FORGET TRUST, THE ISSUE IS COMPETENCE

(h/t emptywheel)

Edward Snowden was able to mine NSA documents using an ordinary web crawler and that makes the NSA seem partly responsible for the breach. We also recently learned that NSA meta-data collection is nowhere near broad enough to be of any real use and that's probably one reason it didn't know about the Boston Marathon bombing plot beforehand.

UPDATE: The State Dept. also sucks (from McClatchy) -

Yet here you have two high-ranking American officials – Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt – discussing sensitive matters apparently on an unsecured line, just days after a similar call had been recorded and, embarrassingly, put online.

Nuland, who refused to comment on the specifics of a conversation meant to be private, did note during a news conference Friday in Kiev that the static-free recording “was pretty impressive tradecraft. The audio was pretty clear.”

But she didn’t address why she was exposing herself to the obvious threat of being recorded. In the wake of the NSA spying scandal, the U.S. administration has repeatedly defended its actions using the line of reasoning: “Everybody does it.”