This Time, You Have to Read Down to Paragraph 29 to Find Out Glenn Greenwald Is Exaggerating Again
Here we go again. The latest story from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept is based on another stolen 5-year old PowerPoint deck, and describes an NSA system designed to be able to scale to a large size — so of course, Greenwald’s headline screams: How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers With Malware - the Intercept.
Please note that designing a system with scalability is not the same thing as “planning to infect millions of computers.”
And once again, if you read all the way down to paragraph 29, buried under reams of fear-mongering hype, you find:
It is unclear how many of the implants are being deployed on an annual basis or which variants of them are currently active in computer systems across the world.
Yes, that’s right — Greenwald simply doesn’t know how many of these “implants” were deployed, or are being deployed, or if they’re actually being deployed at all. But that doesn’t stop him from inserting inflated numbers — also known as “wild guesses.”
You’ll also find that this system has nothing to do with spying on Americans, and is targeted exclusively at foreign terrorists and criminals.
If you want more details, follow the link. I for one am getting very weary of these exaggerated hyperbolic claims based on out-of-context PowerPoint slides, conflating the ability to do something with actually doing it.
But just in case you want another clear indicator of the pure animus toward the US that drives Glenn Greenwald, in two consecutive tweets:
CIA Search of Congressional Computer Sparks Constitutional Crisis http://t.co/khBGX2QfJ7 by @froomkin
— The Intercept (@the_intercept) March 11, 2014
An all-out, bitter public war between the CIA and their Senate Intelligence Committee-enablers seems too go to be true, and yet…
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 11, 2014
What kind of person thinks a “constitutional crisis” is “too good to be true?”