The Guardian Publishes Another Deliberately Shocking Yet Self-Debunking NSA Article
On Friday, President Obama held a televised press conference about proposed reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). While discussing leaks by former Booz Allen Hamilton analyst Edward Snowden, the president said, “Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate, but not always fully informed way.”
“Not always fully informed” is a bit of an understatement.
Earlier that day, I posted an article documenting the top ten most inaccurate and exaggerated claims made by agenda-journalists covering the Edward Snowden NSA beat. I specifically excluded articles that are “self-debunking” because the list probably would’ve doubled in length. Self-debunking occurs when the central claim of an NSA article is undermined deep within the article itself. It’s become a bit of a game to click over to a new NSA bombshell post and then to count how many paragraphs before the headline and lede are contradicted by a brief mention of actual policy, usually involving a note about the requirement for individual warrants.
But a new NSA bombshell article in The Guardian, posted on Friday and written by James Ball and Spencer Ackerman about a secret FISA Amendments Act Section 702 glossary document (702 authorized the PRISM system), didn’t bury the self-debunking at all. This time, it happened before the lede paragraph.
The article’s sensationalistic headline makes it appear as if the entire NSA story has reached new levels of unconstitutional egregiousness: “NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls.” And the subheadline: “Exclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans’ communications.”
The keyword here was “permission.” Someone, Ackerman and Ball wrote, has secretly granted authorization to NSA analysts to read emails and listen to phone calls belonging to U.S. persons — without warrants! Analysts apparently have “permission” to do this.
More at: http://thedailybanter.com/2013/08/shocker-the-guardian-publishes-another-sensational-yet-self-debunking-nsa-article/
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