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Comment by stinkytaco | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why we're satisfied with an anonymous leaker and some shoddy looking powerpoints.

I'm not going to comment on what's true or what's not, but I know a few things:

1. Having been "in the news" or when I've had firsthand knowledge of an event in the news, I'm always shocked by how inaccurate the news is. Usually not in broad strokes, but in lots of details. I have learned to take everything I read in the media with a healthy grain of salt. I'm not dissing journalists here, but that's what they are: journalists. They are not tech experts. What we are reading could very well be inaccurate. We've not vetted their source either. At least Google is known entity.

2. This whole "we scan everything" business just seems farfetched. That's a lot of data to just double.

3. This program has been subject to oversight. I haven't lost that much faith in my elected officials, or government employees for that matter.

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Many times this.

Do you all remember when the "news" was "leaked" by "anonymous hackers" who claimed to lift Apple user data from a hacked FBI laptop? The Internet lost its mind frothing against the surveillance state.

The minority of critical thinkers who suggested that maybe the claims of anonymous hackers shouldn't be taken entirely at face value were either ignored or shouted down. Blanket denials by the FBI were met with retorts of "we know they're lying!". News outlets -- many the very same covering the PRISM story -- repeated uncritically the accusations of the FBI harvesting Apple user data.

Do you all remember what the actual outcome of that story was? Spoiler alert: the allegations were grade-A bullshit. The only part that was true was that it involved (old) data lifted from a hack (against an app developer). Everything else was bogus self-aggrandizing, and the Internet loudmouths played right into it. Why? Because it confirmed people's existing fears.

The sad reality is that everything that has hit the news about this PRISM story -- and the Verizon story -- has actually shed very little light on anything. We have a source with unknown credibility providing incomplete and possibly even misunderstood information colliding with large corporate and government interests. Maybe everyone is lying. Maybe nobody is.

The only thing that is certain is that people unquestionably believe claims that confirm their existing beliefs.

You know, there's a conspiracy theory angle here. A tactic I have observed for dealing with awkward leaks is to allow the speculation about the unknown aspects of the leak ramp up to extreme levels, then rebut the more ridiculous theories without addressing the sensible ones. Joe average reads the rebuttal, feels let down that the story wasn't quite as inflammatory as the hype had led him to believe, and moves on.

This PRISM business (of which there had been no hint before) is a massive one-up on the seriousness of the Verizon scandal, and its timing in relation to it is deeply suspicious. It wouldn't be too difficult for someone in the intelligence services to make a pithy PowerPoint presentation about how the NSA slurps data from all and sundry (what was it supposed to be for again? "Training"?) and fake a leak to a few newspapers.

I predict that this story will turn out to be a complete wash, and in the meantime everyone will have forgotten about the not-as-sexy but much-more-true Verizon leak.

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