FTA: ""This is yet another trick move in the never-ending shell game that the NSA is playing with the American people, and apparently with the secret court whos

FTA: ""This is yet another trick move in the never-ending shell game that the NSA is playing with the American people, and apparently with the secret court whose oversight it is trying to evade," said Kevin Bankston, the director of New America's Open Technology Institute. "New rule: if the NSA claims that a particular surveillance program has ended, or that a particular type of surveillance has halted 'under this program,' assume that it is still going on in another program."" It's hard to keep up with the latest abuses because, as the article mentions explicitly, the government is perpetually playing a shell game with its surveillance programs in order to deceive the public and its other enemies which the programs target. The government works from the assumption that an outed surveillance program is a surveillance program rendered ineffective, meaning that there's consistent internal pressure to reorganize, rename, and reconfigure existing programs that get hit with daylight. In order to kneecap oversight, regulatory questions are answered as literally as possible, using the most deceptive and narrow terms as possible. The terms that they use are typically internally defined in bizarre and obtuse ways for the purposes of propaganda, and these definitions are never made explicitly clear to the public or regulators. This is how we get to the point of a very straightforward, unambiguous term such as "collection" actually being defined by the NSA as "processing data for intelligence purposes after it has been found, categorized, scraped via algorithm, and stored." In summary: it's hard to keep up because the surveillance agencies are intentionally being evasive of public and political oversight, because they are engaged in immoral programs which are perpetually extralegal. EDIT: An additional bonus of this maskirovka-style strategy is that the press will be bungled up habitually by reporting in the government's desired terms. This means that if the press even does understand the true meanings of the propaganda terms used, the public will be getting a confusing and often inconsistent narrative that is hard to make sense of. The press will also typically publish articles detailing the denial of wrongdoing from the government, and will rarely publish the highly detailed and factual accusations of wrongdoing in the first place.