14 DAY TRIAL // Despite previous statements that the NSA knows full well what documents and files Edward Snowden made it out with, it turns out that the agency has no idea what got out and what didn't, even several months after the leak.
The greatest spy agency in the world hasn't been able to figure out what happened in its own backyard, while we're supposed to believe that the very same agency is capable of snooping through most of the internet traffic in the world but only target terrorists.
According to NBC News citing intelligence sources, the NSA is still trying to figure out what files were copied and what the journalists have.
That's because the NSA had poor internal policies, both with regard to security, which is why Snowden as a system administrator was able to access pretty much everything that the NSA had, and to audit, which is why it's still trying to find out what happened.
That a government agency is insecure, inefficient and incompetent is hardly news, but, again, this is the same agency that is asking us to trust that they know what they are doing.
It also hardly surprising that the NSA would lie about it and then lie about lying. That's the modus operandi at the NSA these days. Last month, NSA Director Keith Alexander answered "yes" to both "Do you feel you now know what [Snowden] got?" and "Was it a lot?"
But "yes," coming from the NSA, doesn't necessarily mean "yes." When another intelligence chief was asked whether Americans were spied on, before the Snowden scandal, he said "no."
Later he explained that when he said "no," what he was actually doing was saying the "least untruthful" thing he could say. What he meant to say was "yes." That's the case this time around too.
An NSA spokesperson told NBC News that, by "yes," Alexander didn't mean "a hard, 'We know everything, completely.'"
"He did not say the assessment had been completed in absolute terms," it seems. "The Director answered a question about his general sense."