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Jesus Malverde

(10,274 posts)
Sun Nov 3, 2013, 02:54 AM Nov 2013

What's bugging the head of the NSA? (MSM respect for "The Weasel" turns to contempt.)

General Keith Alexander seems to be running out of friends.

Around the CIA's executive suites a few years ago, General Keith Alexander was known as "The Weasel." Not a weasel, The Weasel.

"He'd leave the room after some briefing or meeting or whatever and we'd all look at each other," a former denizen of the spy agency's seventh floor told me. "Sometimes we'd just laugh. We knew he'd just lied to us, or been less than truthful about something we were supposedly working on together."

Now everybody in the world knows Alexander can be a proficient liar, thanks to Edward Snowden's dripping spigot of top-secret NSA documents.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, got a taste of the NSA director's "weaseliness" this summer when he learned that Alexander's claim that the agency's massive data collection programs had thwarted 54 terrorist plots was a big fat lie. "The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs," Leahy told Alexander.

When Google and Yahoo, who've made billions tracking our shopping habits, are upset about the NSA breaking into their servers, as was reported by The Washington Post this week, you know the agency is out of control.

http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/11/01/whats-bugging-head-nsa.html

"Oversight obviously hasn't work very well...." Fenn said, ticking off all the House and Senate committees - armed services, intelligence, homeland security - not to mention the secret surveillance court, supposedly keeping the spy agencies in line. "They tend to go native. There is a plethora of people with fingers in the pie."
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What's bugging the head of the NSA? (MSM respect for "The Weasel" turns to contempt.) (Original Post) Jesus Malverde Nov 2013 OP
Were Google and Yahoo really upset? I mean...REALLY? MADem Nov 2013 #1
Yeah that outrage is a bit disingenuous since the NSA likely has it's own facilities at google. Jesus Malverde Nov 2013 #2
Unfortunately, nothing was done about that lie. delrem Nov 2013 #3

MADem

(135,425 posts)
1. Were Google and Yahoo really upset? I mean...REALLY?
Sun Nov 3, 2013, 03:09 AM
Nov 2013

Or were they simply affecting "upset" because it puts them on the right side of this whole data mining debacle in the eyes of the public?

Poor little Google! They've been duped by The Weasel, too!

Ironic, too, since they're right up there with NSA in the computer-intrusion department...

Jesus Malverde

(10,274 posts)
2. Yeah that outrage is a bit disingenuous since the NSA likely has it's own facilities at google.
Sun Nov 3, 2013, 03:16 AM
Nov 2013

Like it does AT&T.

The article is scathing in it's attack on the NSA and Alexander in particular. It unflinchingly calls out bush for approving "kidnapping and torture" in writing.

The last sentence caught my attention.

But it will be fun watching Alexander try to weasel out of this mess. To do that, he might have to take down a president. But for that, he'd better have something in writing.


or on tape...

delrem

(9,688 posts)
3. Unfortunately, nothing was done about that lie.
Sun Nov 3, 2013, 03:39 AM
Nov 2013

But Senator Patrick Leahy, who has perfected high dudgeon when standing in judgment, never follows up to actually correct the problem. A stern expression, some stern words, are the whole damn thing.

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