[Kylekramer]

He answered harsh criticisms about his personality and motives, but added very little regarding NSA spying. It is all well and good that he is willing to die for America, thinks the media has focused on the wrong elements of the story and made fun of Cheney. But in regards to the subject of NSA spying, he spoke in vague terms that didn't add to the public's awareness. And that is pretty much all I care about hearing from him, not media criticism, his suggestions for Obama or how he thinks he exposed the largest suspicionless surveillance program ever.

[temp9251]

I disagree, some key points were clarified. To wit -

1. Encryption works, but "endpoint security" is easily defeated.

2. "US Persons do enjoy ... one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time."

An "ingest point" appears to be the term for a preprocessor that parses raw data before sticking a normalized copy in a database. I believe this is talked about more in Boundless Informant papers.

3. American data is regularly collected "incidentally", and when between an American and a foreigner. "Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant."

4. Intelligence agencies (including GCHQ) have raw access to query NSA databases, and GHCQ is cited to have 5% of queries audited.

I made an effort earlier to try to write up a fully cited description of what we know about NSA activities. If you would find that useful, you can find it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892755

[warmblood]

I see.

Despite already blowing the whistle and turning unconstitutional domestic surveillance into a public discussion for the first time in, well, ever, to truly be useful to society he must accept your amorphous terms of disclosure for information that is likely forthcoming anyway.

Thank you for explaining yourself.

[Kylekramer]

My demands are quite morphous. As a person who is only of public interest due to leaking information about the NSA, I would perfer he clarify what exactly the NSA does. Good intentions about "public discussion" don't help if the public discussion he provoked is uninformed.

[rdouble]

but added very little regarding NSA spying.

Well, he did clarify that Google, Facebook et al don't provide "direct access."