The Guardian walks back claims of direct NSA access to servers of tech companies
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. This story made it 1/3rd up the front page; stories based on the most extreme possible interpretation of what seems to be Greenwald's own extreme interpretation of a slide deck covered the entire front page for days. Remember when "direct access" meant Palantir was a third party doing the actual collection? Just look at their name! Remember when all of Facebook and Google and Yahoo's denials looked "suspiciously similar"?Someone on Twitter (sorry) said that Google and Facebook "looked like angels" compared to Verizon. That sounds about right to me, too. But what incentive do they have to do that when their reward is conspiracy-theoretic nonsense about how NSA has their TLS keys and 3rd party contractors are used to keep them from "lying" when they say NSA has no direct access?