Attacking the Messenger

The main stream media is salivating to publish and repeat any inkling of anti-Snowden material. (It is certainly easier than asking how the Intelligence Community leaders, secret court, and Presidents of both parties signed off on surveillance that violates the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans.)

While the original piece didn't include a statement from Snowden's legal representative, to his credit, Michael Isikoff of NBC updated the article today to include a statement from me:

In response to a request for comment, Jesselyn Radack, a legal adviser to Snowden in the U.S., said, “Edward Snowden stands by his denial on Jan. 23. NSA has a documented history of scapegoating innocent employees for its own failures, … manufacturing evidence against them and misleading Congress.”

[...]

The fact that NSA finds time to write a memo to Congress about accountability for the public finding out about NSA waste and illegality, but cannot give a clear answer to simple oversight questions like "does the NSA collect data on millions of Americans?" should call into question all of NSA's defensive smears of the messenger that are really transparent attempts to distract from the message.

  Jesselyn Radack

In related news:

They may not be trying to figure out how to curtail privacy abuses, but they are definitely on top of how to avoid hiring another Edward Snowden.

 The GAO recently published a report on their efforts to “improve civilian IC [intelligence community] elements' or their respective departments' ability to mitigate risks associated with the use of contractors.”

Shorter GAO report: We don’t know how many there are or how much they are costing us, but we found out that many of them may be redundant or unnecessary. All agencies need to fix this.

 Full report.