I think this is going to be really pushed as a meme to discredit both Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald over the next couple of days. It is somewhat frightening and it is being pushed by the usual suspects such as Andrew Sullivan (he of the fifth columnists) but also by people I wouldn't suspect and should have credibility among the left such as Kevin Drum and Rick Pearlstein.
Let me start by saying that I do not consider Edward Snowden a hero. I respect his decision to go public with information he thought would be harmful to his society. I take his motivations at face value until proven otherwise. I have a love/hate relationship with Glenn Greenwald, who is sometimes brilliant and sometimes annoying as hell.
The issue has to do with the claim the NSA had direct access to servers of large communications companies, that this claim was somehow wrong or excessive and therefore calls into question some of their other claims. It is important to notice who is claimed as responsible and who is not. The story is below the fold.
I will lay out the story as I have experienced it this morning. I read thisKevin Drum post questioning Snowden, it seemed to me initially on the issue of the NSA having "direct access" to servers. This may have been bad writing or ignorance on Drum's part or my own misreading, but I was initially confused. I have done some research on the Internet and had always thought direct access a very basic term meaning unmediated access (you could retrieve information directly from a site), basically the kernel concept of the world wide web. I thought maybe the meaning had changed and Google "Direct access and the Internet" (something Drum probably should have done.)
At the type of the retrieval list was this post from Boing Boing Notice a couple of things. First, it is incredibly well written and precise, explaining the exact issue. Second, the issue was with the Washington Post story not what Greenwald wrote. It was the Washington Post that got it wrong (there are never any direct quotes from Greenwald or Snowden anywhere in this story. Third and most important, this issue was vetted and explained by the tech community about a week ago. There was no secrecy to this and no attempt to hide anything. And there is nothing in here to suggest that Snowden or Greenwald said anything wrong, simply that people who did not understand the technology had misunderstood a bit.
Confused, because all this had been hashed out a week ago, I went back to try and understand what Drum was actually talking about. He took me to this cryptic Andrew Sullivan post, which then took me to this Bob Cesca post which completely misunderstands or misuses the meaning of direct access (see boing boing link above) and this Ricke Pearlstein post which claims Greenwald botched the direct access issue. Again there are no direct quotes from Greenwald and the type of explanation offered by boing boing is non-existent. Instead Pearlstein only offers quotes from Karl Foger who he claims is an Open Source guru which
1. Is highly debatable. I have done a lot of research into Open Source and have never seen his name mentioned
and
2. Doesn't matter anyway because this issue has absolutely nothing to do with the Open Source movement other than Open Source people would probably be interested.
What the hell was Pearlstein thinking?
So I followed to the Karl Fogel (Open Source guru) post. And he is quoting yet another post by somebody name Mark Jaquith claiming
Are online service companies giving the government fully automated access to their data, without any opportunity for review or intervention by company lawyers?
Is the central question. Except Snowden and especially Greenwald never seemed to say this.
So here is Mark Jasquith's post, essentially copying the boing boing post a day later but with far more hysteria and couched to make Greenwald look as bad as possible.
That's the story as I have figured it out. It is an ugly, ignorant development of a meme that protects the powerful
8:32 AM PT: There has also been a misrepresentation suggesting the Guardian disavowed Greenwald's story. This is not right I think. Here is what the Guardian wrote as an embedded paragraph that people are claiming is a disavowal
The Guardian understands that the NSA approached those companies and asked them to enable a "dropbox" system whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server out to an NSA-owned system. That has allowed the companies to deny that there is "direct or indirect" NSA access, to deny that there is a "back door" to their systems, and that they only comply with "legal" requests – while not explaining the scope of that access.