If you have followed this blog, you know we made fun of the great data vacuuming effort. Quite acerbic quips at times, and we still think TOR is a good idea. An idea we share, as it stands, with illustrious organizations.
But that is as far as we are willing to go. The many different aspects of the issue have been baffling greater minds than ours, and pretending we have answers where these folks fail, it's just too much.
So, imagine our surprise when we found a loose group of German Twitterati who have the best interests of their preferred American spy agency at heart.
It is one thing to make like a hobby sleuth and analyze the published documents, or to show off your math skills by adding up numbers and pointing out discrepancies. Why not? Errors do occur, translations of the English documents can come out weird. When that happens, are we witnessing sinister manipulation, or simply an error?
Run of the mill errors and a little sloppiness, generally, it seems, said a linguist we know.
The German NSA posse, as we decided to call the friends of the agency for their cowboy attitude, are a funny bunch. Involuntarily so, we assume, because they seem to be competent techies in their own right in such fields as networking infrastructure or telecommunications, to name just two.
Their claim "no evidence of mass surveillance" prompted some American experts to question if these Germans were NSA booster accounts. And, of course, there is the "collection does not mean surveillance" argument. The simple questions if you are not intent on surveillance, why do you collect all of this in the first place, and since you run it through filtering software, what is up with that - these questions do not resonate with these engineers.
For some time, we figured that the sleuths were no more obnoxious than yours truly but that changed recently.
One of the gentlemen filed a criminal complaint against a witness of the German parliamentary investigation committee looking into the NSA surveillance issues from a German perspective.
The expert witness targeted by the complaint is German, little known to most folks outside of the computer sector, including us. The man who filed the complaint is German. His complaint quotes from the leaked NSA documents and slides, alleging criminal misrepresentation of the witness.
Wow, one lone German who succeeds in interpreting documents where dozens of journalists and experts have failed before? Unlikely success stories do happen, but on this subject?
We'll see if there is something newsworthy out of the posse, or entertaining.
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