It appears that being the chair of the Intelligence Committee doesn't actually require a lot of intelligence, because DiFi's assertions are really so very dumb.
January 19, 2014

Lord help us if the chair of the Intelligence Committee comes up with gibberish like this:

DAVID GREGORY: And do you agree with Chairman Rogers that he may have had help from the Russians?

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN: He may well have. We don't know at this stage. But I think to glorify this act is really to set sort of a new level of dishonor. And this goes to where this metadata goes. Because the N.S.A. are professionals. They are limited in number to 22 who have access to the data. Two of them are supervisors. They are vetted. They are carefully supervised. The data goes anywhere else. How do you provide that level of supervision?

I get that smearing Snowden is the name of the game. God forbid that the government answer for their overarching and unconstitutional grab of information that has as yet prevented exactly ONE terrorist attack.

But please do not insult the intelligence of Americans by insisting that there are only 22 people who have access to the metadata. Because the NSA's budget is classified, there's no way to prove or disprove that. But we know that Snowden's employer Booz Allen Hamilton had access to it and that exceeds the 22 NSA professionals. What other private contractor had access (and are any of them associated with Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum?) to them isn't known because of the classified nature of the budget. Where exactly is the level of supervision there? The NSA has admitted that they had no idea exactly what or how much information Snowden took in his position, so obviously the NSA's version of supervision is somewhat suspect, innit DiFi?

And now pointing fingers at the Russians? Come on now. That's some pretty desperate deflection from the clear failures of intelligence gathering by the Intelligence Committee.

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