NSA Responses to Snooping Revelations Skirt Edges of Outright Lying

Careful parsing is required

The Wall Street Journal published an important investigation last week, reporting that the National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to many key telecommunications switches around the country and "has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans." Notably, NSA officials repeatedly refused to talk about this story on their conference call with reporters the next day. Instead the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA released a statement about the story later that evening.

If you read the statement quickly, it seems like the NSA is disputing the WSJ story. But on careful reading, they actually do not deny any of it. As we've shown before, often you have to carefully parse NSA statements to root out deception and misinformation, and this statement is no different. They've tried to deflect an accurate story with their same old word games.