Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal
Surely this being HN I will be down-voted terribly for this. But I am not at all convinced that Snowden&#x27;s account is 100% to be trusted in this.<p>The article in question spends an exceptionally long time examining NSA&#x2F;DoJ decision making in responding to Snowden&#x27;s claims that:<p>&gt; . &quot;I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than 10 distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them.&quot;<p>The article provides no evidence that this was true. Or that US Officials&#x27; rejection of this position was contrary to the facts. In fact a different reporter might argue that the lack of such evidence given the new documentation provided supports the opposite conclusion.<p>&gt; The NSA portrayed it as an innocuous question that elicited a direct response when it released the email in 2014.<p>It may not be an entirely innocuous issue, but it&#x27;s certainly not equivalent to <i>raising</i> concerns. To suggest the later requires perfect ignorance of how bueracracy works. No one is going to look for &#x27;implicit intent&#x27; in you raising a question and escalate it to something more than that. They cc&#x27;ed relevant experts to provide an answer and that&#x27;s really the best you should expect from a large organization. Unless you explicitly report a complaint, nobody is going to go around knocking on the higher ups doors for you.<p>Another point that I would like to raise that hasn&#x27;t been mentioned is Snowden&#x27;s account of his career at the CIA. According to him he was quite senior.<p>&gt; In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA&#x27;s information-sharing office. [0]<p>In this article we clearly see he signs ( when answering a question about file types) as:<p>&gt; Ed Snowden,
System Administrator<p>I&#x27;m not bringing these up as a proponent of NSA surveillance, but I do think it is important to be critical in this - and I&#x27;m no more convinced of Edward Snowden as a witness than before I started reading this.<p>Particularly I think the article is disingenuously written (Clickbait Title) in following a very lengthy narrative ( to build up suspense? ) without providing much in the way of strong evidence; one expects to finally find it at the end, but curiously finds nothing. If they told me at the start &quot;no emails which would significantly alter the known facts were disclosed&quot; - I could have saved 30 minutes.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edward_Snowden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edward_Snowden</a> 
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