Hyperbole in NYT report on Australia and NSA spying on Indonesia

A New York Times story about how Australian intelligence might have passed information involving a US law firm and Indonesia is heavy on the drama.

James Risen and Laura Poitras at the New York Times have the latest scoop from the steady drip drip drip of National Security Agency files that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden stole and has been distributing to reporters since the middle of last year.

Staff writer

Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East.Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.

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They report the news breathlessly, but there's far less there there than their presentation would lead a casual reader to believe. They write:

A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.

Scary, huh? No. Not at all. Here's my summary of the key assertions in the article, stripped of spin, drama, and adjectives:

"A 2013 memo leaked by Edward Snowden shows that Australia's version of the NSA, while engaged in electronic surveillance of an Indonesian trade delegation, came across communications between the Indonesian officials and a US law firm the country had hired for help with trade talks. Australia informed the NSA liaison office in Canberra that intelligence it was collecting and willing to share with the US might infringe on US attorney-client privilege laws. The liaison referred the matter to the NSA general counsel in the US and some sort of legal guidance was sent back. The memo does not say, nor has the Times been able to learn by other means, what that guidance was."

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Hyperbole in NYT report on Australia and NSA spying on Indonesia