A blitz of new articles were posted on Thurday based upon the thumbdrive goodie bag filled with top secret documents stolen from the government by former NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden, who defected to Russia back in June. The articles covered two separate stories.
First, the new alliance of The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica published articles about an NSA operation code named BULLRUN, and its GCHQ counterpart MANASSAS. (We’ll nickname this publishing alliance “Team Guardian” for brevity’s sake.) The ProPublica and The Times articles were essentially the same, while The Guardian‘s version of the story, co-authored by Snowden’s media flack Glenn Greenwald, was unique (more on its uniqueness presently). Simultaneously, The Washington Post‘s Barton Gellman covered a top secret NSA document titled “Threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” how NSA is surveilling al-Qaeda engineers who are attempting to disable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “predator drones”).
There are so many problems with these posts, some worse than others, so rather than cover everything narrative-style, here are the bullet points… [CONTINUE READING]