You keep implying that The Guardian is making unsubstantiated claims, but their article is full of "NSA claims" and quotation marks, and it would take someone intentionally trying to read something else into it to ascribe these claims to The Guardian.
Are you claiming The Guardian is lying or mistaken about what the NSA documents says?
Because if you are not, then your beef should not be with The Guardian articles, but with the NSA documents.
It's possible the NSA documents are technically incorrect, but if that is what you believe, then complain about the NSA rather than attack the reporting, as in that case attacking the reporting just seems like a weak attempt at making your arguments seem more credible by attaching the claims about "direct" access to the reporters rather than the NSA.
Yet, you are arguing some mundane semantics?
Instead of smearing the people responsible for these revelations, why not try to focus on the big picture? That is, all of this is leading to long overdue appropriate dialogue, that is engaging our representatives in the oversight that is required to uphold our Constitution. Big picture!
You think these are mundane semantics. I think they're more meaningful than that. People on HN can't get me to shut over the right fix for a CSRF bug or how taxicabs can be licensed; why would anyone think I'd back down on an issue like this?
In the absence of more evidence about what exactly PRISM does, what we have is guesswork, but guesswork where believing some interpretation of the NSA documents becomes easier the more revelations of extensive NSA surveillance via other channels that are coming out.
For all the promotion they put into two-factor authentication for account-safety, "suspicious login attempt" notifications, etc, if they had done the same for GPG in GMail/Chrome, that would have been a huge step towards giving the mainstream a taste of actually being in control of their own privacy, I'm not saying we wouldn't have this problem right now, but we'd be in a way better position of dealing with it, for sure.
edit: to be clear, that is one of the many reasons why I think this arguing about whether this access is "direct" or whether it's "sorta kinda direct" distracts from the real issue: access.
And like you yourself mention, to add security to prevent automated hacking scripts from 0wning accounts to add to a botnet (attempts that happen orders of magnitude more often than an NSL or FISA warrant) they have to add IP tracking for individual accounts.
You talk about GPG but there's little safe way to do that from client-side JS, would defeat most of the point of offering free email for Google in the first place, and is already supported just by offloading that onto a real email client.
Here we have revelations by the NSA, that analysts can listen to anyone's phone calls. In America. This subverts just about the entire spirit of the Constitution and some of the letter.
But, you would rather spend your time isolating some relatively minute detail that Snowden or others may or may not have gotten wrong.
And the thing is, neither you nor anyone here even knows enough to draw conclusions as to these minute details. A few weeks ago, we didn't know that the NSA was collecting metadata on so many calls. A few days ago, we didn't know that analysts were eavesdropping without warrants. Yet people like yourself would argue vehemently on behalf of the government. The more that comes out proving you wrong, the more you dig in and move the goalposts. It makes one wonder what the government would have to do to actually concern you.
And the thing is, while you argue things you couldn't possibly know, there are now enough solid facts coming out (including admissions by the NSA) that should be of grave concern to you. Yet, here you are again focused on trivial, unprovable details.
I won't argue the subjective notion of whether the details are mundane. That's opinion. But, I don't understand how anyone can have such a skewed sense of scale when comparing the relative importance of what you choose to argue versus that of the astonishing revelations being brought to light about our government.
When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.
Every part of this graf appears to be false!
The phrasing "directly and unilaterally seize" seems exaggerated given the preponderance of current revelations and denials, but if Prism includes other not-yet-revealed acquisition methods, might still be substantially true. After all, the denials you're relying on are from company leaders who also said they've never heard of Prism.
I can believe Greenwald got overexcited in that phrasing, and trusted the slide deck (including as-yet-unreleased slides) too much. Just like perhaps Obama was a bit clumsy and overeager to reassure with his phrasing, "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."
It bothers people that the USG virtually always wins these cases. But I think it shouldn't bother people as much as it does, for a couple of reasons:
* It's also the case that state governments win most attempts to get Title III wiretaps; in those cases, it's because getting a Title III wiretap is an expensive process that involves a shitload of paperwork, and prosecutors don't waste the time going for them unless they're sure they're going to win. It appears easier to get a FISA directive upheld, but it's not free.
* It's what you'd expect to see happen if the USG was only using FISA to conduct foreign surveillance, which, while I wouldn't take NSA's word for it, is not at all hard to believe; what is the motivation for them to set up a paper trail with the FISC of doing something else?
Yes, but that's close to being a tautology: what outlandish claim might not turn out to be true if in future startling new revelations supported it? In fact, direct access in the NSA-has-root sense is less likely in light of the PRISM slides: why file 702 orders and dicker with webco lawyers if you're able and willing to get whatever you want through some kind of back channel? Why create a Top Secret overview and training resource for Internet surveillance and apparently not mention this backdoor?
So while of course, we can't assume every covert acquisition method darkly imaginable is happening, it would also be foolish to assume that exactly what has been clearly documented so far is the full story.
Why the trouble of extra legal orders and a paper trail if the NSA already had deeper covert access? Well, the government isn't efficient and different levels can't always work together. For example, why did the DoJ use more normal procedures to get AP phone records, when the NSA already had all that data? Also, when you have a treasure trove of info obtained in illegal ways, or in ways you don't want to admit, and you want to act in ways revealing that you have that info, you can try to get it again in a second, redundant way: one that you can explain, and maybe legally rationalize.
And when nobody inside or outside your organization has the whole picture, the fact that there's some legal process for getting some info from, for example, Google, might serve as plausible cover deflecting questions about how exactly so much more info winds up in the system.
In fact, that's one possible mechanism for the PRISM slides' author thinking that the access to Google et al is so much more powerful and 'direct' than the companies' own measured response process can explain. They're each blind men feeling different parts of the elephant.
And unless I've missed some major revelation, it "appears to be false" on the basis of press releases from companies with an interest in not being caught with their pants down.
Forgive me for not being so willing to jump to conclusions about which claims to believe.
E.g. "direct and unilateral access". Unilateral means exactly that only one party needs to decide, the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).
So that's at least one thing Greenwald managed to screw up in his "book review" of a single slide. The question is whether blame lies with Greenwald alone, or if Snowden mislead him into that by stupidity or malice.
For most of the world -- those who have never SSH'd into a machine, nor had machine 'root' access -- that rapid-batch-dump access still would be fairly described as "direct access". Word meanings vary based on context and the expertise of the discussion participant; the slide deck and the journalistic reports were all written at the level of fuzzy understanding, not technical precision. Practitioner nitpicks about the implementation details don't refute them.