The president is both wrong and not wrong. He's saying things that are both true and not true, or true and beside the point.
For example, "No domestic spying program" may be 100% true. It's a foreign spying program that's devouring domestic data because of where the data is tapped and how data flows, then having the data shared domestically outside the program.
Any time government officials are commenting here, the adjectives and adverbs -- okay, even verbs and nouns -- are being used as qualifiers to eke out a "technically true but in a practical sense false" statement.
In another example, when he says "nobody's reading your emails" that's true for all but a handful of his listeners. For the rest of us, an algorithm may be parsing, but "nobody" as in no human, is "reading" as in with her eyeballs, until the emails are flagged live for review or "collected" (read with eyeballs, according to Clapper) later.
It's a shame dialectic isn't a popular school subject any more. The TL;DR crowd doesn't stand a chance against this kind of nuance.
These pronouncements and these nebulously defined NSA behaviors are like Schrödinger's cats. We need Snowdens to help us observe and collapse their states.
For example, "No domestic spying program" may be 100% true. It's a foreign spying program that's devouring domestic data because of where the data is tapped and how data flows, then having the data shared domestically outside the program.
Any time government officials are commenting here, the adjectives and adverbs -- okay, even verbs and nouns -- are being used as qualifiers to eke out a "technically true but in a practical sense false" statement.
In another example, when he says "nobody's reading your emails" that's true for all but a handful of his listeners. For the rest of us, an algorithm may be parsing, but "nobody" as in no human, is "reading" as in with her eyeballs, until the emails are flagged live for review or "collected" (read with eyeballs, according to Clapper) later.
It's a shame dialectic isn't a popular school subject any more. The TL;DR crowd doesn't stand a chance against this kind of nuance.
These pronouncements and these nebulously defined NSA behaviors are like Schrödinger's cats. We need Snowdens to help us observe and collapse their states.