Spies Like Us, Again

Washington Post's Barton Gellman both simultaneously screws over Team Dudebro Defector by stomping all over the "big scoop" and embarrasses himself with the same breathless hyperbole of "The NSA is watching everything Americans are doing!" when that's simply not the case.  He does get around to the actual story, however in paragraph five.

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

News flash:  the NSA spies on foreign bad guys who do bad, bad things.  Like, nuclear things.  But apparently we stopped these bad guys by then having conversations with Americans.  This means we have to apparently throw away these conversations, in Snowden's world.

As I keep saying, if your goal was to inflict maximum damage on the US capability to gather intelligence, what Edward Snowden has done in the last several months could not have been more effective.

Which, as I keep saying, was Snowden's goal all along.