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| Science & Technology |
| Greenwald and WaPo misreport on Prism |
| 2013-06-16 |
| Layers of fact checking don't work when you fail to employ them. From TFA: Last week, The Guardian and The Washington Post got their hands on a big story about the National Security Agency and its alleged connection to a handful of giant tech companies. The bombshell stories in both publications carried the by-lines of experienced reporters. The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, a But neither publication assigned an independent expert to vet the claims of their source, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, who had until recently worked at the NSA as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden provided both publications with classified documents he had spirited out of the NSA. He also made claims that turn out to have been exaggerated. That absence of an independent tech check means both publications got the story wrong, as subsequent reporting by other journalists with experience in these topics has confirmed. These are not trivial details, nor is this a matter of semantics. We're not quibbling over words. If you don't understand the technical workings of these surveillance programs, you can't understand whether they're working as intended, you can't identify where the government has overstepped its bounds, and you can't intelligently debate the proper response. The fact that the government has maintained rigid secrecy compounds the problem. Greenwald has been something of a legend to rightwing bloggers for his sockpuppetry mostly. It's how he got his start. What Greenwald knows about technology, you could fill a urine test sample cup. A summary of Glenn Greenwald's extensive military experience can be found here |
| Posted by:badanov |