Greenwald’s new ‘bombshell’ article about the NSA essentially details how the NSA collected email metadata beginning shortly after 9/11.
The screamer headline: “NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama.”
We already knew about this program. Most recently, Eichenwald has been writing about it for the last week or so.
But here’s the most revealing part of Greenwald’s article: the program was stopped by the Obama administration in 2011. As Charles Johnson tweeted yesterday, the article’s headline could actually be “Obama discontinued NSA email program started under Bush.”
Furthermore, Greenwald wrote: “It did not include the content of emails.” The NSA only collected metadata, authorized by bulk FISA court warrants. The program, like everything else, sought overseas communications, and those communications might have inadvertently included some data from US persons connected with the overseas emails. And, again, reminder: any data from US persons that’s inadvertently collected is anonymized, encrypted and destroyed. It’s only decrypted with an individual warrant.
What’s continuously astonishing to me is that corporation-hating liberals are freaked out about privacy yet appear to be totally fine with evil corporations collecting and storing all of this data — including content, which isn’t stored by the government.
Once again, I still don’t see any evidence of wrongdoing or abuse-of-power here.