Edward Snowden Says More Info About "Direct Access" Is In the Works

—By Kevin Drum

Edward Snowden is holding a live Q&A at the Guardian. Here's one exchange:

<...>

Snowden's reply about direct access is weirdly nonresponsive. He's talking here about analysts' access to NSA databases, not to corporate servers, and he seems to be talking about metadata, not content. What's more, even if he is talking about content, he's talking about content that's already been collected by NSA, not content "direct" from Google's servers. He's right that access to this stuff is policy-based, but then again, I'm not sure what else it could be. In the end, access to everything is policy-based.

His reply to the warrant question is a little clearer, but doesn't really say anything new. Section 702 warrants are indeed very broad, and once issued can cover communications from a lot of targets. When this stuff is swept up, some of it inevitably turns out to be domestic communications, which NSA is required to either discard or segregate away from the view of analysts according to court-mandated minimization procedures.

Now, does NSA really do this? How do we know? Those are good questions, but Snowden sheds no light on that. He's just telling us that 702 warrants are very broad, something we already knew.

I really wish Snowden were more forthcoming and less evasive in his answers to questions like this. It's been over a week now, and if he really has more detail about what "direct access" means, it's long past time to share it with us. Ditto for any evidence that NSA is abusing its minimization protocols.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/edward-snowden-says-more-info-about-direct-access-works