“A complete and utter falsehood”

Ken Dilanian and Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times’s Washington Bureau have some more important context for the extravagant claims made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. According to their report, security analysts say Snowden’s claim that he could “wiretap anyone,” up to and including the President, is a “complete and utter falsehood.”

Analysts said that Snowden seems to have greatly exaggerated the amount of information available to him and people like him. Any NSA analyst “at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere,” Snowden told the Guardian. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.” Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the NSA and CIA, called the claim a “complete and utter” falsehood. “First of all it’s illegal,” he said. “There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired,” he said.

According to the Times, analysts are under “stringent” internal supervision, to the point where some complain that the many levels of oversight and technical limits make it difficult to do their jobs.