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Comment by subsystem | Hacker News Reader

"making claims that are not directly backed up by the material"

Which makes those claims inconclusive regardless of Snowdens character.

Except where - particularly around Hacker News - people have been taking everything Snowden has said and just running with it as though it's obviously true, regardless of technical or legal possibility.

The material that's actually been disclosed is, what, 3 powerpoint slides? Almost everything else is simply wild speculation.

As far as I know it's 5 slides on PRISM, 4 slides and screenshots on BOUNDLESSINFORMANT and a Verizon court order from FISC.

I guess if you're going to stipulate that nobody believes anything Snowden says and that we're all sticking to the leaked Powerpoint slides, sure.

Which in and of itself is tricky because a slidedeck without the presentation itself is hard to interpret. I don't know how much of the slidedeck is historical vs aspirational. And who made the slides in the first place - did they have a better picture of the program than Snowden?

If I'm being asked who I believe more, the person who authored a slide deck selling some kind of surveillance tool to the NSA, or Google's chief architect, their general counsel, and Larry Page, I'm going to go with the Googlers.

Exactly. Google at least has some room for transparency in all of this. Not to mention an economic incentive to get an accurate picture of this out in the public.

Google has motivation to bring clarity to their role in all of this. The NSA would rather keep everything secret. I'd believe Google more too...

"PRISM Collection Manager", "April 2013", "ORCON", "You should use both" and the classification date in relation to the date slide doesn't suggest sales material to me.

Note that the slides have different degrees of redaction across sources. These links should together cover what's available on PRISM.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-... http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server...

You know what: stipulate that this is an internal presentation by a manager at NSA. My opinion is unchanged about who's more credible.

A collection manager is someone who works with collection management and not necessarily a manager, as in boss.

On what basis? Personality?

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