When the NSA insists they aren’t targeting Americans with their broad surveillance, the choice of language is deliberate and necessary: the law actually forbids them from doing so, as do the court orders.
That doesn’t mean they don’t target us, of course, it just means they need to find a loophole. Today we learned one of those loopholes is to collect literally all emails and other text-based messages that involve a foreigner, figuring that if pressed they can insist the foreigner, not the Americans were the “target.”
Stretching the credibility of this argument to the breaking point, the NSA reportedly also collects communication between Americans in which “information linked to foreigners” is cited, arguing that those conversations also technically involve the foreigner since he’s being mentioned.
NSA officials, as usual, are declining specific comment on the question of what they’re doing with Americans’ data, insisting only that what they are doing is “lawful” and that they are only collecting data that the FISA orders allow them to collect.
While the administration continues to insist they aren’t spying on Americans, the claim is increasingly boiling down to them deliberately and knowingly spying on Americans, but only when they have some remotely plausible excuse.
That was the job of Nastasi, the Gestapo, the Mossad, the M5, CIA, the SAPO and all others, NSA stands for national Security Agencies so as others.
The approval rating of the word "lawful" is rapidly declining towards the same single digits as the body that turns out our laws.
They make only laws there is no need to break since everything they do it is "legal.".
That is what they call themselves, "lawmakers"
Anyone outside the loop is in a lose-lose situation but that is the new law.
100% for the i%ers.
As the curtain is pulled open and the machinations exposed, we should not feel that we are now seeing all that they are doing…I'm sure that what we are seeing are only the edges of the Empire. My desire is for the American people to finally see, while their attention is focused forward, what it is the USG does to cause the ill feelings toward our nation. If the American people are made aware of how evil and duplicitous our governments foreign policy is perhaps we'll have the impetus to change it.
i am with you. i just hope that in this information age it doesn't take thousands of years like it took for Rome and others.
nsa: FLUKE YOU..
We should call it what it really is "Weasel Speak" because it has nothing to do with adherence to the law, but some way of "weaseling" the information, Time to go back to snail mail its so much harder if you actually have to OPEN each piece of mail and read it to get to its contents!