The Question of the NSA And Tech Corporations

I think “epic botch” is going too far, but it certainly looks as if the strongest claims made about the collaboration between the NSA and tech companies in the initial Guardian and Washington Post stories are at this point unfounded:

Fogel points out that a widely-read post to this effect called “Cowards” from the blogger Unchrunched—”What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth”—is “mostly wrong.” He says, “It looks like Greenwald & co simply misunderstood an NSA slide [see image at the top of this post for the slide] because they don’t have the technical background to know that ‘servers’ is a generic word and doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as ‘the main servers on which a company’s customer-facing services run.’ The ‘servers’ mentioned in the slide are just lockboxes used for secure data transfer. They have nothing to do with the process of deciding which requests to comply with—they’re just means of securely and efficiently delivering information once a company has decided to do so.”