Nobody is listening to your telephone calls...Follow

Thing to do, in my mind at least, is to separate what he actually provided documented proof of from what he's claiming goes on. Since with the former you have some reason to believe it, the latter you have no way to verify.

How much information does the government give 3rd parties access to anyway? I imagine there's a point you need outside expertise, but I can't imagine you'd reveal everything you know to the lowest bidder (as I write that part of me guesses it's no-bid...).

My understanding is that he hasn't actually provided documented proof of anything. He's just made wild broad claims about the NSA (and by extension himself) being able to do a bunch of bad things and specifically speaks of gathering phone records. Um... Which is low hanging fruit given that pretty much everyone had already assumed that the NSA does that. So nothing really. So far, his shocking claims could have been made by anyone at all with zero access to any actually intelligence data or procedures.



I actually suspect his job was to mop the floors. He's a nobody. But he does make a great distraction though.

Have you read any Taleb (black swan, antifragile)? Cause you pretty much summed up his thesis there. Reading antifragile right now, I am really enjoying it.

Does the idea of a bunch of old people making hideous powerpoints really seem that far fetched? I mean, I doubt they are going to hand info around just to improve the graphic design.

Edited, Jun 14th 2013 4:23pm by Olorinus

For those curious, I was specifically talking about the last slide, but all of them are ridiculous for a number of reasons. They look like some ignorant conspiracy theorists idea of what secret documents detailing some nefarious scheme would look like. While I suppose it's possible that the NSA is just that silly about how it disseminates information about its super secret programs to new employees, it seems more likely that Snowden and/or Greenwald are engaged in a hoax.

Or the whole thing is a honeypot. Suppose that's a possibility too. Snowden may just have spectacularly failed his entrance exam.

For the record, Back when SIVAM was still a secret program, it had much ******** internal presentation materials. I have no earthly idea how gbaji concocted this "poor presentation means non-govt" idea.

No one would ever misuse classified data like that to settle personal grudges or to consolidate power.

Not even Hoover would be that bold.

Yeah, has he never seen a government website in his life?

Informal in house materials often get worse the higher up the chain you go, because the people making them are older.

Every Monday morning I'm welcomed back to work with a recruitment numbers power point presentation for local, state, region, etc etc and it is, without a doubt, the biggest reason why military recruiters commit suicide.

That's kinda the point though. Nobody uses this method of information transfer where "interesting useful work happens". The kind of presentation those slides appear to convey is that of a marketing or "project progress" presentation (you're trying to impress someone with what you're doing basically). I just find it amazingly strange that a secret (frankly any) organization would create slides like that revealing in an almost backhanded (and conspiracy theorists wet dream) way how they obtain the data they're analyzing to random new employees consulting with them.

What possible training purpose can that serve? And if it's marketing, who are they marketing *to*? It makes zero sense. Hell, when I do presentations for an engineering group, I focus on the parts of whatever process is in place that actually affects them. So when I tell them about some new software program we want them to use for doing some part of their job, I don't include background information about how we developed the software, what milestones we hit along the way, or what vendors were involved. I present the information they need to know to use the program.

Unless Snowden's job was to go out to companies like google and recruit them into providing data access to the NSA, there's no value to including any of the stuff on those slides as part of any training he'd have received. That's what I find odd about those slides. They just dont fit with regard to the content itself. You only create slides like that if you're intentionally highlighting to someone (or group of someones) how you're getting that data, and how your project to obtain said data has grown over time. But who would your target audience for such a thing be? Not some new guy you just hired, right? So what? Members of the intelligence committees in congress? Even that is a stretch (although I could almost see it). Some political officers within NSA itself? Maybe.

It's just too perfectly designed to reveal that the NSA is doing these "bad things" that it's hard to think of any reason for anyone to have constructed such slides unless their purpose was specifically to reveal those things, not to someone already working inside and with appropriate clearance, but to a public which would be alarmed at the revelation. Which is why I'm having a hard time believing that these are legitimate. The apparent target audience of such a presentation is the public. So why would anyone actually create them in the first place?

Edited, Jun 17th 2013 3:30pm by gbaji

Given that at least the slides we've seen so far don't contain any information at all about what to do *with* the information, but has an orgy of damning information about where it comes from, that seems somewhat absurd. The guys paring down the data don't need to know where it comes from, or how it was obtained. So why put that on a slide as part of their training?



Incomplete reporting of what though? I mean, unless the sole purpose of the document is to maximize the number of people who know that you're secretly doing something you've kinda been trying not to reveal directly for over a decade, there's no reason to do this. While I wont absolutely rule out the possibility of complete incompetence on the part of the NSA at doing what is pretty much the only thing it does (this is government, after all), the whole thing just looks like a mock up of what someone would want to see if they were looking for "proof" of some wrongdoing. It's just way too pat. If you were asking me to come up with a document to ensure that anyone reading it couldn't fail to realize that it spelled out how the NSA was siphoning data about everyone, I'm still not sure I could come up with something this blatant (I'm not a graphical design guy after all). It's just "hit you over the head" obvious. It's like someone thought "Hey. Folks reading this might not get that this list of company names are places that store data about them, so lets make sure to plaster the logos on the pages too!".


Too obvious. Over the top obvious.

What about the other documents? Like this one. There's like a half dozen different documents he leaked or something? Finding links to these things hasn't been easy.

Edited, Jun 19th 2013 8:58am by someproteinguy