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NSA Wants To Reveal Its Secrets To Prevent Snowden From Revealing Them First

Posted by samzenpus on from the coming-clean dept.

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.'"

10 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Psyops at its finest. by starworks5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Psyops at its finest. by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly.

      I've been posting this prediction all along.

      They will own it in public statements, (or at least they will own part of it), and they will tell you to get over it. They will then go on to even bigger excesses and violations. They will attempt to have laws passed making encryption a crime (again).

      You haven't seen anything yet.

      --
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    2. Re:Psyops at its finest. by Mitreya · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      NSA will also probably claim that they were going to release/review this material anyway, and Snowden just forced them to do it too early (thus jeopardizing security, etc, etc.)

      I found it fascinating when Obama made these claims -- that he was going to review and fix the entire NSA program any day now and that Snowden just forced him to do it in a rush instead of carefully.

    3. Re:Psyops at its finest. by boorack · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Given their record of factuality in their official statements this whole bruhaha about "openess" it is more likely to be lie. Given number of transgressions and laws broken by NSA we've seen in Snowden documents, they just can't release such things, so it is lie for sure. They only thing they propably want to achieve by this manipulation is to make whistleblowers' life harder. After all, despite of all bullshit and propaganda in corporate media citizenry is now behind Snowden. What they want is propably to have some leverage to explain to public that future whistleblowers' revelations are 'redundant', so they'll have public consent to prosecute or exterminate future whistleblowers and also journalists. This corresponds pretty well with latest law pushed by Feinstein that legalizes all NSA transgressions we've seen in latest months and mandates harsh penalties for both whistleblowers leaking inconvenient materials and journalists publishing such revelations. In short, Obama regime is now busy reinforcing its grip on what public should and shouldn't know.

    4. Re:Psyops at its finest. by Seumas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We want to reveal the lie before Snowden reveals the truth.

  2. Credibility? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Would anyone actually believe anything the NSA has to say at this point?

  3. Openness by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Openness by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      .the more open the government is about its activities, the better.

      Openness is good, yes. But what the NSA will release will be misdirection, dissembling, disingenuousness and lies.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  4. Re:Round 1: Fight by Zemran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nah, they will do a Assange on him but with 10 year girls making the accusations this time and no one will ever be able to discuss what he said again. People will just talk about the accusation instead of the issue. If you look at the accusations they are so stupid but it whitewashed the whole Wikileaks issue. Same with Strauss Khan...

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  5. Is Snowden any less than a patriot? by grasshoppa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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