White House unable to confirm if Congress briefed on NSA spy program

I always love those recordings. Few people are able to keep up the bullshit and cognitive dissonance required to maintain the current governments position in an even remotely logical and consistent way when faced with on demand questions, so they quickly revert to reiterating canned answers or even just missing the whole question as their brain responds to the information overload with a simple backtracking to what they know best (which, it turns out, is the canned answers, not actual knowledge of the program asked about).

The considerable stress this causes then further produces nonsense side statements, like "informing people about false claims isn't necessarily what we do".

Snowden/Greenwald are doing a great job keeping this issue alive. Much like if you tell a lie enough times people believe it: if you tell the truth enough times people remember it.

Everyone who cares about this issue should do what they can to make sure as many people as possible understand what is going one. Just keep bringing it up like this reporter did today. Otherwise it will just slip into the background and we will be stuck with it for a very long time.

It's disheartening that politicians can barely confirm whether they even know what is going on (i.e. what they vote for on our behalf), let alone the have the capacity to grasp the scale of the surveillance and its (eventual) misuse. It takes at least a modest understanding of math and computers to understand the gravity of such a dragnet, which is very discouraging to me. And when white house reps defend themselves with gems like, "informing people about false claims isn't necessarily what we do," is even less reassuring.

On that note, an interesting article on acm.org was recently posted about about how politics, and not encryption, is the only way to make it change. I think the reason why a lot of us invest so heavily in encryption solutions is because the above makes us so incredibly cynical that politics will achieve anything.

One hand doesn't know what the other is doing and our President has the gall to espouse "accountability?"

This is typical bluster and buck-passing, and I am disgusted!

Drip, drip, drip...