NSA Chief Defends Facial Recognition Database By Denying Claims That Weren’t Made

I posted something about this previously, but Tim Cushing’s article is still worth reading:

James Clapper’s defense of leaked NSA programs have fallen into the “strictly legal + oversight” framework so often it’s become a cliche that can be ably wielded by lower level staffers. Occasionally, Clapper fires off something longer, like his defense of the NSA’s collection of French phone metadata. During this longer “debunking,” Clapper denied accusations that were never made by attacking a lousy translation of the original French article. This provided for some plausible deniability (“NSA does not collect recordings”), even if the underlying claims — correctly translated — pointed to something the agency was actually doing (bulk phone metadata collection).

The new head of the NSA, Michael Rogers, is doing the same thing.