Stephen Colbert to Glenn Greenwald: “Do You Believe There Should Be No Espionage?”
Stephen Colbert actually asks a couple of tough questions of the Mighty Greenwald — specifically about the fact that many of the NSA documents revealed by Greenwald and pals have nothing to do with surveillance on US citizens, but are simply exposing legitimate espionage programs.
It’s framed ironically, of course, and there’s no real follow-up when Greenwald inevitably dodges out of answering it (he blames it on the New York Times), but this is probably the roughest grilling he’ll face all week on his book promo tour.
Bob Cesca discovered that Greenwald’s latest article for the Guardian, which alleges that the NSA is intercepting and installing beacon devices in servers and routers being shipped overseas, is just more of the same misleading hyperbole; again Greenwald has omitted mentioning that this only applies to certain “hard targets,” not to the general public: Greenwald Misleads Again, This Time It’s About NSA and Internet Routers.
In this case Greenwald’s article uses the term “international customers” to describe which devices are intercepted, even though the actual NSA document uses the word “targets” several times. Seems clear that Greenwald omitted this important distinction deliberately to give the impression that everyone’s servers and routers are being tampered with, since his article quotes directly from that part of the NSA document but never mentions “targets.”
Stealthy Techniques Can Crack Some of SIGINT’s Hardest Targets
Here’s how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc.) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices.
