Predictably, the new “bombshell” article about the National Security Agency, co-authored by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, is loaded with gaping holes and irresponsible reporting, and yet, once again, nearly every major publication uncritically re-posted it practically verbatim. The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Slashdot, The Daily Beast and Salon.com, to name a few, repeated exactly what Greenwald and pro-Snowden filmmaker Laura Poitras published in The Guardian Wednesday morning.
But if the editors of these publications had compared the claims being made with the actual leaked document itself, they would’ve discovered a laundry list of serious problems with the agenda-driven angle of the original article.
The post is titled “NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel” (83 web bugs), based upon one of 56,000 documents stolen from NSA by defector Edward Snowden. This newly released document allegedly proves that NSA has been “routinely sharing” raw signals intelligence (SIGINT) with Israel’s NSA counterpart, the Israeli Sigint National Unit (ISNU), including content and metadata collected from American citizens. Simply put, according to Greenwald, NSA, in an obvious breach of the Fourth Amendment, is sharing your personal communications with a foreign government without processing it through “minimization” procedures (a process in which inadvertently collected data from U.S. persons is encrypted, anonymized and destroyed).
As with all of these stories, the intended takeaway is that NSA is secretly and wantonly violating your privacy rights… [CONTINUE READING]