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Comment by Kylekramer | Hacker News Reader

Probably neither. It is just my guess, but it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have (after all, this is a $20MM project) and the journalists took them at their word/pushed the sensational angle. The tech companies are understating how much they work with the government. No one is strictly lying, but their various interests are conflicting.

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I have a hard time Glenn Greenwald would stake his reputation on this without having more concrete proof. I think that there is still a lot more information to be let out. They are slowly leaking more and more every day so that the story stays in the news. It's a clever tactic. I'm curious why Greenwald isn't going to release the "highly detailed technical materials on how they eavesdrop" that he claimed he had on Twitter. [1] Perhaps it would give up his source? Or maybe it just contains too much national security information or whatever? I'm not sure.

[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343470800784982016

Ninja edit: Also as another commenter pointed out, that $20-million figure could be for just one specific part of the program or what have you.

Uh, Glenn has said even more stupid stuff IMO in the context of the Pfc. Manning case so it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

In fact I'd argue that Glenn's reputation is based more on being a "civil liberties watchdog" and far far less on actually being right in his reporting. So in that regard he's simply padding his rep even further.

I'm not sure what Glenn said in regards to the Manning case, but wouldn't that be different because in this instance Glenn is the person who broke the story and has the source? He's casually mentioned on Twitter and in his articles that there's more information coming out. So I reckon we will see.

"it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have"

This strikes me as pretty implausible; verifying the extent of their access to someone's gmail or facebook account seems like something the NSA should be able to do very easily. I think it's safe to assume that this part of the project is $20M, not that they have $20M worth of access to the internet.

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