I noticed something interesting in two of our recent stories about NSA surveillance. In yesterday's revelation in the Guardian about how Microsoft had made it easy for the NSA to record Skype audio and video, an internal NSA bulletin referred to the situation this way:
The document continues: "The FBI and CIA then can request a copy of Prism collection of any selector…" As a result, the author notes: "these two activities underscore the point that Prism is a team sport!"
That was apparently written on August 3, 2012. But the "team sport" phrase caught my attention, because while Tim Cushing was writing up that story, I had been working on the story about the NSA's
talking points for the groundbreaking of its massive datacenter in Bluffdale Utah. Those talking points were for January 6, 2011, but they too, reference "team sports" as a way to describe the collaboration with tech companies:
Cyber must be a team sport -- it is too big for one agency, or even one nation to be able to "control."
Seeing that exact phrase show up in two separate documents, which were both revealed on the same day, through different means (one via a leak, one via a FOIA request), were written at different times, and were revealed through very different sources, has me wondering. It seems likely that this is a key talking point that the NSA has been working on for quite some time, should information on PRISM and other programs ever get out. As long as they call these efforts a "team sport" perhaps people won't be as freaked out about them, or something.
But it's kind of a funny thing to call them. Who is the "opposing" team here? The public? And it's a funny sort of "sport" when the rules are all secret, and the referees and umpires get to reinterpret the rules in secret with the NSA/companies' team, without ever informing the public of the rule changes. There's definitely a team here, but it doesn't seem very sporting. It seems more like a bunch of people with way too much power screwing over the public. Perhaps that's what they should actually call it.
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