It requires that they coordinated with the companies PR departments in the process of setting up the program. The companies asked: what if the shit hits the fan, or this comes out in the public, what do we say? And the government had a simple, boilerplate answer for it.
You wouldn't even have to work with the PR dept, just one single person. Either a special rep in PR for government matters, or just the CEO himself. It would take 5 minutes to put together a generalized script for the CEO to follow in the event this hit the public news.
This (the PR response) would be extraordinarily easy to coordinate, and it would take just one conversation at the point the program was signed on to by the companies.
And when this all became public, the company could also easily then call up the US Government and ask them what to do (and more than likely, the NSA could call them and tell them what to do).
The part that requires incompetence is everything that has happened today. The NSA's job is intelligence. They are the experts in connecting dots, reading between the lines, seeing how random events might be a sign of something bigger, and whatever other cliches you want to throw in here. Yet they are an organization that doesn't know that having people reading from nearly identical scripts will make people think they are reading from nearly identically scripts?
Senator Wyden has openly talked about how he wanted to say something about these programs, and even now he can't reveal details of what's going on because it would violate national security and he'd probably be put in prison or at the least removed from Congress.
The overall fact that the NSA has been reading our email, tracking us on Facebook, tapping our phones, etc. has not been kept quiet. Exact details are far more difficult to come by, even now those are classified. The IRS was talking about their right to read our email four years ago. The IRS has no known infrastructure to pull that off, it's clear they were talking about NSA or FBI programs.
As someone else noted, the government is very frequently both competent and incompetent when performing tasks or running programs. There's nothing unusual about that, you see it throughout the government bureaucracy. Sometimes they pull off impressive feats that you only read about decades later, and other times they're Nixon trying to cover up Watergate.
| The IRS was talking about their right to read our
| email four years ago. The IRS has no known
| infrastructure to pull that off, it's clear they
| were talking about NSA or FBI programs.
Which is complete bullshit of course. Mike Gravel anyone?
Rumors of widespread data collection -- even specifically by the NSA -- from many of the providers at issue have surfaced many times, what was new recently is the same (or substantially similar) bits of documentary evidence substantiating and connecting those rumors.
So, to all appearances, it may not really have been "kept quiet" up until the recent leak, it was just that the information that got out before wasn't as well-supported and therefore hard to dismiss.
Which is exactly what governments are.
Extreme resources, very smart people, and very idiot people, incompetent bureaucrats, messy cover-ups, all co-exist, all the time.
What did you thought they were? Incredibly competent XOR incredibly incompetent? (Only the first would be a conspiracy theory, whereas only the second would be gross underestimation).
>If the NSA was able to keep this project under wraps for so long with the number of people involved, I think they would be smart enough to at least slightly alter the words of their puppets, after all this is supposed to be the area of their expertise.
You've never seen badly (or too fast) done spin work?
Not to mention, why would the NSA care to spend too much effort to how those things were phrased?
If you think it matters, I'm afraid, you give the American public too much credit. It's not like it's gonna get suspicious by such small and peripheral signs. Listening to and accepting bad arguments, BS excuses, fake promises, and shit from politicians if what people are doing all their life.
And it's not even like they're gonna do anything about the core situation with regards to privacy. It's just the "hot topic" of the day, to be forgotten for some BS next week. You surely don't expect some kind of revolt of anything? If that was to be, it would have been at the other 20 similar media expositions or against the horrible laws that have been passed openly.
Not just the American public. This is blanket spying on the people of the world. Now that might sound less problematic for Americans who want to see those pesky terrorists brought to justice, but it also allows the NSA to build up profiles on everyone.
US border security is already a nightmare, god knows what they can do with this kind of information. Ever searched for torrents on Google? Your next trip to the States might be interesting.
It seems also they could be sharing this data with other national security agencies, which is where this gets really scary:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22813893
Global Big Brother.
Personally as a user of Gmail, Skydrive, GDrive, Dropbox, Facebook,... I find this incredibly disturbing. I will be doing whatever I can to remove my dependency on any service hosted in the US.
You think Belgium or France or Poland spies on US citizens phone-calls and Google/FB? Inside the US?
As for "Nobody gives a shit if your torrented a movie", first, we're not talking about Joe Average, that downloads GoT in rural Idaho. We're talking about people that matter to society: writers, investigative journalists, dissidents, hackers, activists, etc. They cared very much what A. Swartz did, for example.
Second, even normal people, downloading a "torrented movie" have been hit with huge fines by RIAA.
It isn't chance that their statements look similar: You can be absolutely sure that each looked to the other for some sort of direction, and once that came they followed the leader simply because it makes sense.
Even excluding that, really how many variations could there possibly be? Someone said you did something illegal. Say "no I didn't do something illegal, and everything I have done has been above the board and transparent". Do the same thing to twenty people and you would get remarkably similar statements, because a response can only come in so many forms.
and citing this http://blog.reddit.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-m...
where it shows:
Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL
At the moment all there is on the front page are 2 stories on Greenwald and some "collecting anti surveillance arguments thread".
I guess after their role in promoting the anti-SOPA movement they got some "special attention.
Oh come on. We all know that it's Agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD that's doing this. "This isn't my first rodeo," he said.
Isn't that the definition of a government conspiracy?
It's even possible that the companies coordinated their press releases for the very purpose of raising questions. We shouldn't assume they are all isolated from one another. It's far more likely that there is some form of communication going on between them, or at least between the high officials.
In essence, this looks very much like a coordinated effort to rebel against a gag order without actually crossing the line and putting oneself in jeopardy. Read between the lines.