NSA spokesmen told to just say "9/11" to deflect criticism

boing
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How about saying “Howard Stern” instead?

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That was more than a decade ago. Also this:
Claim on “Attacks Thwarted” by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence
“We’ve heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted” by the two programs, Leahy told Alexander at the Judiciary Committee hearing this month. “That’s plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements. These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted. The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs.”

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Just like the NSA, trying to use the tragedy of John Ritter’s death to distract us!

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Brilliant! I’m going to use the same tactic.

“Honey, I’d rather explain why I didn’t take out the trash than have to explain another 9/11.”

“Kids, I’d rather explain why you have to go to bed early than have to explain another 9/11.”

I think the key is to say it in bold print.

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The rejoinder to this kind of chop logic is obvious: they had the information they needed to prevent 9/11, and they had it by conventional means, but the info did not get to where it needed to be due to bureaucratic inertia and infighting. So their solution is add more bureaucracy (in the form of ONI and DHS) and gather more (utterly irrelevant) information (which means adding even further layers of bureaucracy)? This is getting into serious face-palm territory…

Nope. The purpose of this surveillance is threefold:

  1. to expand the bureaucracy, i.e., bureaucratic empire building;
  2. to enrich the private companies to whom the government is outsourcing work (note Clapper’s ties to Booz Allen and SRA);
  3. to Hoover (as in “J. Edgar”) personal information so as to be able to quell dissent, and subvert the political and judicial processes in order to serve the requirements of items 1 and 2. For this, and only this, all that lovely excess of data isn’t irrelevant.
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I can’t quite decide whether to indulge anybody who makes this claim with a temperate, reasoned, analysis of what a shit job panopticon-surveillance has actually done in terms of keeping us safe(regardless of whether it’s worth the costs or not), or whether a “Listening to you reminds me that Al-Quaeda really should have chosen your sinister cube as a crash site.” is acceptable under the circumstances.

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Soooo, the NSA get all their ideas from Family Guy?

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Perhaps the people who don’t have a problem with building a surveillance state in the land of the free, home of the brave, under god, and all that good stuff… perhaps these people who lie about thwarting imaginary programs… perhaps these people who worked hand in hand with the Bush administration to fabricate evidence of WMDs so that they could start a useless war… when these people say “we’d like to prevent another 9/11”… perhaps what they mean is “don’t make us get nasty”

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Needs more flags and symbols of patriotic fervor.

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Ah, ha! Not typically impressed with Family Guy, but that was pretty funny.

However, the tactic seems to be failing for the NSA, polls are showing voters as overwhelmingly rejecting the NSA activities.

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Nonsense! Don’t you remember? The creation of the DHS ended bureaucratic inertia and infighting back in 2002.

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Is Rudy Guilliani their new media advisor?

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Because nothing ends bureaucratic intertia and infighting more effectively than creating a larger bureaucracy!

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Would the party of small government create a bureaucracy? I think not! The DHS is a paragon of efficiency and valor by design!

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Could it be, Cory used ‘Bumblef*ck’ in the wrong headline?

“I’d rather have to explain another 9/11 than this bumblef*ck list of talking points.”

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I watched some of the congressional hearings with the NSA, and came away thinking that the guys running that show are very smart and very sneaky. They masterfully deflect from the most egregious unconstitutional activity, to something that can be framed as constitutional. They spend their words describing how tough the FISA court makes it for them to get at US citizens data. They conveniently ignore the fact that they are trying to get at data that was collected without a warrant to begin with. They briefly mention ‘hinting’ from data to guide who’s data to subpoena, then talk at length about the type of very bad people they are going after, without really mentioning that these ‘hints’ are unreasonable search. The whole thing was a disgusting show. A couple of committee members asked about getting notified when the FISA court approves high profile targets, but none of them really seemed interested in anything more than token bureaucratic tweaks to what the NSA is doing.

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9u11iani! PRESIDENT!

I’d rather have an additional 1.78 “9-11” magnitude incidents, that live under the perpetual pall of of a universal-surveillance enabled police state.

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Translation: “Sure, we’ll come and lie to your face, and you will garner some sympathy from your constituency and I can look a little foolish in public. Then we can wait for it to blow over and get back to work. Because you know and I know that you don’t have any power over me and that is just the way it is.”

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Are these guys that dumb that they have to be reminded that “‘9/11’ is the new root password to the Constitution, in case ‘national security’ doesn’t work for you”?

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