Interesting to get a look at what it's like to be inside the bubble. It's compartmentalized enough that the individual actors can justify their actions by the assumed competence and benevolence of the others.

> I didn't test it, but I'm sure there was automated analysis that prevented or flagged use of US selectors.

The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I assume the system enforces this. As such, US citizens have nothing to worry about. However, in the immediately previous paragraph, he noted:

> one employee spied on a spouse

So much for automated analysis, besides not being able to filter out US citizens' data it can't even filter out an employee's direct family. But there's no need to worry citizen, the NSA has a very high-quality workforce.

In the NY Times this morning was a piece noting that the government has concluded they don't know what files Snowden took with him (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/us/officials-say-us-may-ne...). The most technologically advanced intelligence agency in the history of the world and they have no idea what files were electronically taken by one of their own. One of their own who passed the background check by the way--I don't know why the OP is so enamored with the polygraph.

What's particularly interesting is that some of the recent disclosures don't seem to be visible inside the bubble. Take this assertion, for instance:

"The NSA copy of my emails won't be viewed by police or FBI investigating me about marijuana use, for instance. Law enforcement might get a search warrant and retrieve a copy from Google, but not from the NSA."

In fact, it's been known for months that the DEA receives intercepts from the NSA in such volume that they have an office devoted to handling them (the DEA's "Special Operations Division"). And as for search warrants, the manuals for that office describe a practice of "parallel construction" which involves, not to put to fine a point on it, lying about the ultimate source of the information they're using, with the clear intent of evading judicial scrutiny.

Details here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE...

This reads like it was penned by someone who's never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram's research. When I read "I have a very high opinion of my former coworkers ... NSA employees are the law-abiding type ... You take a long automated psych test that flags troubling personality traits," I take away "the NSA is full of the kind of person who won't look at the big picture, who will follow orders without exercising critical thinking, and who can be counted upon to be a Good German."

The problems that the HN crowd (speaking broadly) has with the NSA and related entities, are systemic problems. They are not about, "is act X legal or not," they are not about "was this particular incident harmful or not." They are about root of the thing: about the high-level agenda, about the strategies, about the ideas. It does not in the least address these concerns to say "oh, my coworkers are fine folks, we work hard to obey the law, there are scary people out there!" This says nothing to the counterarguments of "we shouldn't have to trust you" (really, you could say that the field of cryptography is about replacing situations where you have to trust a human with situations where you only have to trust math), "the law itself is a problem," and "you haven't proven that you are doing more or better compared to other ways we could push back against scary people."

As with any government agency, the more they insist that they must not be held accountable, the more accountability we should jam down their collective throats. The first sign of someone who can't be trusted with power is that they ask for more of it.

Is this the best defense of the actions of NSA employees publicly available?

He spends a lot of time denying pervasive surveillance puts us in a panopticon where the FBI and other LEAs can observe everything we do. And never mentions parallel construction once.

He tries to justify a Cold War sized, and then some, security state by invoking North Korea.

This is a big bowl of very weak sauce.

The director's standard of candor is "least untruthful."

I really don't care what a mid ranking employee says about what the NSA will and won't do. EVERY revelation where people in this forum have given the NSA benefit of a doubt in the form of "they could, but they wouldn't" has max'ed out at "would do, did do, and trying hard to do it more" once more revelations have emerged.

The NSA can't be trusted with what it has.