How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say

Slate ^ | July 31 2013 | Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman

[foundedonpurpose]

How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say 1.9k 703 A lexicon for understanding the words U.S. intelligence officials use to mislead the public. By Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies before the House Select Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on April 11, 2013. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies before the House Select Intelligence Committee in Washington, D.C., on April 11, 2013.

Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say.

Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how long—and it’s been doing this for seven years. After the call-tracking program was exposed, few people thought twice about attaching the label “surveillance” to it. Government officials, though, have rejected the term

[foundedonpurpose]

Does it come down to their lips moving?

[henkster]

Interesting to see this in Slate. You’d think the liberals could connect the dots some time. A government that is big enought to spy on you is big enough to squash you like a bug. Liberals ought to know this. Maybe they do. Maybe it’s what they really want. They should not be heard to complain when maybe they find out they, too, are mere bugs.

[kimtom]

“...should not be heard to complain when maybe they find out they,...”

they hope to be the ones “left” when clean up time comes.

Kind of like the turncoat Jews in concentration camps did to fellow prisoners.....