How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say

[Attic]

Sorry guys, you just aren't as "smart" as the elitists running government programs.

Bottom line, they know what they mean when they use words that are widely understood to be the opposite of what they mean by using them. Got that?, for those who distrust government, you're up to speed... Never believe one thing till they've denied it.

Helpful Article from Slate.com

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say.

Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how long—and it’s been doing this for seven years. After the call-tracking program was exposed, few people thought twice about attaching the label “surveillance” to it. Government officials, though, have rejected the term, pointing out that this particular program doesn’t involve the NSA actually listening to phone calls—just keeping track of them. Their crabbed definition of “surveillance” allows them to claim that the NSA isn’t engaged in surveillance even when it quite plainly is.

Full Article. Number of really great words I bet you never knew the "real" meaning of.

Maybe this is why our debates are so difficult, words are so easily misinterpreted by folks who just don't get it.

Deception remains clear though.

 

[Fern]

Haha. Thanks for posting the article/link.

Bastages

Fern

 

[piasabird]

Everything the government of O'Bammah says is a lie. Our entire government is full of liars and theives. Just fire them all one at a time.

How much you want to bet that O'Bammah used the NSA and the IRS to Spy and gather information about his political foes all during the election? You have to realize that this was completely possible.

 

[Double Trouble]

Everything the government of O'Bammah says is a lie. Our entire government is full of liars and theives. Just fire them all one at a time.

How much you want to bet that O'Bammah used the NSA and the IRS to Spy and gather information about his political foes all during the election? You have to realize that this was completely possible.

This probably has very little to do with Obama. The technology is advancing such that the NSA (and whatever other agencies) can spy on just about anyone at any time. It just so happens that Obama is at the helm at this point in time, but if you think things would be different under any other president, you're dreaming.

It is disappointing that the same candidate who ran on such transparency and open government, railing against Bush and warrantless wiretaps is now in full support of even more secrecy and even more unchecked government spying.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Everything the government of O'Bammah says is a lie. Our entire government is full of liars and theives. Just fire them all one at a time.

How much you want to bet that O'Bammah used the NSA and the IRS to Spy and gather information about his political foes all during the election? You have to realize that this was completely possible.

You do realize that 7 years ago (when this program started) Bush was the President right?

Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how long—and it’s been doing this for seven years.

 

[Attic]

I wouldn't really say its a partisan issue, just a political one.

It's a quite clever and difficult to pin down deception of rhetoric that increasingly permeates the political landscape.

Have to go back to the definition of doublethink, coined by Orwell, to best explain the way it works and the power it gives to its weilder.

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

This accurately described what Clapper did in the OP when he spoke about the NSA. He is far from alone, and politics drags this shit into its ranks like a tractor beam.

Though we don't run that definition in our heads when we see it in the news or sense it from a politician, it is very irritating if only because its hard to counter the effective use of such deceptive and destructive methods.

It works simply because people, in general, tend not to question authority.

Recent example is the term "phony scandals", to describe real scandals. Trickle down economics is another one, I doubt the ones at the top of that policy had any desire other than to put money at the top by indicating that which they knew simply wasn't true, but through doublethink convinced themselves was true. Put plainly its simply corruption, and may hint at why good folks go to Washington and end up succumbing to what they wanted to stop. They convince themselves the ends justify the means, one of the biggest problems we face as a nation, because its strips individuals of power/freedom/liberty and gives it to government so that the ends my be achieved.