Greenwald Shatters White House Talking Points

June 11, 2013 • 10:23AM

While White House spokesman Jay Carney refused to say anything at his briefing yesterday about the NSA's global espionage, Obama's "talking points" on the scandal are in fact being used by sympathetic journalists. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe"' program Monday, muckraker Glenn Greenwald exposed host Mika Brzezinski for "reading from White House talking points" in her questions to him.

Generally, Brzezinski was trying to get Greenwald to say that Obama's spying was lawful though it could be objectionable. This has in fact never been determined, since there has never been any challenge allowed in any court to the Patriot Act, which has been changed constantly since 2001.

Specifically, Brzezinski was using Obama's claim in his Friday press conference that "no American's telephone calls are being listened to" without a warrant obtained from the FISA court. This Obama claim, Greenwald said, is "simply false". Even under the "improved, 2008" version of the Patriot Act, he explained, the only cases in which the NSA requires warrants to capture exchanges — e-mails, telephone calls, videoconferences, etc. — is when both parties to the exchange are in the United States when it occurs, and are U.S. citizens. Therefore American citizens' communications can be warrantlessly monitored, when they speak to non-citizens, or communicate with citizens or non-citizens who are abroad.

Furthermore, the NSA is spending vast amounts of funds to have the technological capability to monitor all communications traffic worldwide, Greenwald said.