Instead, Miller said, "One of the Snowden leaks involved the concept that NSA had tunneled into the foreign data centers of major U.S. Internet providers. Did the leak describe it the right way?" That's a terrible way to phrase the question if you're dealing with an NSA employee intent on exploiting any loophole.

And Alexander's answer still wasn't totally responsive.

"No, that's not correct," he began. What's not correct? The NSA documents that Snowden leaked? The Washington Post story? Miller's summary of it? It's left unclear.

Alexander continued: "We do target terrorist communications. And terrorists use communications from Google, from Yahoo, and from other service providers. So our objective is to collect those communications no matter where they are. But we're not going into a facility or targeting Google as an entity or Yahoo as an entity. But we will collect those communications of terrorists that flow on that network."

This is a classic technically-accurate-but-wildly-misleading NSA answer. As best as I can understand the thought process behind Alexander's evasions, it's something like this: No, the NSA isn't "tunneling" or "going into a facility." It is copying data flows as they pass between facilities. No, the NSA isn't "targeting Google" or Yahoo "as an entity." Its "targets"—per the highly particular NSA meaning of that word—are users who communicate via Google and Yahoo. Of course, by intercepting data as it flows between foreign Google and Yahoo facilities, the NSA is getting the same stuff as it would get if it were "targeting" Google and Yahoo by "tunneling" into their foreign facilities.

(Alexander may also be relying on the fact that GCHQ, the NSA's British counterpart, is technically the entity doing some of the work.)

Ultimately, only Alexander himself knows exactly what technicalities he used to obscure the truth here. What's clear is that because of the imprecise way Miller asked his question, the misleading way Alexander answered it, Miller's failure to ask follow-up questions to clarify the truth, and 60 Minutes' decision to air the exchange without further explanation, the news program all but guaranteed that the vast majority of its audience would come away with an inaccurate impression on this matter. Alexander makes it sound as if, in the course of tracking individual terrorists, the NSA happens to collect some data from Google and Yahoo, because sometimes terrorists use those platforms.

But as the Washington Post explained, the NSA had a particular slide about "Google Cloud Exploitation":

Google and Yahoo ... had reason to think, insiders said, that their private, internal networks were safe from prying eyes. In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” however, a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is “added and removed here!” The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said. For the MUSCULAR project, the GCHQ directs all intake into a “buffer” that can hold three to five days of traffic before recycling storage space. From the buffer, custom-built NSA tools unpack and decode the special data formats that the two companies use inside their clouds. Then the data are sent through a series of filters to “select” information the NSA wants and “defeat” what it does not. PowerPoint slides about the Google cloud, for example, show that the NSA tries to filter out all data from the company’s “Web crawler,” which indexes Internet pages. According to the briefing documents, prepared by participants in the MUSCULAR project, collection from inside Yahoo and Google has produced important intelligence leads against hostile foreign governments that are specified in the documents.

Notice how Alexander managed to make it sound like the Washington Post got something wrong without contradicting anything actually reported in the Post story—even as he made what the NSA does sound a lot less intrusive than it actually is.