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19 May, 2014

Everyone should know just how much the U.S. government lied to defend the NSA – The Guardian

Intelligence director James Clapper’s infamous lie to Congress – in which he claimed just months before Snowden’s leaks that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans – will certainly follow him for the rest of his career even if it never leads to his prosecution. But while Clapper almost certainly broke the law, the senate committee members in front of whom he spoke knew the truth regardless.

The Justice Department, on the other hand, convinced the supreme court to dismiss a case that could have dramatically curtailed the NSA’s most egregious abuses of power based on false statements. And now all of us are forced to live with the consequences of that.

Read the rest: Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA | Trevor Timm | Comment is free | theguardian.com.