A Guide to the Deceptions, Misinformation, Word Games Used to Mislead the Public About Surveillance

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/15



***SNIP

NSA’s Bizarro Dictionary

The latest example comes from the New York Times last week, which reported that the NSA is “searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country.” Despite the fact that millions of people’s communications are collected in bulk, the NSA says that this isn’t “bulk collection.” From the NYT story:

The senior intelligence official argued, however, that it would be inaccurate to portray the N.S.A. as engaging in “bulk collection” of the contents of communications. “ ‘Bulk collection’ is when we collect and retain for some period of time that lets us do retrospective analysis,” the official said. “In this case, we do not do that, so we do not consider this ‘bulk collection.’ ”
In other words, because the NSA does some sort of initial content searches of the bulk communications that they collect, perhaps using very fast computers, then only keep some unknown subset of that greater bulk for a later date, no “bulk collection” occurs. This is ridiculous. No matter how you slice it, the NSA is mass collecting and searching millions of American communications without a warrant.

Keep in mind that officials have previously said communications aren’t even “collected” when they are intercepted and stored in a database for long periods of time, much less “bulk collected.” Orwell would be impressed.

[Igel]

1. Any jargon is confusing for those who don't know it.

When I refer to text tagging I have something very specific in mind. When I say "constraint ranking" I also have something very specific and very theory-specific in mind.

Kids in science classes are forever confused by terms like "distance" and "displacement." A particle in chemistry is not necessarily the same as a particle in physics. Esp. if they're fundamental particles. "Radiation" scares kids, and some look really concerned that the fluorescent bulbs are pumping out radiation all over the place because they haven't learned the word's definition for that context.

But "radiation" also includes alpha and beta radiation. Fluorescent bulbs aren't noted for those kinds of radiation, so context really is key here.

The speaker who produced the linguistic data in the OP was clear. "Collecting" a communication is storing the metadata *and* the communication itself. If it's collected, it's stored. He said that they didn't collect telephonic communication; one doesn't need to ever have access to the communication to collect the metadata--in fact, it's far more efficient to collect it at set times instead of in real time. He was asked about telephony, he talked about telephony. What he said referred to, well, telephony. He wasn't referring to email collection any more than he was referring to butterfly collection.

You want to talk about mass collection of email records, that's fine. But it's really unnecessary to show that much ill-will by intentionally (or through ignorance + arrogance--we really need a word for that) trying to make somebody out to be a lying dragon that the bearer of the sword of truthiness must slay in absentia. I mean, if that's the best the person can do, perhaps sudoku would be a better vocation.

[blackspade]

2. Typical of our authoritarian state.

Redefining words to avoid a lie is still a lie.