Liberal advocates of a police state turn savagely against Edward Snowden

[BeyondGeography]

40. Wake up already...Even The Guardian has walked back Greenwald's (and Snowden's)

original interpretation of that slide.

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/microsoft-twitter-rivals-nsa-requests

Greenwald, meantime, steadfastly refuses to comment.

Why hasn’t Greenwald clarified his “direct access to servers” language from last week’s PRISM report?

Multiple other news outlets have provided information debunking the notion that the NSA had unfettered back door access to servers belonging to the various tech giants named in the PRISM slides. The New York Times described a process whereby the various tech companies, after receiving a FISA court approved request from the NSA and vetting it through their legal departments, gather the information and post it in a virtual “mailbox” for the NSA to retrieve: “It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.”

You know what this is? It sounds like an FTP server to me, not unlike Dropbox. This is how many of us transfer digital files that are too large for email. The NSA apparently doesn’t enjoy a free pass to directly grab up server data at will — instead, it merely downloads it from an FTP server (or similar) after it’s been placed there by the tech company that set it up for them. Again, this undercuts one of the most outrage-inducing aspects of Greenwald’s story, not to mention the initial Washington Post reporting as well. The NSA doesn’t have “direct access” to anything other than an innocuous file transfer “mailbox.” But “direct access” sounds sexier and therefore feeds the outrage agenda.

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

Direct access to an FTP server...hell, even I have that.

This kind of shitbag due diligence will continue. Sorry.