Mike, an alternate reason why the NSA is unable to determine the scope of Snowden's access is that the systems were designed to provide plausible deniability in the event that someone suspected that the appliances were being used to specifically target Americans for non-terrorism-related matters.... If the stakes are big enough, there are incentives to design specific flaws into the process. Look at Satyam and how it used its ERP to hide financial misdeeds.
The non-tech folks seem to be responding to the idea of "programming errors" as a factor in the errors reported in the WaPo NSA audit article. But it might be useful to let the natives know that the level of "programming" required seems to be on par with typing in your CCV code when buying something online. In other words, the real story is about hiw ridiculously easy it is for ANY operator to acquire,collect, and examine any form of digital information from ANY SOURCE in the world... unless that xKEYSCORE screen cap isn't really like enCASE....
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