Guardian "walked back the 'direct access' claim made in Greenwald’s original article" [View all]

[ProSense]

<...>

UPDATE: A new article posted at the Guardian by Charles Arthur and Dominic Rushe walked back the “direct access” claim made in Greenwald’s original article and confirmed the FTP/Dropbox theory.

The Guardian understands that the NSA approached those companies and asked them to enable a “dropbox” system whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server out to an NSA-owned system. That has allowed the companies to deny that there is “direct or indirect” NSA access, to deny that there is a “back door” to their systems, and that they only comply with “legal” requests – while not explaining the scope of that access.

Anyone who uses an FTP server knows that this is a far cry from “direct access” to the entire contents of a server. But now, to paraphrase a popular quotation, the hyperbolic misleading interpretation used by Greenwald has been around the world a few times now that the reality of the technology finally got its pants on. The question remains, however, whether Greenwald was deliberately vague, or whether he didn’t bother to attain more clarification on this point from his IT expert source.

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/greenwald-sticks-with-his-story-in-spite-of-growing-questions/

The hyperbole got ahead of the technology.

Report: Snowden Stored Documents On Thumb Drive
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023010060