But what exactly has been "confirmed"? There are no details. What is being alleged is broad, unrestricted access by the NSA to all user account data, not specific targeted individuals. While the Verizon metadata case is disconcerting, there is legal precedent for pen register/trap-and-trace going back decades. It's on shaky legal footing, but not obscenely illegal.
On the other hand, blanket access to the email contents of every American on domestic soil, for the NSA to just go run a search on at any time, without a court order, would almost certainly be completely illegal.
It is very very doubtful this is going on. Tech companies responding to FISA requests and sending a mirror of an individual target's account data, that is totally unsurprising. We know they respond to such requests, they've never denied it, and so the way the data is delivered is really just an implementation detail.
What Greenwald is alleging flies in the face of 9 major tech companies full of thousands of engineers who tend to side with civil libertarians, and these companies are under threat of hack all the time and conduct extensive audits of who is accessing who's data internally. It's just unbelievable that the kind of access alleged is actually occurring with active knowledge.
So, whose's to say that these slides aren't being misinterpreted as to the actual details of the program, or that the source may have obtained a copy of the PPT, but is actually not privy to the actual implementation details of the compartmentalized information. Just because someone works at the NSA means they are privy to everything. For example, analysts in WW2 often dealt with intelligence reports from Ultra, unaware of what Ultra was or how they obtained information. I want to see a slide that says "NSA box installed in Datacenter 12, with credentials for direct access to datastore"
From my watching Greenwald on talk shows, he comes across to me as someone who oversteps the bounds of calm rational analysis, and ventures forth into media whorism. I'd rather just have the slides, I don't need him to trickle them out with his interpretation. Dump the slides and dump the transcripts and notes he took from his source. Let us judge and discuss.