventing terrorist attacks.”

The government has also called allegations that calls could be “used to glean the identities” of associations’ members, constituents and others who wish to associate an allegation that is “attributable to misperceptions and conjecture about the government’s activities, but not one fairly traceable to the government’s actual conduct.”

In the ACLU lawsuit, the government has made similar arguments. It has argued, “Even if the government’s conduct implicated a protected Fourth Amendment interest, the bulk collection of telephony metadata would be ‘reasonable’ and permissible in light of the strong national interest in preventing terrorist attacks, and the minimal intrusion on individual privacy.”

A federal judge in December 2013 defended the government’s interest in maintaining secrecy and dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit. The ACLU has now appealed.

Recently, Sen. Rand Paul filed a lawsuit against the government. Lawyer in the case, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, said what the government is suggesting it may do is “just silly.” He even said he thought destroying phone records the government had “without demanding those records in pretrial discovery” would be acceptable to his clients.

Federal judge Richard Leon ruled, also in December, that the program did, in fact, infringe upon privacy and was “likely unconstitutional.” That case was brought by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch. The government has appealed the decision.

Why the government would need to make this argument now is very unclear and seems ill-conceived, but journalist Marcy Wheeler points out that the government has made this argument before to the FISA Court.

EFF has another lawsuit filed in 2008 to “stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government and government officials behind the program accountable. A federal judge actually ruled in July 2013 that the government could not use the “state secrets privilege” to block a challenge to the constitutionality of the program. (It’s what Cohn is probably referring to in her comments to WSJ.)

Wheeler asks, “If the NSA is so cautious about retaining evidence in case of a potential crime, then why did it just blast away the 3,000 files of phone dragnet information they found stashed on a random server, which may or may not have been mingled in with STELLAR WIND data it found in 2012?”

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board described the data and its destruction like this:

. In one incident, NSA technical personnel discovered a technical server with nearly 3,000 files containing call detail records that were more than five years old, but that had not been destroyed in accordance with the applicable retention rules. These files were among those used in connection with a migration of call detail records to a new system. Because a single file may contain more than one call detail record, and because the files were promptly destroyed by agency technical personnel, the NSA could not provide an estimate regarding the volume of calling records that were retained beyond the five-year limit.

This seems like “evidence” the government lawyers would want to protect for lawsuits like the one being brought by EFF. But, as Wheeler notes, this evidence of illegal surveillance is “all gone.”

Perhaps, the appropriate response from EFF and the ACLU is to go to court and express concern that the government has, up until this point, not been preserving evidence of possible illegal or unconstitutional surveillance in this program.

What else have technical personnel discovered and deleted that is relevant to pending lawsuits, which aim to protect Americans’ privacy?

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'NSA luistert nu Duitse ministers af'

De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA luistert de Duitse bondskanselier Angela Merkel niet langer af, maar houdt ambtenaren en politici uit haar omgeving scherper in de gaten. Dat schrijft het Duitse zondagsblad Bild am Sonntag, dat bekendstaat om zijn goede contacten met de Duitse inlichtingendienst.

De Duitsers waren vorig jaar geschokt door de onthulling dat de NSA in Duitsland zeer actief was en zelfs de mobiele telefoon van Merkel afluisterde. President Barack Obama beloofde dat de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst Merkel niet meer zou bespioneren, maar volgens het zondagsblad is nu onder anderen minister Thomas de Maizière van Binnenlandse Zaken een doelwit. Hij is een van de belangrijkste vertrouwelingen van de bondskanselier.

'Wij hebben de opdracht geen verlies aan informatie toe te staan, nu de communicatie van de bondskanselier niet meer direct mag worden gecontroleerd', zei een anonieme NSA-medewerker tegen Bild am Sonntag. Het Duitse ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken wilde niet op het bericht reageren. 'Wij geven nooit commentaar op wat 'anonieme individuen beweren', werd daar gezegd.

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Inside the Mind of James Clapper
^{By Glenn Greenwald}

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I’m going to have a story published later today about a new document, but until then, this new interview with (and profile of) Director of National Intelligence James Clapper by the Daily Beast‘s Eli Lake is worth spending a few moments examining. Last week, Lake published one excerpt of his interview where Clapper admitted that the U.S. Government should have told the American people that the NSA was collecting their communications records: as pure a vindication of Edward Snowden’s choice as it gets, for obvious reasons. But there are several new, noteworthy revelations from this morning’s article:

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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

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One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

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Attorney for Edward Snowden Interrogated at U.K. Airport, Placed on "Inhibited Persons List"

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Four journalists who revealed the National Security Agency’s vast web of spying have been awarded the 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post were among the winners announced on Sunday. Even as the journalists who broke the stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks were awarded one of journalism’s highest honors, a lawyer who represents Snowden was recently detained while going through customs at London’s Heathrow Airport. Jesselyn Radack joins us today to tell her story. Radack says she was subjected to "very hostile questioning" about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an "inhibited persons list," a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers. Radack is just one of a growing number of people who are being stopped, harassed and interrogated for their work around Snowden, WikiLeaks and National Security Agency documents. Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower support organization.

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Op dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:25 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:
Wie hebben er een kopie / al die bestanden van Snowden nu dan? En waarom kwakken ze die hele mik niet gewoon online?

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Op dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:39 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:

[..]

Het gaat om duizenden bestanden, dan kunnen andere mensen daar toch ook duiding aan geven. Heb je niet alleen dat handjevol journalisten voor nodig die constant worden lastiggevallen door GCHQ zelf.

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Wat is er precies erg aan dat instanties zich dieper in de ellende liegen?

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Op dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:47 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:

[..]

Oh op die fiets inderdaad. Nu snap ik dat 2e inderdaad ook, dat las ik anders.

Maar GCHQ hebben toch al eens ingevallen bij één van die nieuwsbedrijven en daar allerlei bestanden geconfisqueerd? Dan weten ze misschien ondertussen toch ook wel wat ze kunnen verwachten lijkt me.

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Why is this story being removed from all the popular subs over and over by mods?

Message the admins about the censorship of this article by /r/news and /r/worldnews mods. They have never seemed to care about this in the past but if enough users message them it will hopefully at least provoke a response of some kind. Something needs to be done about this or this site needs to be abandoned as a platform for legitimate political discourse.

Important Update: So, it turns out that the /r/news mod /u/BipolarBear0 who has been deleting all the instances of this story has previously been caught running a voting brigade to get anti-Semitic content upvoted on /r/conspiracy to discredit the sub. A fact which he admitted to me in another thread just a few minutes ago (he claims he was doing an "experiment"...) . This guy needs to be banned from the site.

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This was all over the front page around 4am this morning. came back and really had to dig to find any mention of this story.

kind of alarming.

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GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide

• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.

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A Key NSA Overseer's Alarming Dismissal of Surveillance Critics

The NSA's inspector general mischaracterized Edward Snowden's critique of the agency in remarks at Georgetown.

The National Security Agency's overseers have a spotty-at-best post-9/11 track record. The NSA carried out an illegal program of warrantless wiretapping during the Bush Administration. Even after the President's Surveillance Program was reformed, the agency built a surveillance dragnet that collected information on the private communications of millions of totally innocent Americans, a dramatic change in approach carried out without popular input or consent. And according to the FISA-court judges charged with overseeing the NSA—the very people who signed off on the phone dragnet, among other things—the agency has violated the Fourth Amendment and the law on at least thousands of occasions.

Some of those violations affected millions of people.

As well, insufficient operational security recently resulted in the theft of a still unknown number of highly classified documents by an employee of an NSA subcontractor. Civil libertarians and national-security statists alike have reason to be upset.

For all of these reasons, it must be a tough time to be George Ellard, the NSA's inspector general. The entity that he heads declares itself "the independent agent for individual and organizational integrity" within the NSA. "Through professional inspections, audits, and investigations," its website adds, "we work to ensure that the Agency respects Constitutional rights, obeys laws and regulations, treats its employees and affiliates fairly, and uses public resources wisely."

Since taking his post in 2007, Ellard has scarcely made a public statement. This week, however, he participated in a conference at Georgetown, and while efforts were reportedly made to keep his press exposure to a minimum, his remarks have been reported.

They're interesting—and do not inspire confidence. We begin with the account provided by Kevin Gosztola:

. Ellard was asked what he would have done if Snowden had come to him with complaints. Had this happened, Ellard says would have said something like, "Hey, listen, fifteen federal judges have certified this program is okay." (He was referring to the NSA phone records collection program.) "I would also have an independent obligation to assess the constitutionality of that law," Ellard stated. "Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do."

Even on their own, these comments are strange. Many aspects of the Section 215 phone dragnet are now public. Edward Snowden is on record with specific objections to them. The same goes for lots of other NSA initiatives: As they've been publicly fleshed out, Snowden has articulated why he believes the public ought to know about them. If Ellard understands what has transpired since last June, why is he speaking as if Snowden's leaks could've been averted if his supposed "misperceptions" had been corrected? That possibility isn't consistent with the facts. Knowing their actual nature, Snowden still thinks the programs should be public.

Misunderstanding Snowden so completely is strange. A subsequent statement is worrisome. It comes via Politico:

. “Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

. And if Snowden wasn’t satisfied, Ellard said the NSA would have then allowed him to speak to the House and Senate intelligence committees. ”Given the reaction, I think somewhat feigned, of some members of that committee, he’d have found a welcoming audience,” Ellard said in a reference to outspoken NSA critics on the panel, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.).

It is difficult to know exactly what this means, but it certainly appears as if the inspector general of the NSA is questioning whether the Senate Intelligence Committee members expressing alarm at surveillance practices are actually earnest.

The Politico article continues:

. “Whether in the end he’d have been satisfied, I don’t know,” Ellard added. “But allowing people who have taken an oath to protect the constitution, to protect these national security interest, simply to violate or break that oath, is unacceptable.”

It's worth mentioning that Snowden never took an oath to protect national-security interests. As a CIA employee, he did take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Many Americans, myself included, believe that Snowden upheld his oath when he alerted the public to mass surveillance, Fourth Amendment violations, and thousands of instances of NSA lawbreaking. Other Americans believe that he violated his oath by leaking classified information to the press.