Senior U.S. officials continue to mislead the public about NSA surveillance. As the Washington Post reported today, "details that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior U.S. officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false." This biggest example is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's whopper to Congress. He denied that the NSA collects information on Americans, despite the fact that the NSA has a database of at least 5 years of information on the phone numbers dialed by every American, that they also collected internet traffic data to, from and between Americans, at least until 2011, and that the NSA routinely collects US person's communications in the course of targeting foreigners overseas.
Figuring out the whoppers is hard if you aren't familiar with the tortured way in which national security officials use language. On Robert Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence continued the tradition of reassuring through misleading statements. He was on a panel at the Newseum on June 26th. Here are my annotations of his opening comments.