This is relevant, because the claims that he’s making that are the most serious to me is that he could order wiretaps.

That he could get whatever data he wanted from the system he was the sysadmin from is hardly startling news. It illustrates the dangers of data collection— that there’s a big pool of people who can dip into it, and they may use it irresponsibly— but it’d be really hard to keep a sysadmin out of the system he sysadminned.

That he could do something active with that data, that he could order a wiretap, that’s the self-aggrandizing and weird and startling claim. I really think— and hope— it’s not true, and I think it’s not because of the self-aggrandizing nature of the claim.