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NSA Wants To Reveal Its Secrets To Prevent Snowden From Revealing Them First
binarstu writes "According to a recent report by Tom Gjelten of NPR, 'NSA officials are bracing for more surveillance disclosures from the documents taken by former contractor Edward Snowden — and they want to get out in front of the story. ... With respect to other information held by Snowden and his allies but not yet publicized, the NSA is now considering a proactive release of some of the less sensitive material, to better manage the debate over its surveillance program.'"
When you get to frame the issue the way you want, you can try to convince the people that it was for their own good. Snowden may likely say show that it was used abused in practice, and the NSA likely wants to say that they prevented a suspected domestic terrorist.
Snowden Wins.
Spent All My Mod Points
Would anyone actually believe anything the NSA has to say at this point?
Whether government openness happens because of a leaker, or it happens because of fear of leakers, or because it believes it's the right thing to do...the more open the government is about its activities, the better.
Either the information is too sensitive for the public to know, or it isn't. If it isn't, then it should have been public to begin with.
Since they are releasing trivial information about themselves, how about this:
What role did the NSA have in the piece of shit hatchet job movie on wikileaks that came out recently?
If reality was anything like it people would have just told Assange to fuck off and wikileaks would never have happened. All the movie character has is dance moves and insomnia.
What really scares me isn't that the Americans themselves don't seem to care a lot. Europe has been a prime target of all this and even there the reaction is "meh". How many USA ambassadors have been summoned to explain and apologize? The USA has treated their allies worse than most of Europe would treat their enemies and still nothing came of this. It turns out Europe isn't that different after all....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
After all the material that's been leaked by Snowden, is there any question that the man is a patriot?
So what does that make our government?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Funny thing about "oversight". On the one hand it means some mechanism to keep tabs on some process making sure it doesn't run amok. On the other hand it also means to neglect something.
Seems to me the NSA oversight is more like the latter, except not by accident.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
A limited hangout, or partial hangout, is a public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in order to prevent a greater exposure of more important details.
[sarcasm] By lucky coincidence [/sarcasm] the NSA are now allowed to go direct to the public with their message (see "'Anti-Propaganda' Ban Repealed... Direct Broadcasting at American Citizens"), not that private mass media was not on their side to begin with anyway.
When journalists get around later to releasing Snowdens whistleblower material as a "full hangout" truth, most mass media will then shout LALALA OLD NEWS nothing to see here as loud as they can to drown it out. You might even see it being marked as a dupe here on /.
In both countries the governments own the media. More appropriately, the same people controlling the governments control the media. Neither place has had any type of reform, just discussions of reform which are being drowned out by other noise in the media.
To the people pulling the strings, it's simply a waiting game. As we saw with Benghazi, Fast and Furious, etc.. nobody has been held accountable and the public is no longer thinking about those items. I have little confidence that enough people are awake to change that, and the same thing is being played against the anti-surveillance crowd. Unless we can change the messages from the media, nothing will change. Word of mouth is something that works, but is also very taxing on the people that are awake.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.