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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to download all the docs to view, there is a mirror on Google Docs with web based viewers:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bx25s45t4-d_eE0xbklZ...

I skimmed those docs and my eyes started to glaze over at all the government-ese in them. Most of those documents seem to be high level proposals for things like PRISM and some of the other programs that we more or less already know exist in some form or another, but it's unclear whether they're just proposing the creation of such networks, or whether they're documenting what already exists. There's also a lot of "System A must conform to Standard B Sub-Section C unless interaction with System D Sub-Section F (See Req E)" type gibberish all over the documents so it's really hard to understand exactly what any particular piece of it is describing.

Aside from that the only other thing I see is a list of what appear to be boilerplate redaction requests for a list of NSA spies posted on cryptome, with ironically most of the information redacted. Mildly interesting in that they'd be so transparent as to use near identical wording on what should be apparently unrelated requests, but otherwise not particularly notable.

Can someone with a higher pain threshold for bureaucracy please try to go more in depth on some of these and let us know if there's any meat to any of these documents, or is this all sound and fury signifying nothing.

The more government-ese, the higher the chance that it goes over-budget or never gets completed / never does what it was supposed to / is working but not usable in real world. I like that kind of text in things that should be never completed. I hope they also contract out each piece of it to a different country and lowest bidder.

There's something quite funny about putting these documents up on Google Docs.

recursion :)

I wonder if they have a termination case. You never know, maybe this will break the system.

Did you mean: recursion

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