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" Over the weekend, The Washington Post produced yet another story birthed by the revelations of Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage. As is customary in such things, the story immediately was drowned out by usual Glenn Greenwald: Threat Or Menace? arias from most of the usual suspects. (&amp;quot;Inadvertent&amp;quot; apparently has a shiny new meaning in this context.) However, the story itself remains fairly significant. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or &amp;quot;minimized,&amp;quot; more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans&amp;#039; privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents...Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless. I am sure that all of these useless-but-strangely-retained conversations were never passed around for shits-and-giggles by the folks in the cubicles. I&amp;#039;m sure that the high priests of the surveillance state never would stoop to profane the temple in such a skeevy fashion. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias. One of the prime arguments from the people who Know The Way The World Works is that we all should have assumed this was going on anyway, and, anyway, Target has your information, too, y&amp;#039;know? Look, we have a gigantic surveillance state now, one that was created largely beyond the reach of public debate, and anything that shows me how that surveillance state, the one that was created on my dime, works is valuable information. I also am tired of being lied to. Ever since Snowden took off with his flash drive, the all-too-human, but curiously error-prone, heroes of our intelligence community have maintained that Snowden did not have access to actual intelligence intercepts. As hard as it is to believe at this point, they appear to have been dealing in barefaced non-facts again. Kevin Drum does due diligence and provides the NSA&amp;#039;s latest bullshit alibi. Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities. &amp;quot;We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic...&amp;quot; Litt said. &amp;quot;Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.&amp;quot; There is absolutely no reason to believe anything these people say any more. Any story that assumes the NSA is telling the truth is prima facie flawed. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21112/the-snowden-effect-and-more-lies/>