Document released just before holiday season includes disputed claims about spy agency to share with 'family and close friends'

The National Security Agency recognizes that disclosures of its mass surveillance dragnets can make the holiday season awkward for its employees. So much so that it’s apparently prepared a list of talking points to share with friends and family around the turkey and the yuletide log.

As first reported by Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake, the NSA evidently compiled a two-page document, dated November 22, giving instructions for discussing the highly secretive agency with “family and close friends”.

Among the points officials are “authorized to share” this holiday season: “The NSA’s mission is of great value to the nation”; it performs its missions “exceptionally well”; and its employees are “loyal Americans with expert skills”.

NSA officials did not respond to questions about the talking points, their preparation and their veracity.

While most of the talking points simply provide that level of uncritical assurance, several pass along disputable or disputed claims – things that can probably pass muster around the mulled wine, but have come into sharp contention during congressional hearings.

For the NSA’s counter-terrorism function, for instance, NSA’s activities have “helped to understand and disrupt 54 terrorism events since 9/11”, of which “13 had a homeland nexus”.

While that talking point is couched in such a way as to make direct refutation difficult – does a “homeland nexus” mean that the plot was to have taken place in America or that an operative was based in America? – US senators have pointed out that the most contentious of all NSA’s surveillance programs, the bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone data, did not contribute to the disruption of any terrorism plot.

Under sharp questioning in July by the Senate judiciary committee, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis said that, at most, “there is an example that comes close to a 'but for' example,” meaning that the phone records bulk collection might have stopped one terrorist “event”.

And while it may be true that “NSA does not target US citizens or permanent resident aliens” without court approval based on probable cause, hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone data and an unknown number of Americans’ communications with foreigners are nevertheless collected without individualized suspicion of wrongdoing.

The NSA’s position is that such data is “incidentally” collected – that is, unavoidably scooped up in its vast technological dragnets, particularly while it searches for the communications of foreigners.

Nor does the NSA mention in its holiday-time chats that a judge on the secret surveillance court found NSA “systematically” transgressed both its own and court-appointed limits on a bulk internet data collection program; nor that a different judge on the court barred the NSA from sifting through its domestic phone-records database for most of 2009, fearing that he could not trust NSA to abide by similar limitations; nor that NSA possesses a so-called “backdoor search” loophole that allows it to sift through Americans’ emails and phone calls without a warrant.

Still, NSA declares that it is “committed to increased transparency [and] public dialogue”. Even around the holiday dinner table.