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

[IllinoisBirdWatcher]

85. I normally lurk and don't post often, but in this case the early sensationalizing (on many sides)

is from people without any technical knowledge.

Yes, evidently the reported powerpoint used the phrase "direct access" or something like that. It was not tech specs, not even close to technical. The masses reacted to that as proof of something. That kind of presentation is the same as using four slides to explain the fractional puts and calls of futures trading to me so I can become a multi-millionaire trader. Or the fractional over and under betting in a Vegas sports pit. After listening to experts in both, I still don't understand either of those well enough to make intelligent conversation. And certainly not well enough to play in either sandbox.

Years ago I was doing some consulting for a large multi-national corporation. Not my project but at the same time world-wide regional managers were demanding that they had to have real-time access to company data. There was quite a standoff between the MIS folks and the rest of upper management. When that project was finally implemented the regional managers finally got their "direct access" they were elated, everyone was happy, and the storm died down. The MIS admins were smiling - especially smiling to themselves.

What anyone outside the building really had access to was a constantly updated mirrored server on its own network which only mirrored the relevant sales data and no other corporate data. Not only that, but the mirrored hardware was two security corridors down from the "real" data and techs managing that system didn't even have access to the main system. A technician hooked to the world-wide network, unless he were told otherwise, could assume he was working with real company data.

I can only hope that many years having passed, the SAs at google, Verizon, facebook et al at a minimum are doing the same thing. I suspect that with today's diversified processing, to provide the data the government asks for, those companies are consolidating data from multiple server farms which aren't even in the same geographical regions.

Two things intrigued me enough about the original post to add my comment:

First that other writers were allowed to write and publish the walk-back from the well-known headliner. NOT a standard practice.

Second was the paragraph quoted from the walk-back:

"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..."

The paragraph has to be looked at in the context of the entire original article which was not linked:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/microsoft-twitter-rivals-nsa-requests

The article reviews their original breaking story and also presents the views of many of the corporate providers involved. But then at the very end the article comes to the authors' carefully worded conclusion quoted above. It does not say, "We learned this from google..." or "We learned this from microSoft..." or "We learned this from the NSA..." or "We learned this from our own IT department..."

How or from where the Guardian (now) understands is noticeably absent from the article.

Thanks for your responses to my comment.