[Declan McCullagh reporting on comments from Rep. Jerrold Nadler][1]:
> Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
> If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
[President Obama, not a week earlier][2] (as transcribed by The Wall Street Journal):
> They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. So I want to be very clear. Some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so — nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls.
The argument here is that Obama was specifically addressing PRISM, and not the overall capabilities of the NSA. I call bullshit. Either Obama was being intentionally deceitful by word-smithing around the truth, or he was *also* being lied to by the NSA and thus ignorant about the rampant abuse of power coming from the NSA. I highly doubt the NSA would be able to do this without the President knowing. So…
**UPDATE**: Looks like CNET’s sources/government is backtracking. Instead of CNET clearly updating the story, they went through and just changed a bunch of shit like hacks do, which completely changed the story, so they re-wrote the headline. Hacks. Anyways…
[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/
[2]: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/07/transcript-what-obama-said-on-nsa-controversy/
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